Walt Disney was fired from his first job drawing farm animals for a farm journal. John van Hengle, the founder of St. Mary’s Food Bank, lost his advertising job and wound up practically homeless before finding his way.
Both of them changed the world.
Have you lost your job? Are you hurting financially, struggling to get back in the game? You are not alone. But your job loss could be the ultimate opportunity to find your true purpose and to realize that losing your job should not mean you have lost your value.
The unemployment rate in the United States is around 9.6%. That’s a staggering number. But it’s what happens after the job is lost that is the real tragedy.
We have been programmed in America over the last few decades to believe that we derive our value as a human being from our ability to make money. The idea we can find our “net worth” by adding up all our debts and assets and arriving at our value as a human being is preposterous.
Your real, innate value was made by God and that’s what inspires your economic value, not the other way around. Realizing that is the first step to getting back on your feet.
In fact that’s actually how capitalism is supposed to work. It’s not predicated on greed and selfishness but actually meant to inspire people to use their God-given gifts, ideas and abilities to provide the world with something it needs. They are then rewarded with what they need. Or in the words of the late Pope John Paul II “the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs.”
Unfortunately capitalism hasn’t worked real well over the last few years because too many people were either cheating the system or simply looking to make an easy buck instead. Moral responsibility is an integral and irreplaceable component of both a healthy society and a healthy economy.
But therein lies an amazing opportunity to help set the system straight again. How do we do that? By doing what God put us here to do – to use our gifts to improve the world.
Every one of us has something the world needs, and by learning how to share that gift with the world for all the right reasons, we are rewarded with what we need eventually.
Your desire and ability to reach out to and contribute to the world is a divinely inspired asset that can and will still lead you to long-term and stable career success once you engage it. Finding your mission is finding the job or career that will allow you to do that.
Yes, it doesn’t always happen overnight, and it’s not always so easy. It took good old Walt a decade of struggling to make ends meet, and after John van Hengle lost his job, he did everything from lifeguard to bus driver to working in a soup kitchen before he found his calling helping the hungry, only after he came to know and understand hunger himself.
Not to be overly simplistic but God does work in mysterious ways. Your value is assigned by God, and it is not rooted in how much you earn, but in HOW and WHY you earn.
The world needs you somewhere and somehow right now. Maybe it’s through a volunteer organization where you can obtain some of your needs in return or a part-time job or turning a favorite hobby into a freelance job. Get out there and find out how you can help because the world needs a lot of help.
That might not just help you to find a new job but a whole new career and greater happiness than you have ever known.
Chris Benguhe’s latest book, “Overcoming Life’s 7 Common Tragedies,” is available on Amazon.com. His website is www.OneMoreDayAlive.com.
By Chris Benguhe
Is humanity evil, and is it government’s responsibility to rehabilitate it?
Or is mankind innately good, and with the most basic of oversight and moral motivation will the majority of us choose to do the right thing, allowing government to focus on controlling only the most aberrant humans?
Maybe Michael Moore didn’t think about answering those questions before he concocted his attack on capitalism a few years back. But as President Obama attempts to “fundamentally transform” our nation by restructuring our economy, our society, and our national mindset hoping to ultra-regulate America out of immoral business practices and legislate morality with new social policies – these are a couple of questions which really need to be answered.
There are plenty of examples for the evil humanity argument. Over the last few years, we saw greedy hedge fund managers play a shell game with investors and invested funds. We watched everyday people lie about income and fraudulently promise to pay more than they could afford, so they could have more than they needed in a nation seemingly obsessed with having more, bigger and better stuff.
Then we topped it all off with Wall Street financiers and Big Business bosses looking for government bailout packages, unions refusing to negotiate wages for the good of ALL the employees and the nation, and everyday folks all looking for what their country can do for them, instead of the other way around.
What do all these things have in common? They are all selfish and immoral. But was any of this really the fault of capitalism? Or was it actually quite the opposite, that these were all directly or indirectly the result of a combination of government intervention, greed and irresponsible stupidity and could capitalism save us?
To determine that, first we might have to get out from under the recent tirade of media maniacs deriding capitalism, to get a little background on how capitalism actually works.
You see, if you believe that human beings are inherently good, then you are also a fan of capitalism. Because you also believe that people will eventually act in the best interest of society more often than not, when left to their own devices in a free market system. But when the system is played around with too much, for instance when government favors one industry, or group over another, such as the oil industry, or the real estate industry, or the auto industry, then it screws everything up. That stops people from doing the right thing, which they already wanted to do. At least that’s the idea behind the philosophy of capitalism. It also leads way too many people to forget about what’s best for them and the rest of society because they are so busy trying to beat the system of government regulation.
Don’t take my word for it – listen to Adam Smith, the founder of modern capitalism.
Most unethical opportunists today point to Smith’s claims in his famous “Wealth of Nations” that self-interests alone are what make capitalism work. But Smith wrote another book. In his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” he explains “self-interest” includes the interest of the rest of society, since the social acceptance, status, and support of all affects the interests of the individual. He argues only a society which values social justice achieved through community and moral obligations can achieve prosperity.
In simpler terms any capitalist with a brain in his head knows that for him to prosper in the long run, so too must his neighbors, his community, his nation and his world prosper. Maybe the real problem is that a few too many of us capitalists forgot about that recently.
But Smith doesn’t stop there. He says not only “should’ we act morally, but free from the tyranny of government we “want” to act morally.
Says Smith: “However selfish man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though they derive nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”
That’s probably why despite the all the financial doom going on in America, Americans, left to their own compulsion to care gave over $300 billion away last year. None of that was caused by Obama’s stimulus package. It was given of our free will.
That, by the way, is another positive precept of capitalism – it fosters free will, which is a basic requirement for morality. You cannot be moral if someone has forced you to do so. That’s the whole theological argument behind why God allows people to sin, because if he didn’t they could not choose to love Him and choose to do the right thing.
So maybe capitalism is a good thing, a moral thing. If so, then will less capitalism mean less morality? Or to put it more specifically, do we want government to tell our businesses and our people how to behave ethically ironically leading most of us to do the opposite?
Will such heavy-handed attempts simply enrage free-willed Americans making them less apt to act in accordance with their conscience? Will taking away our free will make us incapable of loving and respecting each other? A quick look back at the Soviet Union suggests so.
Do we really want to live in an Orwellian world where Big Brother forces us by dictatorial edict to do what it believes is right, or should we leave people alone to choose to act morally and let government concentrate on protecting the right to life, liberty and the PURSUIT of happiness?
We better choose now before the choice is taken away.
With Independence Day just around the corner, it might be a nice time to reflect on how fortunate we all are to live in this amazing nation, even when it seems like everywhere you turn things have gone wrong over the past few years. But some amazing things have also gone right — pinpointing some very special attributes of our country.
Yes, there are still way too many people without jobs and the housing market is still in a slump, but all of us have adjusted remarkably well to one of the worst economic struggles in the last 100 years. Report after report and study after study show that Americans have used the experience to reexamine their values and adjust their desires.
Despite the fact that many people had to drastically cut their own personal budgets, they still felt compelled to give to others around $300 billion last year; that’s remarkable. We did it not because our government forced us to, but because we wanted to. Incidentally that’s the key difference between socialism — where government supplants our moral right and obligation to help, which the Catholic Church squarely condemns — and social justice — where we choose to help because of our moral character. That character is alive and well in America!
And it seems that when the chips are down Americans go to church — attendance has continued to rise in America since 2008, when the whole economic turmoil started according to the most recent Gallup reports. Maybe that’s because nine out of 10 Americans say they believe in God (that number is only one in five in nations like Denmark and Sweden) — and most believe our nation was founded upon the divinely derived innate value of human beings. When times get tough, we go back to the source of our strength, our beliefs and our nation.
When times get tough in America, we stick together, especially with our mates. A report from the CDC released in May shows that the divorce rate has gone down for two years running after years of rising. Though some cynics say it’s because people can’t afford to get divorced, others point to the more sensible conclusion that since the number one reason for divorce is historically financial, maybe Americans are starting to revaluate their reasons for splitting as they reevaluate all their other economic indicators.
Finally, let’s take a look at crime in America. You would think that tough times would make crime rise, especially when it comes to theft. On the contrary, the overall crime rate is dropping like crazy across the board according to the FBI’s Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report. Robbery dropped 8.1 percent, murder decreased 7.2 percent, aggravated assault declined 4.2 percent, and rape decreased 3.1 percent.
Experts can’t really point to a reason for that decline. Maybe money really is the root of all evil — when we are too obsessed with it. Or maybe we simply need a wake-up call every once in a while in America to remind us of our commitment to each other, to God and to the values that this country was founded upon. After all, this wasn’t the land of wealth of and wonton pleasure, but the land of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And we Americans don’t give up on that, or each other.
When times are tough, we respond, ready to fight arm in arm not just for our own selfish needs but for what’s right, what’s just and for the rights and welfare of others. That’s what God created us to do, and He gave us this blessed nation, unlike any other on earth, to do it in.
Hope vs. Faith
Hope: Expectations for the future
Faith: Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing. Belief in a set of principles
“Don’t lose hope,” said the waitress to one of the regulars at a little cafe I frequent. The patron had just poured her heart out to the waitress about losing her job. The property management company she worked for lost their shirt in the real estate crisis, and the thirty-something single mother of two got laid off. “Keep the faith,” I muttered as she left the cafe. She smiled and thanked me for my concern.
But can such platitudes offer any meaningful comfort or direction when we are at the end of our rope?
Unemployment is still in the stratosphere. Most economists say we had better get used to that because we won’t see that number coming down for years.
Foreclosures are still out of control and may see another rise. Experts say the worst of this is behind us – but that really doesn’t make anyone who has been foreclosed upon feel any better.
Oil and gas prices are through the roof.
Everywhere you look nowadays the papers are filled with stories of people struggling to make ends meet.
So what do we all do about it? Don’t lose hope and keep the faith? But what does that actually mean?
Well maybe hope –looking forward to better times to come – makes it easier to keep going. Psychologists and common sense tell us we can endure anything for a limited time, as long as the end is in site, and we know that better times lie ahead.
But how do we know that good times lie ahead – and how do we deal with the ones we got.
That’s where faith comes in.
Maybe hope without faith is missing the point of our lives – that there is a great value to finding some solace in the situations we are in – even the worst of them.
If you believe in what you are doing and why you are doing it, you can endure more than you ever imagined.
But faith can help us find happiness within the experiences of our ordeals themselves and how we deal with them? Because tough times make us realize the value of our lives can’t all be measured, understood or based on our prosperity, our fortune, misfortune, or end result at all.
Our value is wrapped up in the way we live, the people, the principles and the God we live for. And in turn those are the reasons to endure the toughest times life can offer – to keep going – for all those principles and people that we love.
And we will get through. But when we do, we will have much more than our rediscovered prosperity? We will have the knowledge and know-how it took us to get there. We will have the confidence in our ability to weather tough times. Most importantly, we will know better what we value, and who.
We will all keep working hard. Because that’s what Americans do. In fact, when the chips are down, you can’t beat our spirit, our ingenuity and our faith in each other, in ourselves, and in our God to see us through.
We keep going because we know that every day, every hour, every second that we spend helping spread God’s love through our own compassion, our understanding and our endurance gets all of us one step closer to making the Lord’s Prayer a reality – “Thy will be done – on earth as it is in Heaven.”
And I HOPE none of you give up on that.
7 Days of Simple Exercises to Turn on Your Heart!
Times are tough all over. People everywhere are struggling more than in decades. Add to that all the timeless tension of living your everyday life – struggles at home and on the job (if you have one!).
So here is a series of 7 very easy exercises you can do this week to prepare for the rejuvenating magic of Easter. They will not take more than a minute or two each day.
Day 1
Pick someone you love and write down why are they special to you. (THIS DOES NOT HAVE TO BE ROMANTIC, JUST ANYONE YOU LOVE!)
Day 2
Think about the nicest thing anybody did for you today or last week.
Day 3
Think about the kindest thing you did for anybody else today or last week.
Day 4
Recall something positive that you saw somebody else do THIS week to help someone else that filled your heart with happiness.
Day 5
Reflect on the person you picked on Day 1 and write about how their love and support for you has changed your life in one simple sentence.
Day 6
Read the person you wrote about on Days 1 and 5 what you wrote..
Day 7 (Easter!)
Go to Church – Smile at everyone there. Observe all the love that’s there. Tell God how much you love Him and spend the rest of the day spreading that love everywhere you go!
All materials above are From Chris Benguhe’s latest book “Overcoming Life’s 7 Common Tragedies: Opportunities for Discovering God,” available at Amazon.com which examines the positive potential of tragedy to bring people closer to each other and to inspire them to realize their ultimate purpose. He also pens a regular column for the Catholic Sun in Phoenix, Ariz.
It’s not about whether the glass is half full or half empty, but about the value of the glass – the glass of our lives is always valuable.
Send this to 10 People You Love!
After a decade of unprecedented disasters in America, we can learn a lot about dealing with tough times from a tiny nation with nothing.
Only 700 miles from Florida, but a universe away, 20-foot-deep-ditches are overflowing with tens of thousands of bodies. Images of battered and bruised school girls embracing the lifeless bodies of classmates, mothers falling to their knees and crying out to the heavens, and hospitals, schools, churches and any building left standing filled with the critically injured literally dying for help fill the airwaves, the Internet and the minds and hearts of millions all over of the world.
With the death toll nearing 200,000, the situation in Haiti will soon outgrow the word catastrophe and enter the sphere of apocalypse. Yet for Haiti this isn’t a totally new experience. In 2004, a torrential rain drowned 2,000 people. Only a few months later, Hurricane Jeanne killed 1,900 more and left hundreds of thousands homeless. In 2008 three tropical storms killed close to 800.
However, the 7.0 earthquake that hit last month has clearly been the largest catastrophe Haiti has endured since the 1700s. With little to no infrastructure, the majority of Haitian housing has been demolished, leaving entire families and groups of families living in tents. The injuries have rippled into a cascade of Illness and disease. The Red Cross estimates that if more relief doesn’t come quickly, the death toll could top 250,000. Add to all that a lack of proper sanitation, and an avalanche of yet to be discovered problems threaten to overwhelm Haiti.
A helping hand
While Americans scramble to support their hemispheric neighbors, as well they should, I wonder if we truly appreciate exactly what our inspiring outpouring of love and support can teach us about our own problems.
Our government has rightly dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to this tiny island nation neighbor. Everyday Americans have pledged hundreds of millions more. We are all calling into telephone banks manned by celebrities who have millions of disposable dollars, and we are doing so from the comfort of our homes on our fully functional cell phones — giving money that, despite our economic woes, we can afford to give. The people of Haiti on the other hand have none of those luxuries or choices right now.
Haiti is the definition of desperation. This is the real meaning of hard times. And yet the Haitians go on — to endure, to persevere, to live.
It is not the end for Haiti, but a new beginning. And it is never the end for any of us, as long as we are living and breathing with the breath and inspiration of the Lord. Isn’t that the message of Job — the good news of our Lord — and the message of Psalms? “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
Maybe Haiti is our wake up call to stop living in a delusory world where we strive for comfort and ease — instead choosing to cherish the struggle that is life lest we be doomed to eternal ingratitude.
We are all in this together — life, that is — and nobody gets out alive. It’s what we do, why we do it, and how we do it while we are here that counts. Help Haiti, help your neighbors, help your family and friends, and stop wasting time worrying about how much you have or don’t have. After all, I’m pretty sure none of you out there are worse off than our Haitian neighbors.
–Chris Benguhe will donate half of his profits from all copies of “Overcoming Life’s 7 Common Tragedies: Opportunities for Discovering God” sold on Amazon.com through Easter 2010 to Haiti relief.
Last week a teenage boy stuck a gun to my head. The peach fuzz on his face was still not mature enough to make a real beard, but the gun was all too real.
As I stared down the shiny black, cold-steel barrel of the gun, I wasn’t as scared as I was shocked — that a boy this young could be so desperate and so willing to destroy life.
It was just after dusk, when I parked my car at the edge of the parking lot at a local restaurant in Central Phoenix, only a few blocks from my home.
I emerged from the car and only made it a few steps before a young, wiry youth, donning a black-hooded sweatshirt pounced on me, pointing a small caliber gun in my face and screaming at me.
I had just given a teen talk at a local church a few nights earlier, and as strange as it sounds, the first thing that popped into my head was that he reminded me of one of those kids. Was this for real? Could this be some badly conceived prank? But the gun was no joke, and as I hesitated he became more irate.
I pulled a wad of five singles from my wallet and threw them at him. The flying cash distracted him long enough for me to make it into the restaurant and call the police.
Within minutes the place was swarming with cops, and half an hour later they had three suspects in custody down the street.
As a police cruiser drove me a few blocks away to where they were being held, I reflected on the whole event for the first time. I wasn’t as angry as I was sad. As I thought about the years of jail time he would receive for armed robbery, I wanted to sit this foolish boy down and drum into his brain exactly what he had done, and what he jeopardized.
What might have been
I thought about my mother who recently had a stroke and depends on me. I thought about my friends and the rest of my family who would be so extraordinarily traumatized by the event if this kid would have shot me.
I thought about his family and what they would lose if I were armed and shot him.
I thought about all the people this young man could help in the future.
I thought about the children I would never have, he would never have and all the ways the world would be deprived of one or both of us.
I know how much I have to offer; he obviously had no idea how much he could give, and he was willing to throw both of our lives away for a few dollars.
I wanted to tell him all of that and more as we neared the sea of flashing lights sitting atop the caravan of cop cars surrounding the suspects. The cruiser stopped 20 feet away, and three suspects were dragged from the back of an SUV and paraded in front of the headlights. None of them were him.
My heart sank a little. I could never look this misled youth in the eye and tell him why what he did was so insane!
But I am still here to help and to make a difference. And maybe there still is a way to get to him, by telling you to share this story with every young man and woman you know, so that they never make the same stupid mistake.
So that maybe eventually every one of them will know what he didn’t — that God created us to live, to let live, and to revel in the love that surrounds us no matter how much we have or don’t have everything we want. And that blessed mission is priceless.
DON’T JUST FIND A JOB – FIND YOUR CALLING!
Have you lost your job? Are you hurting financially, struggling to get back in the game? You are not alone; the unemployment rate is skyrocketing, especially in places like Michigan.
But your job loss could be the ultimate opportunity to find your true purpose. And that might not just help YOU to find a new job but a whole new career and greater happiness than you have ever known by finding out what society needs and ultimately finding God’s mission for you.
Every one of us has something the world needs, and by learning how to share that gift with the world for all the right reasons, we are rewarded with all the things that we need.
That’s actually at the heart of capitalism, the most moral economic system on earth.
God gave you a special gift that nobody can take away from you, and when you use it to contribute to the world, the world rewards you. Finding your mission is finding the job or career that will allow you to do that.
But in a confusing and failing economic environment the true meaning and value of work, social responsibility and YOU has become muddled, if not completely lost. Too much government regulation on one end and too much corporate greed and malfeasance on the other end has caused the whole system to go haywire. That is not your fault.
Yet, your desire and ability to reach out to and contribute to the world is a divinely inspired asset that can and will still lead you to long-term and stable career success once you engage it. Because God gave every one of us something the world needed, and our jobs are how we offer that gift and are rewarded by society for it?
Finding your mission is finding the job or career that will allow you to do that. In other words, your economic value is assigned by God, and it is not rooted in how much you earn, but in HOW and WHY you earn.
This new perspective enables and inspires you to reach out to others to love and respect and to be loved and respected as an integral part of the human community, and finally to transform that whole life idea into a career strategy that will help you find and succeed at a new job.
Want to read more. Find out how to turn your job problems, and all your other troubles into opportunities to revitalize your life in Chris Benguhe’s new book, “Overcoming Life’s 7 Common Tragedies: Opportunities for Discovering God,” available here on this website or at Amazon.com.
Author and Columnist Chris Benguhe will be kicking off his W.O.R.K (Wealth Originated from Responsibility and Kindness) program at churches from coast to coast this fall. If you are interested in bringing Mr. Benguhe and his seminar to your church or other organization, you may contact him at cbenguhe@yahoo.com.
Something amazing is happening all around us. As one of the worst economic downturns in history struck this nation last year, the nation has responded not by crumbling under the strain, but by downsizing, reprioritizing and reassessing their values. The results – a nation that saves more, spends less on things they don’t need, while remarkably has continued to give to charity.
That’s amazing and almost too hard to believe, if it weren’t true. And what it says about human nature is nothing less than extraordinary.
Here are the facts. Amidst an economy that saw housing values in many areas drop in half, an unemployment rate that nearly doubled and 54% of human services charities report a rise in human services requests, it was no doubt that people are hurting. We have all felt the hit in one way shape or form.
Yet look at some of these surprising effects.
The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index – a Gallup poll that rates how Americans feel about the quality of their lives actually went up since last June.
Another Gallup poll shows that Americans have not only cut back on their expenses because of these tough times, something that you would obviously expect, but that that they have come to terms with their new budgets and aren’t that worried anymore. In other words, they have changed their expectations of what they want and they need.
The study showed that 71% saying they are cutting back on their spending and 88% saying they are watching their spending very closely.
But the result of that is that 78% of Americans now say they have enough money to satisfy their basic needs.
That brings up two points in my slightly twisted reality; one is that the situation is not quite as dire as some would have us believe. But secondly, that Americans have a pretty amazing ability to adapt, especially when they realize what and who is important in their lives. And this crisis has apparently helped us to do that.
And that brings me to my third amazing realization – giving.
Despite all the hardships that occurred over the last year, the total amount of charitable giving in the United States exceeded $300 billion for the second year in a row in 2008, according to Giving USA 2009. Donations reached an estimated $307.65 billion in 2008.
Now admittedly and significantly that was a 2 percent drop over 2007, but considering that the economic climate was reduced by a whole lot more, that’s pretty amazing reorganizing and reprioritizing. A caveat to that number is that religious donations soared to $106.89 billion – an increase of an estimated 5.5 percent.
Now let me throw in one more little interesting study for good measure The latest Gallup Values and Beliefs Poll, conducted annually each May, this year found the number of people who say that the moral values of America are getting better to have increased – in fact it doubled since the beginning of the year.
Christ once said that money was the root to all evil. Discussions of the meaning of that phrase about in theological circles, but generally it is believed to mean that the vicious and unrestrained pursuit of money at all costs lead down the primrose path.
So maybe an economy that forces us to slow down in that pursuit and reevaluat what we ant and need isn’t such a bad thing.
That doenst mean that we shouldn’t keep trying to improve, but that maybe fixing our economy isn’t as necessary as fixing our values.
After all if we all can whether this much of an economic hit and still be ok, maybe are perceptions of what we needed weren’t so clear in the first place.
But maybe they will be a whole lot clearer because of it.
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