eBook - ePub
The Little Red Book of Wisdom
Mark DeMoss
This is a test
Share book
- 208 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
The Little Red Book of Wisdom
Mark DeMoss
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
The search for wisdom invariably leads us back to the places we've overlooked.
The Little Red Book of Wisdom takes the reader on a journey so often sidestepped in favor of the newer, quicker, easier. If you're seeking simplicity in a complicated world, Mark DeMoss's insights will illuminate your path to a wiser and more deliberate way of living. By illuminating the notions of integrity, humility, and self-restraint, DeMoss demonstrates what is possible when we value listening and thinking over talking and doing.
- Learn why a postage stamp is worth much more than 44 cents, and what time of day wisdom flourishes.
- Find out the wisest decision anyone can make, and the value of eating lunch alone.
- Rethink the advantages of technology, and learn how to safeguard yourself against any shadow of deathbed regret.
Step out of the incessant business of your daily life, and spend a few moments learning timeless and foolproof truths that you can apply right away. Wisdom is not just for past generations; it calls to us today. We need only respond.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is The Little Red Book of Wisdom an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access The Little Red Book of Wisdom by Mark DeMoss in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Theology & Religion & Religion. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Topic
Theology & ReligionSubtopic
ReligionPART I
WISDOM FOR YOUR PROFESSIONAL LIFE
Chapter 1
A MATTER OF DEATH AND LIFE
No one can confidently say that he
will still be living tomorrow.
Euripides
During the summer before my senior year in high school, I spent only a few days at home because my father had encouraged me to take a job with the Southwestern Company selling books door-to-door. My dad was my hero, and I agreed to the work unaware that it would mean thirteen-hour days for eight straight weeks with no breaks to see my family.
I hated being away from home. I hated that the time with Southwestern didnât allow me to join my parents and six brothers and sisters on vacation in the Caribbean. My father and I spoke each weekend by phoneâhe took great interest in my progressâbut nothing could substitute for being with him.
I was back home that Friday in late August, just before classes started for my senior year, when he and I met for lunch at the headquarters of National Liberty Corporation, the life insurance company he had founded and led to considerable success. I was always so proud to be his son when I walked through the beautiful corporate headquarters by his side. That day we talked about my plans for college and possibly for business later on.
The next day, Saturday, September 1, 1979, an ambulance sped to our home where my father had been playing tennis with three other men. One of them had rushed up to the house to make the emergency call. I didnât think to worry. Lots of men fall out of breath during exercise. Dad was fifty-three and in the prime of life. Heâd be back home in a few hours with a heart prescription and doctorsâ orders to take it easy.
Instead my mother and brothers and sisters and I gathered in the emergency room of the Bryn Mawr Hospital and listened to a doctor softly say, âIâm sorry. We did all we could.â My father was dead. My hero was gone. At age forty, his wife was a widow with seven children between ages eight and twenty-one. Certainly I had known people who had died during my still-young life; but death was supposed to happen to older people, in other families.
Shortly after we returned home from the hospital that day, my mother found a piece of paper on my fatherâs nightstand. He was a prolific note-taker, never without pad and pen. In my mind, I can still see in his handwriting the words from the Ninetieth Psalm: âSo teach us to number our days, that we may present to You a heart of wisdom.â
Arthur S. DeMoss was the wisest man I knew. Now he was in heaven, less surprised by his departure, I suspect, than we were. I still miss him. He never saw me play college football. His place was vacant when I married the most wonderful girl in the world. He missed greeting his first grandchildren. When I started a business, he wasnât there to advise meâthough I had more counsel from him than I realized at the time, which is a large reason for my writing this book.
Seven years after my fatherâs death, in the spring of 1986, I was working for Rev. Jerry Falwell and attending a conference at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville. We had just settled into our rooms when a call came from home telling me that my twenty-two-year-old brother, David, had been in a car accident and was in serious condition. Jerry and I checked out, flew to Philadelphia, and drove straight to the hospital at the University of Pennsylvania.
My kid brother, a wiry go-getter with a remarkable knack for making friends, just home for the summer before his final year at Liberty University, lay comatose next to a row of blinking and beeping machines. His doctors talked with us, and our friend Rev. Falwell prayed with us. Eventually we walked out of the hospital and across the street to the hotel where we would stay for the next several days. On June 6, 1986, David Arthur DeMoss joined our father in heaven.
After my father died, I somehow believed that early death would pass over the rest of my family. Why I thought that, I donât know: actuarial tables, common odds, maybeâcertainly not the Bible because, if anything, it underscores lifeâs brevity.
As I write this, I am a handful of years from the age my father was at his death and twice my brotherâs age when he died. The math in my head is unavoidable. I have a wife and children. Iâve had the thrill and challenges of building a career. Iâve had adult years and all that comes with new eras in lifeâall things David never grew up to experience.
In the early years of the church, the apostle James wrote to Christians in a distant city, âYet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.â
What is it about human nature that we so blithely presume we will have seventy or eighty years of health and life? The Creator guarantees not another breath. In the last few years, in too short a span of months, I joined the families at our childrenâs school in mourning the loss of Carter Martin, a second grader who died following a protracted fight with cancer. I helped lift and carry the coffin of Jeanine Allen, the young mother of my daughterâs best friend since kindergarten, after a seven-year battle with cancer. Through another âprematureâ death, I got to know Evelyn Husband, the widow of space shuttle Discovery Commander Rick Husband, whose shuttle blew apart as his wife and kids waited to welcome him back to earth.
âManâs days are determined,â the Old Testament figure Job says as he labors to grasp his own devastating loss and grief. âYou have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed.â
When my father died, I thought I could never ever hurt that way again. Then we lost my brother David. Since then, I have been privileged to share the sorrow of other families during loss, and I know from my marrow and tissue what is important. People are. God is. Time isâimportant, fleeting, priceless.
Winston Churchillâs father died at age thirty-nine, and Englandâs future prime minister grew up expecting also to die young. In his first autobiography, the young Churchill credited his military exploits in India, including a dramatic escape atop a moving train, and in general his fearless first decades, to his awareness of the ticking clock.
My own fatherâs death at age fifty-three circled that age in my mind, a red mark made darker and more certain by Davidâs sudden death only a few years later. Iâm never so lost in living that I donât hear the clock tick or have an eye on the calendarânot in a paranoid sense, but with a sense of purpose. As surely as a fatherâs life imprints on a son, a fatherâs early death frames how his son takes on the future . . . how he looks at the past, and why he might write a book on wisdom.
I cannot remember that my father ever wasted a minute. Not that all he did was work; he frequently played tennis or Monopoly with us, went swimming or took us to professional sporting events. He was also a great conversationalist. Itâs just that he didnât waste time. He didnât watch TV, and he went to bed at a reasonable hourâeven with guests still in the living room. (âTurn out the lights when you leave,â he would say on his way upstairs.) He rose early each day. His strong sense of purpose and life fully included time to think, plan, dream, and pray.
We all are wise to invest lifeâs most precious commodity for the greatest return. When I die, whenever that moment comes, I hope my passing will echo the psalmistâs saying âTeach me to number my days, that I may present to You a heart of wisdomâânot least because my fatherâs life and death have shown me that it is possible.
Chapter 2
STAY UNDER THE UMBRELLA
The secret of success is constancy to purpose.
Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield
Years ago in Hong Kong there lived a missionary named John who had a knack for getting things done. In a densely crowded and difficult city, that brand of talent attracts attention, particularly among American businesses salivating over the lucrative Eastern market. One day the ranking executive of a squirt gun manufacturer invited John to lunch at a well-known Hong Kong restaurant. In the posh but crowded dining room, the exec slipped $600 to the owner and was escorted with John to a prime corner table.
Napkins had barely hit laps when the executive leaned in. âJohn,â he said âweâll pay you a salary of $200,000, provide you with a nice office, and a car and driver if youâll come work for us.â Perhaps too casually for the executiveâs pride, John said, âIâm not interestedâ (thinking to himself, he said later, that he could have saved the guy $600-plus on lunch). When the businessman pressed with âHow much are you making now?â John didnât hesitate. âEight thousand dollars,â he said. âBut thatâs not the point. Iâm here serving God, doing what Iâm supposed to do, and Iâve never been happier.â
At 11:00 p.m. Johnâs phone rang. âItâs all over Hong Kong that you rejected that big offer at lunch today,â an agitated voice with a German accent said. âI would like to know why.â The caller wouldnât take tomorrow morning for an answer, and forty minutes later, still in his pajamas, John sat across a coffee table from him. His visitor said, âEveryone at the American Chamber knows what you did. I had to hear for myself.â
Telling me about this incident years later, John tried to explain why the squirt gun bid and offers like it through the years failed to entice him. âI call it âstaying under the umbrella,ââ he said. âGet out from under the umbrella and you get wet. I knew my calling and purpose. I wasnât going to let money or anything else sidetrack me.â John is past seventy and at the panoramic end of a lifetime of serving people in Hong Kong, Asia, Africa, and dozens of places the names of which most Americans would mispronounce on the first try. Behind him lies a trail of new childrenâs camps, orphanages, churches, and lives forever changed.
To this day, though technically retired, John has never lost his focus. He recently spent eight weeks in China doing what he has always doneâserving others. In an age of business globalization, John has had abundant opportunity to act as a point man for businesses seeking to expand into markets he knows well. He could have been rich, but he would have been unhappy.
John calls it an umbrella; I call it focusâthat internal compass that keeps a person on track with his gifts, his purpose, and his goals. How rare is that compass? Consider a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey that began in 1979 and tracked baby boomersâ careers over the following eighteen years. The report published in 2002 revealed how many jobs people born between 1957 and 1964 held from age eighteen to age thirty-six.
Hereâs what they found: in an eighteen-year span, each person had held an average of ten jobs. Seventeen percent had held fifteen or more jobsâpractically a different job every year. Only 18 percent had changed employment fewer than five times.
Walt Disney used to advise people to âfind a job that you like so much that youâd do it without compensation; then do it so well that people will pay you to continue.â To almost anyone fifty or younger, that counsel probably seems antique.
But not to me. I feel that way about my work. When I review résumés (the majority of applicants appear to want a job, not a career), before anything else, I scan down their work history. Common wisdom says that multiple jobs bespea...