Priorities

The following is a story I got from an Adventures in Motherhood group at church. It is worth reading...often. It's also especially good for this time of year:

A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.

Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups - porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to coffee.

When all the former students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said, "If you notice, all the nice-looking, expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it's normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee. In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups...and then you began eyeing each other's cups.

Consider this: Life is the coffee, the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of the life we live.

Sometimes by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee.

The happiest people don't have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything."