Stumbling Over A Quarter To Pick Up A Penny

AuthorHouse

Contents

Introduction: Homeless...............................................................11. Decline: May I Help You?..........................................................92. Servitude: Lying at First Light...................................................193. Probation: The Psychic Plowboys Experience........................................314. Preparation: Baby Eagles and Piano Lessons........................................395. Conquest: Can You Hold Your Breath?...............................................476. Power: Riding to the Games........................................................557. Conclusion: How Do You Do It?.....................................................718. Steps to Using the Understanding of the Six Spiritual Periods.....................75Determining Your Life's Spiritual Period Worksheet...................................87Pictures.............................................................................91Endnotes.............................................................................101Acknowledgements.....................................................................103

Chapter One

If you try hard enough you can pin-point an exact moment when you realize that you were turning away from God ... not completely turned away but turning away from Him. It's that time in your life when what you are doing has stopped working for you. It's the point when you are no longer in God's Power but beginning to enter a Decline period in your life.

For me, it was about 9:30 one overcast fall morning in 1976. I remember pulling my gray Corvette way too fast into the parking lot of what was then The Treasury Store. The Treasury Store was a subsidiary of the JCPenny Company and was located on the southwest corner of Elvis Presley Blvd and Holmes Road in the Southwest Memphis community called Whitehaven. It had a full-service grocery store under the same roof as a major retail department store. There was a full-service gas station island out front. It was one of those stores that helped to pioneer the concept that Wal-Mart uses so profitably today.

The gas pump attendant was a man in his late forties with red hair and a red beard that was peppered with gray. He was a skinny man about six feet tall and looked to weigh about 140 pounds. He had on a dingy, short-sleeved shirt that looked beige but you could see that at some time earlier it had been white. On the right side of the shirt, opposite the store logo and inside of an embroidered red oval, was the name Earl. Earl had on navy blue pants that had black grease around the top of the side pockets and on the knees. The pants hung down over his beat-up brown work boots. He was chewing a big wad of tobacco and a small stream of juice was running out of one of the corners of his mouth. I could tell that he wasn't comfortable with the idea of providing full service for me on my expensive sports car. He was supposed to check my oil level, the air in my tires and clean my windshield while he pumped my gas but I could tell that if anything got cleaned or checked in the next 10 minutes it would be me doing the cleaning and the checking.

Anyway, once Earl composed himself he walked up to my car, looked at me and said, "May I help you?" Now, since my JCPenny credit card was maxed out and would have been declined I couldn't say, "fill her up" so I said, "Yeah, you can help me ... can you pump me one dollar worth of regular?" and handed him a crisp one dollar bill through my window. He froze still and didn't make a move to pump my gas. From the sudden gleam in his earlier dull eyes, a new smirk on his mouth and the twitch of his left jaw, I could tell that I had just given him the opening that he needed to get into my business ... and he proceeded to try to take a little wind out of my sail. "I wouldn't have a car like that", he said, "if I couldn't afford gas for it".

Now I can't tell you what I said to him at that time for two reasons. One was because what I said was purely reactionary and I don't remember exactly what I said. The other is because I can no longer repeat the part that I do remember, but I'm sure he heard me because after he told me "where to go", he crumpled up the dollar bill and threw it back at me through my t-top. He didn't know that I was "on my way there" anyway and that I didn't need his directions. He just knew where to hit me though and the blow that he delivered to my pride was devastating because it was true.

The gas station attendant had picked up on the fact that my briefly-enjoyed Power period of the past few years was over and that my life was in Decline and headed towards Servitude. Everyone that I came into contact during that time knew that except me. I was in denial and I didn't want to give up any ground. But the fact is that Decline usually follows Power and since I had eliminated the behavior that kept me in God's Power, I was no longer there and hadn't been there for quite some time. I had stopped practicing the habits that helped me stay in Power; I had stopped going to worship service, attending my college classes regularly, and I no longer had gainful employment. I was focusing on my present position in life and not focusing on the future that God had prepared me for.

I had allowed other peoples' opinions and mores to dictate my life and was too conflicted to tell myself "Hayward ... you are not in Power when you have an expensive car and can't afford gas for it. You are not in Power when you are hiding your car to keep it from being repossessed. You are not in Power when you feel the need to lie to yourself and others about anything and everything. You are not in Power when what you are accomplishing causes you to sin against God or cause others to sin against Him ... you are in Decline."

My above story leads to the following important fact about being in a Decline period in your life:

You enter into a Decline period in your life when you stop doing the things that keep you in God's Power.

How Are Your Habits?

Many people go into Decline periods in their life unaware, as I had done during this stage in my life. You give up your "good practices", the group of essential habits that keep you in God's Power. Practices like: taking time for your morning prayer, having private time with God, and showing up to the midweek worship service that re-charges your faith and keeps you spiritually connected. You stop volunteering to help others. You become callous and you begin to ignore or justify the hurt that your actions and the actions of others cause God's people.

When you are in Decline you find ways to start removing the positive influences that exist in your life ... the one's that God put there to help you to succeed. You get too smart to be involved in any type of organized learning and you stop participating in any form of organized meetings. You ignore an import rule for personal and spiritual growth that says, "If you are always the wisest person in all of the meetings that you attend then you need to attend some different meetings". You abhor discipline of any kind and unknowingly you have created the perfect environment to one day find yourself physically and spiritually homeless.

Every time that you quit doing the behavior that keeps you in Power you go into a Decline period in your life. In the Bible, the Children of Israel were notorious for exhibiting this type of behavior. They worshipped God and then they stopped worshipping Him and worshipped Baal the Semitic god of the Canaanites and Phoenicians. Then they worshipped God and then they worshipped Asherah the goddess, the Queen of heaven, whose worship Jeremiah so vehemently opposed. They didn't stop there; they worshipped other pagan gods too. It was during the quitting of their worship to God that they entered into Decline. The problem was that they had grown to know that they needed to worship something and every time they stopped worshipping God they filled the void by worshipping the gods of their pagan neighbors. We do that too.

You remain in a Decline period because you isolate yourself from "good people" ... and soon the way that you conduct yourself is contrary to what is written in Scripture.

Two years prior to the beginning of my Decline period that I wrote about above, I began to gradually isolate myself from my family and before long I was completely isolated from them. I see now that one of my biggest mistakes during this period was not communicating with them. By not doing so, I had no one to tell me that I was making immature mistakes. I probably wouldn't have listened ... but that's not the point. The point is that I needed to hear from someone that my behavior wasn't right and I didn't. I didn't hear what I needed to hear because the people that I had surrounded myself with didn't consider the hedonism and depravity that we were involved in to be contrary to what God required of us in His Word.

I've read that Dale Carnegie, as successful as he was, didn't complete college, but he had two life-long habits that compensated for that: He never isolated himself to one way of thinking and he was not willing to be stopped by his failures ... he was always willing to learn from them. I just couldn't see that far. At that time I did neither.

Today, we have to be aware and not become isolated and controlled by various authors, ministers, media and others who build our world view and influence our thoughts and belief away from God's truth. By isolating myself I invited Decline. Very seldom, if ever, can you isolate yourself and get the information that you need. The Bible says in Hebrew 10:25, "Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another." I should have known this scripture and understood its importance.

Also when you isolate yourself you are more prone to start listening to gossips and other negative people. There is an explicit warning about listening and associating with them in Proverbs 16:28, "A perverse man stirs up dissension, and a gossip separates close friends."

Decline always leads to Servitude.

Do You Really Fear God? When you are in Decline you forget your life's past accomplishments, ignore today's celebrations and run exhaustively toward an unstable future. In fact, you are running so fast that you find yourself Stumbling Over A Quarter To Pick Up A Penny. What will happen? What will the end result be? It will be that you will find that you are no longer in Decline but that you have made your way to Servitude and will have to deal with the harsh consequences of the selfish and sinful changes that you have allowed to occur in your behavior, habits and practices.

You never go directly from the Power period or any other period to a Servitude period. You always go through Decline to get there. The Children of Israel, even though they were God's Chosen People and spent a lot of time in Servitude periods, they never went directly from Power to Servitude. Even during the 350 years when they were led by Judges they were in Servitude only approximately 100 years. During the other 250 years they vacillated between the other five Spiritual Periods based on how they responded to the directions provided to them from God through their leaders. But one common thread is that when they found themselves in Decline periods they could never stop the slide into Servitude once they got on that slippery slope.

What behavior caused them to go into Decline? They did several things. One was that they consciously stopped fearing God and then always compounded the problem by worshipping idols and other gods. Believe it or not ... our actions prove that you and I sometimes subconsciously stop fearing God and in some cases we never feared Him at all. How do we stop fearing God? We do it knowingly or unknowingly by beginning to worship the idols (people, homes, jewelry, jobs and other stuff) of our life rather than God and that behavior puts us on a slippery slope just like the one that led the ancient Israelites and me ... into Decline.

When I was in this Decline period, I don't believe that I consciously stopped fearing God I just got out of touch with Him because he was out of my sight. I believe that I could have avoided the slippery slope that led me into Servitude if I had had the following scriptures internalized. One scripture reads, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools (ones who are morally deficient) despise wisdom and discipline." Proverbs 1:7 (emphasis added). The other one is Proverbs 15:16 which reads, "Better a little with the fear of the LORD than great wealth with turmoil."

When you are in Decline check your direction and see if you can still see God in everything or whether you are focused on some other god.

Remember that we've already discussed that Servitude periods are preceded by periods of Decline so how do you recognize that you are entering into a Decline period? How does it happen? Why can't you just stop it when it starts? What are the little changes in the patterns of your life that you need to look for?

Let's look at some of them.

You need to begin by looking for a long ago suppressed insecure, jealous, envious or selfish spirit to resurface. You need to determine if you have become depraved and are now letting your personal pursuit of sexual and material gratifications occupy your time and purposes. Has your list of wants grown too large and you have subconsciously begun to let it dictate how you spend your time and your wealth? Do ulterior motives dictate your actions? For example, if you are in Decline even when you attend church you have ulterior motives and those motives, not the worship of God, dictate what you do. You'll let your hedonistic thoughts and actions control you because you have yielded to the philosophy that pleasure is your most important pursuit. You sing in the choir because you know how to find your pleasures there ... or you might go to the gym not really to exercise but because you can sneak a perverted peak at someone of the opposite sex or maybe because you are on the prowl to find your next sexual partner.

Even your choice of careers can be dictated by insincere motives when you are in a period of Decline. Some masseuses only choose that profession so that they can have the sexual gratification of putting their hands on individuals without being encumbered by societal rules. Some pedophiles teach elementary school to be near a seemingly in-exhaustive supply of children approaching puberty. Some ministers only preach so that they can use the power of the pulpit to fulfill their selfish desires. In Decline, just like them, you become jaded, cynical, callous and worn out.

If you are not careful, before too long the subconscious pursuit of these life altering goals are setting your agenda without you even being aware of the change of your life's course. In other words, you have allowed Satan to set your agenda and when you do your life will lose its focus. You will not see God because you have turned your back on Him and are Stumbling Over A Quarter To Pick Up A Penny. Your power is gone and you are deep in Decline.

The best way to get out of a Decline period is to never get into one in the first place and you accomplish that by taking the actions that will keep you in God's Power.

Unfortunately, since never getting into a period of Decline is virtually impossible for all of us to do the next best solution is to know what actions we need to focus on to get out of one when we find ourselves there.

Your first action in Decline is for you to recognize that you are no longer in God's Power and then focus on taking the actions that will get you into a Preparation period. You need to start developing new habits and acquiring new wisdom while at the same time ridding yourself of the depravity that is preventing you from holding on to that which is good. You must do what the Bible says in Hebrews 12:1-2, "Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith ...".

You need to also closely analyze your motives for going the places that you go and for the actions you take once you get there. Ask yourself, "Am I doing this for God or am I doing this to satisfy one of my ulterior motives?" Ask yourself, "Am I moving away from a depraved state or moving towards one?" Ask yourself, "Am I becoming less jaded, cynical and callous and fixing my eyes on Jesus the author and perfecter of my faith?"

To get out of a Decline period you need to refocus your energy towards God and wait for Him to move you into a period of Preparation.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Stumbling Over A Quarter To Pick Up A Pennyby Hayward C. Townsend Sr. Copyright © 2009 by Hayward C. Townsend Sr.. Excerpted by permission.
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