Lessons from my dad changed my life. He gave me so many insights into life, marriage, fatherhood, leadership, and character. I want to share several of these lessons with you. If you were never fathered by a loving father, I pray these lessons fill the voids you may have felt. Here is the lesson for today: Don’t look at what you’ve lost, but what you still have. Dad knew that life meant loss. Life is “a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (James 4:14). We come into this world with nothing. We accumulate. Then lose either through theft or death. Then we leave one day with nothing, with others spending what we earned! But dad reminded me to always look at what I had left instead of what I had lost. So often, you can’t recover what you’ve lost. But you can start anew. And build on what you have right in front of you. His wise counsel has kept me going day after day, month after month, year after year. If you have never learned this lesson before, life knocks you down. But you can get back up again and persevere. “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5). When you choose to tap into unexplainable joy in the midst of suffering, you take away the enemy’s power. You remove the stronghold he wants you to live in to keep you in a place of despair and hopelessness. Dear friend, don’t look at what you have lost. Look at what you still have and be thankful for it. Gratitude changes your perspective.
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