Paul Charlap puts it like this. He says that everybody should spend a year in the Marines. Then we would learn that we can march that extra fifteen miles with a pack on our back. That's discipline, he says, like a checklist in your head. If you are a salesman, for example, "You say to yourself, the night before, 'I'm going to do this amount of work, make this number of phone calls, this number of calls knocking on doors, this number of demonstrations, and you don't go home until you do it. After a while...it becomes automatic. At a level where somebody else has to put out all kinds of effort, you pass by like it's nothing."

That's one person's experience. Of course, most of us don't possess that kind of trained experience. But we can do better than we are doing! We can take one small step at a time with our eye firmly fixed on the man or woman God has created us to be. The battle will never be easy, but it can happen.

Ron Newhouse