THE OVERWHELMING, IMPOSSIBLE TASK

It is important to set goals and then strive to achieve them. A great measure of joy came to my life when a monumental goal was completed a few years ago. The amazing thing about this goal is that it started some forty-five years ago when I was a teenager. I am sure it was through my father's example of collecting poetry, quotes, and stories that I started my own collection. You can imagine, after so much time had passed, the vast amount of written materials I had gathered.

One day, I opened the filing cabinet and made the decision to either get rid of the collection or actually put it in some type of order. It was on every kind of paper imaginable from old envelopes, bits and scraps of paper, to faded mimeographed sheets. In its present form, it was a just a heap of paper, unmanageable, and certainly not very useful. I knew I had to do something with it; and thankfully, I could see the possibilities of a wonderful book. So plans were made to get started on what looked like an overwhelming, impossible task.

The objective was to work on the project a few hours each evening and on weekends during the long winter months. At first, it seemed like a boring, endless job—all the sorting, tossing, typing, proofreading, and printing that needed to be done—but I kept in mind that I did not have to complete the project all at once; I just needed to finish one page at a time.

As I completed the final pages, I had feelings of satisfaction and fulfillment in my heart for I had accomplished a monumental task; and to top that off, my goal was realized. My time and effort had been well spent and the end product was worth the many months of hard work devoted to its completion. I add fresh material to the book yearly and find pleasure in thumbing through the pages on a quiet afternoon while relishing in the fact that what was a forty-five year collection, a “useless heap of paper,” is now a beautiful book and a completed goal.