Hello everyone, as most of you know we just finished the women's bible study at my house. It was the book by Max Lacado " Everyday Deserves a Chance". It was a very good book, Elizabeth said, "it should be required reading for everyone." I feel that I am a pretty positive person and I try to always look for the good in people and situations. But this book really made me think about it and I realized that it is a choice that we have to make. Psalm 118: 24-25 says "This is the day which the Lord has made; Let us rejoice and be glad in it." It doesn't say only if it's been a good day for me I should rejoice. It says REJOICE, the Lord has given you this day! I want to share one of the stories that really touched my heart from the book, it is called      

"The Blade of Uncommon Color";  Dirt carpeted the floor. Rats scurried beneath the grated vent. Roaches roamed the walls and crawled over sleeping prisoners. The only source of light peeked through three holes near the fifteen-foot ceiling. The cell offered no bunk, no chair, no table, and no way out for American General Robbie Risner. For seven and one-half years, North Vietnamese soldiers held him and dozens of other soldiers in the Zoo, a POW camp in Hanoi. Misery came standard issue. Solitary confinement, starvation, torture, and beatings were routine. Interrogators twisted broken legs, sliced skin with bayonets, crammed sticks up nostrils and paper in mouths. Screams echoed throughout the camp, chilling the blood of other prisoners. Listen to Risner's description: "Everything was sad and dismal. It was almost the essence of despair. If you could have squeezed the feeling out of the word despair, it would have come out gray, dull, and lead-colored, dingy and dirty." How do you survive seven and one-half years in such a hole? Cut off from family. No news from the United States. What do you do? Here is what Risner did. He stared at a blade of grass. Several days into his incarceration he wrestled the grate off a floor vent, stretched out on his belly, lowered his head into the opening, and peered through a pencil-sized hole in the brick and mortar at a singular blade of grass. Aside from the stem, his world had no color. So he began his days with head in vent, heart in prayer, staring at the green blade of grass. He called it a "blood transfusion for the soul." You don't have to go to Hanoi to face a "gray, dull, and lead-colored, dingy and dirty" existence. Do you know the tint of a colorless world? If so, do what Risner did. Go on a search. Crowbar the grate from your cell, and stick your head out. Fix your eyes on a color outside your cell. What you see defines who you are. "Your eyes are windows into you body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light. If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar. If you pull the blinds on your window, what a dark life you will have." (Matthew 6:22-23). Jesus is discussing, not the eyes of your head, but the eyes of your heart - your attitude, your outlook, your vision, not of things, but of life. We, like General Risner, make daily decisions. Do we set our eyes on the gray harshness or search for the blade of a different color?  Does your world feel like General Risner's POW cell? Look long enough, hard enough, and it will. Even the Garden of Eden looks gray to some. But it needn't look gray to you. Learn a lesson from the prisoner. Give every day a chance. Peer through the bricks, past the rats, to find the blade of grass. And once you find it, don't look anywhere else.