Norman Vincent Peale, author of ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’, tells the story of someone he called ‘the obstacle man’. He was a company director whose standard response to every imaginative proposal was: ‘Now let’s consider the obstacles involved.’ Eventually, in frustration, one of the other directors challenged him about why he always emphasized the obstacles and never the possibilities.
‘Well, what would you do?’ the obstacle man replied. The other director took a small card out of his wallet and showed it to him. On it were some words from the Bible which said, ‘I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.’ ‘That’s my formula,’ he said. ‘There is power in those words to get me over any obstacle and rebuild any ruin.’
And, you know, the world is full of people who have discovered the same.