{"id":3038,"date":"2019-09-30T03:44:06","date_gmt":"2019-09-30T03:44:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biblestudies4you.com\/?p=3038"},"modified":"2019-09-30T03:56:54","modified_gmt":"2019-09-30T03:56:54","slug":"that-black-dot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biblestudies4you.com\/?p=3038","title":{"rendered":"That Black Dot!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A friend sent me one of those thought provoking excerpts that you see from time to time, and I thought this one was worth passing on. A professor set his class an exercise to teach them an object lesson, and as they sat at their desks there was a blank piece of paper in front of each of them. \u201cNow when I tell you to turn that paper over,\u201d he said, \u201cI want you to spend ten minutes, describing what you see on it\u201d.<\/p>\n

The class settled themselves down, and then he said, \u201cNow turn your paper over and write what you see.\u201d<\/p>\n

They each turned their paper over and it was completely blank except for one black spot in the middle of the sheet. There was silence for a moment, and then they began to write. After he had collected the papers at the end of the ten minutes, he began to read what they had written. Without exception, they had all concentrated on the black dot, describing its approximate size and position on the paper, and what they thought it might mean.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow,\u201d he said, \u201cI did this to illustrate a point that I want you to all remember. You all concentrated on the black dot, and you\u2019ve all written about it. But not one of you even seem to have noticed the amount of clean white paper there is surrounding that black spot! You know, that\u2019s like the bad things that happen in our lives, and we all have them from time to time. They are just like that small black dot, and they seem to consume our thinking. But I want you to concentrate rather on the amount of clean white paper there is on that page. This is like the good things that we can enjoy, even while there is a black dot on our page! There are always things we can be thankful for, and as we concentrate on them, the amount of clean white paper makes the black dot look very small\u2026the good things almost over-ride the black dot.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is a lot of truth in this small parable\u2026we should always concentrate on our blessings rather than on the dots of disappointments and discouragements. They will pass with time while the joy of the blessings will last. No matter how bad our circumstances, there is always something that we can be thankful for, especially when we have a Christian faith and hope in God. That is the first thing we can praise God for!<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend sent me one of those thought provoking excerpts that you see from time to time, and I thought this one was worth passing on. A professor set his class an exercise to teach them an object lesson, and as they sat at their desks there was a blank piece of paper in front … Continue reading That Black Dot!<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[508],"tags":[554,484,555],"class_list":["post-3038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-lessons","tag-black-dots","tag-disappointments","tag-thankfulness"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p69z0J-N0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblestudies4you.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblestudies4you.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblestudies4you.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblestudies4you.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblestudies4you.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3038"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblestudies4you.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3041,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblestudies4you.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3038\/revisions\/3041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblestudies4you.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblestudies4you.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblestudies4you.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}