Good Ole Ben

Excerpt from Exploring American History about Benjamin Franklin:

 He kept a little book in which he wrote down his faults. If he wasted half an hour of time or a shilling of money, or said anything that he should not have said, he wrote it down in his book. He carried that book in his pocket all his life, and he studied it, as a boy at school studies a hard lesson.

Can you even imagine? I would hate to keep track of my own faults for a day, let alone for my entire life AND to study them. Ever since we read this as part of our History lesson last Monday, it has rattled around in my mind. What would we learn about ourselves if we committed to this practice, even if only for a day? Even though part of me shudders at the thought, the other part of me has been chalking up mental tally marks every time I err or waste something or say the wrong thing. Quite a lesson, I tell ya.

And what did Good Ole Ben learn from this practice? Our history book says that his lessons were three: Do the right thing; do it at the right time; do it in the right way. And honestly, it seems like pretty sound advice. Now that I've read about the lessons he had learned, I am analyzing the things that I do or that others do that just don't seem to be quite right and have found that they usually fit into one of those three categories. Either I did the completely wrong thing or maybe my husband had good intentions but his timing was off or perhaps my friend was trying to do the right thing but her message got lost because of an inappropriate delivery. It's no wonder Ben went on to help pen the Declaration of Independence.

Amazing what God can use when we are listening. Like a third-grader's history lesson about Benjamin Franklin.