When election time draws near, I hear a lot of different views of the same situation. Both sides tell us that they have the answers to the things that have gone wrong in our society and they have ideas that will make everything better. The solutions are usually opposite in nature so who is right? Sometimes my head starts spinning from so many voices that are trying to convince me that they know the way.

Life lessons are sometimes hard at the time but they can give us what we need to sort through all of those voices that are trying to tell us how great their ideas would be for our life. Life lessons are those lessons that are based on past experience. A great general will study the battles of the past to win the batter at hand. We can always improve on things but we must have enough intelligence to know that if something has always failed, it has failed for a reason. If all of the promises sound too good to be true, they probably are! If we choose to believe those promises we will be bitterly disappointed.

Something for nothing will not last very long and that something for nothing will one day let us down. The time tested way that works is when everyone works together to see things accomplished. There will always be givers and takers, but when the takers outnumber the givers, there will soon be collapse. The problem is that all of us start out with the desire to have things that work out for us with less regard of how it works out for others. Our tendency is to look out for number one. That nature in us is what all of those empty promises are based on. We measure everything of how it affects us.

How can we all have the desire to be a giver? What is in us that makes us have a tendency to be a taker? Is there a source that could help us want for others what we want for ourselves? If that source was working in us would we be able to know the right voice?

These and other life questions will be addressed Sunday morning as “The Gathering Place Family” meets in the Washington Junior High School Library for Bible Study at 9:30 and in the gymnasium at 10 a.m. for our Pre-Service Connection where we enjoy coffee, juice and donuts. Our Worship Service and Children’s Church then begins at 10:30. Come at 7 p.m. and be part of our Wednesday night Bible Study and Children’s Ministry on the third floor above Trends at 120 W. Court St. in Washington Court House.