The Lesson I Learned from Toilet Paper

For a long time, I always managed to use the last of the toilet paper on the roll and according to our house rule; this little event required me to put on a new roll. For years, this irritated me. In fact, I even wondered if my family plotted the event in some sort of twisted little game, finding irksome pleasure in my irritation. One day I decided to turn the tides on them. I was going to pull out the ultimate weapon. It was the one surefire way to win this family war of wits. I would win because I was going to pray.

As I prayed for the ability to be thankful for the job, little by little my thinking changed. My joy in the task grew greater and the frequency of roll changes grew less until one day I realized I hadn’t changed the toilet paper in quite some time. What was most amazing was that no one had mentioned it either. There was not one angry, grumpy, irritated roll changer in the house. And from this, I learned a valuable lesson.

As humans, we spend a lot of time being discontented. Usually it is over something small and inconsequential like changing the toilet paper roll, having to do dishes or feeling there is a lack of anything enjoyable to do. Sometimes it’s a bigger issue like money. We get caught in this trap of thinking of ourselves as poor and unblessed. In reality, what is wrong is not a lack of anything except the ability to stay focused on facts.

In a recent email, I read that if you have food in your refrigerator, clothes on your back and a roof over your head that you are more abundant than 75% of the world’s population. I also learned that if you have any money in the bank, in your wallet and some spare change lost in the couch somewhere, you are in the top 8% of the worlds most wealthy. Even more interesting is that in reading this, you are very likely in one of the top 25 happiest places on earth, a country where you have access to medical care, education, entertainment and freedom. Those are facts that, if brought into one’s belief system, can change a person’s thinking very quickly. And that was the bottom line for me.

When I stopped being upset at having an extra task to do each day and changed the way I thought, I changed my role and amazingly enough, the roll got changed for me.

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