fast, days 6 and 7

Yawn. What a busy two days it's been. I'm wiped. Our little call center is off the ground and we've been flooded with calls. I was on the phone from 8:30am until 5pm yesterday with a 20 minute break for lunch. After a slow drive home through the snowstorm, I spent the entire evening preparing health insurance proposals. It's a nice problem to have for an insurance guy. Most insurance agents spend an hour or two drumming up business on the phone with people who'd rather not talk to you, a couple hours a day out of the office running appointments, and a couple hours of customer service and paperwork. I now spend all day taking calls from friendly people who called me to buy health insurance. Next Monday our customer service/client liaison starts her job. This means no more paperwork or customer service calls, only 8 hours of pure selling time. Beautiful. With all of the busyness, I've had hardly a moment to think about food. It's made the fast easy the past couple of days.

I'm reading a short book by Og Mandino called The Greatest Miracle in the World. The last chapter I reread every night for the next hundred days or so. I'd highly recommend the book and reading that chapter every night just before bed. When you read the book, you'll understand why. Mandino asserts that humans do not live up to our full potential. We are God's greatest miracles, yet most of us wallow in mediocrity. This passage particularly struck me last night:

Maslow once wrote that either people do things which are fine and good, and thus respect themselves, or they do contemptible things and feel despicable, worthless, and unlovable. To my way of thinking, Maslow did not go far enough. I believe that humans feel despicable, worthless, and unlovable without doing contemptible things. Just being sloppy in their work, or not caring about their appearance or not studying or working a little harder to improve their position in life, or taking that unnecessary drink, or doing a thousand other stupid, small acts that tarnish an already bruised self-image is enough to increase their self-hatred.

It sounds depressing to think that humans operate that way, but I believe we do. Fortunately, there's much we can do to turn it around. This passage just seemed to resonate perfectly with how I've been thinking and feeling during the past week. We're Too Easily Pleased with mediocrity. I don't believe that God called us to mediocrity. I'll post more later about what Mandino suggests we do to be more than human beings, to be human "becomings".