Make something good out of what life has dealt you.

A garden left untended goes to weed. Life must be tended like a garden, otherwise the weeds of circumstances will have a way of making chaos out of what could be a beautiful garden of life. Joni Ericksom Tada has taken the awful circumstances of her life and made a beautiful garden out of them that has blesses many people.

The book I have written, BY HANDS OF STRANGERS gives meaning and purpose to what my life has been.

Sucess according to the dictionary definition is...the achievement of something planned or desired...That denotes action. There can be no success without action.

God meant for us to be active. He gave Adam a job to do; that is to manage everything that He had created. God did not tell him directly how to do that. But God created Adam to be like himself. Adam had a creative spirit within himself. It was up to Adam to figure out how to do the job assigned to him.

My father was creative. When we escaped communist east Germany at the end of World War II, we had only the clothes on our backs. We found a temporary place in which to live in an abandoned shack. The countryside was littered with military hardware from the war, which my father gathered up. With his black-smithing skills he used the metal to make cooking pots for my mother. Soon other villagers saw what my father could do. They came to him and traded food stuff for pots and pans and other household things that they needed.

He was successful in providing for us even in the midst of calamity. He cultivated the skills he had,taking the materials which were available and created beauty. He did not leave his garden of creativity untended.