Christian Living

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Larry Lilly's Letter Wednesday May 5, 2010

I have a year's old habit of "spearing" ideas as they flash by and often a neat saying is the trigger for these ideas. Such is the case today. My thought "trigger" comes from the pen of the 19th Century preacher, writer and overall trouble maker, Henry Ward Beecher. Mr. Beecher, much like yours truly was acquainted with trouble as the sparks fly upward. He penned the following:

"The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success."

Most of us have learned that ideas, even very good ideas are a dime a dozen. The idea people are looking for is one or more that is germane to the problem at hand. For instance if I am trying to figure out a way to pay the electric bill by nine o'clock tomorrow morning and some Einstein in the group comes up with e=mc2 (An equation derived by the twentieth-century physicist Albert Einstein, in which E represents units of energy, m represents units of mass, and c2 is the speed of light squared, or multiplied by itself). this wonder formula is not going to help at all with the electric bill even though in the proper venue the formula changed our world forever.

Many folks get all kinds of ideas about how to do this or that, but they never convert the idea to a workable formula, method or machine. In many if not most cases the conversion of an idea to a "thing" will involve input from others. History shows that the people of really great ideas recruited a group of people around them, people from different backgrounds professionally in order to see the idea from several perspectives and via this multifaceted channel we have electricity, light bulbs, unleashed nuclear energy, and literally millions of grand ideas converted to "things."

All of the above pertains to what Rev. Beecher termed, "outward" success.

Inward or more properly, spiritual success/growth depends on converting spiritual principles/ideas in action. For instance if everyone who claims to know "all about spiritual truth" converted this knowledge into action, their life would change dramatically as would the life of those around them. Perhaps even the world at large as in the case of William Wilberforce or the Apostle Paul.

The basics for converting spiritual ideas into action is well laid out in the Bible, but tragically the simple instructions are for the most part ignored and we humans continue to flounder through life though as they did not exist. Got any ideas on how to solve this?

Larry Lilly Copyright © 2010 Use with credit.

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