By Chris WittsWednesday 22 Nov 2023Morning Devotions with Chris WittsFaithReading Time: 1 minute
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Transcript:
If you were living in the 1800s, you might have come across someone called Ed. Now, Ed wasn’t a particularly bright person. He wasn’t considered by his peers as someone who would be very successful. His parents, they were wealthy enough to send him out to some good schools. But he failed in his grades at school and he was very secluded.
He lived in his own private world. When he was 19, his father was broke and died the same year, and Ed was left without any money. He decided to be a cattle drover. Then he became a transit policeman, a law clerk, a stenographer. And he got fired from all those jobs.
He knew that he couldn’t be fired if he had his own business. So he tried to set up his own business. That failed. He went bankrupt, and at age 37 he had no money. And so he began telling himself stories, and he created some very wild, bizarre fantasies in his head, and he used to speak out loud some of these stories. Now, most of the stories amounted to nothing except for one. And the one story that Ed will be remembered for is the one that we probably all know. And that’s Tarzan of the Apes. And I’m talking about Edgar Rice Burroughs.
So here was a man called Ed who didn’t really have a very good start in life.
He was able to actually find the one thing, the one gift that he could actually do very well. And that was with words.
Isn’t it an interesting story that, fortunately, a bad start doesn’t mean a bad ending? And I’m grateful today to Dick Innes for the thoughts about making the best of a bad beginning. So to find meaning and have a good ending, we need to have not just a sense of competence in what we can do, but a sense that I can contribute something.
It’s a sense of worth
And I think there are some valuable lessons here. Just the story of Edgar Rice Burroughs is interesting because it means that with a little bit of faith in yourself and most importantly, faith in God, you can get somewhere in life. What about this word? Competence.
Now everybody can do at least one thing. Well, many people can do several things very well, and there are those people who can do lots of things very well. So whether we’re gifted in one or many areas, that’s not really the point.
It’s important that we use what gifts or gifts we do have to the best of our ability. But it’s also true that we don’t worry about what we can’t do. So it’s all about feeling a sense of your own competence and your own confidence.
I guess if you are a people person, if you work with people, perhaps in the area of church leadership or other areas of life, you’ll discover that a lack of self-confidence is often the root causes of why so many people fail to reach a potential. And what makes us particularly sad is the fact that we have a God given potential in life. People often fail and they don’t get up and have another go, and they fail not only at what they want to do, but in the person that they could become.
But if we have a lack of self-confidence, we tend to think that, “well, I’m the only person that feels this way. Everyone’s better than me.” That’s not very helpful, either, because the reality is that most of us feel this way at some time. Can you remember a time in your own life where you felt that you had nothing much to contribute?
And you might have even allowed that voice as it were, to override any good thing that you did in your life or good things that you thought? And it’s a real trick there to get people to feel down on themselves. So accepting the reality is half the answer, I think, to overcome the problem. And the other half of the answer lies in this basic need of having a sense of worth, having a sense that you belong somewhere and that you are significant.
And tomorrow I just want to take this a step further because I think it’s helpful to understand that we can find our self-worth, we can find confidence and most of all, that God will be with us.
In fact, I’m going to pray –
Eternal God, we need each other. We realise that the relationships are important. And sometimes, Lord, it’s hard to get on with people and often because we Lord, have this sense of failure or low self-esteem. But we thank you that with you, with Jesus in our heart, we can find peace of mind. Peace in our souls. And we thank you that all this is possible in the name of Jesus. Amen.