Rackets…Excerpts from Accept your Abandance
Greg was very agitated, and it was obvious in his voice over the phone. “Randy, you say you’re a good Christian, but you’re always judging me and others. You’re so rich now; you forgot what it’s like to struggle. You forget that others didn’t have the same chance as you. God has blessed you and now you’re forgetting about the people less fortunate than you.”
I took a deep breath and I smiled to myself. I couldn’t help but notice the humor in Greg going back to the well with this old standby again. And why not? It had worked with me many times before.
But not this time…
Because this time I had my Star Trek universal translator fired up so even though Greg spoke the words you see above – this is what I heard:
“Randy, I’m going to take your belief in Christianity and use it against you. I have made many foolish decisions, not the least of which is I knocked up a girl, didn’t pay child support, called in sick a lot so I got fired from a couple of places, and ran my car into the ground, so it doesn’t run. While you were working 70 hours a week, I was just doing enough to get by, so I could watch six hours of television a night and ten hours a day on weekends.
“Now you have things and I don’t. Your life is working and mine isn’t.
“By talking about Christianity, I’m hoping to manipulate your emotions and make you feel guilty. If I can make you feel guilty enough – you’ll “lend” me another loan, which you and I both know, will never be paid back, just like the last three weren’t. By presenting the good decisions, sacrifice and hard work you did as ‘luck,’ or ‘breaks,’ I will try to make you feel that life treated me unfair, and attempt to mooch from you some of what you’ve earned.”
OK, let me level with you. Captain Kirk did not lend me his Universal Translator. I understood what Greg was really saying because I speak fluent “racket-speak.”
Now I’m embarrassed to tell you that I know the language so well because I used to be the biggest racketeer of all. And make no mistake – the situation I have just described is a racket. It is the way addicts, parasites and drama queens use you, to bail them out of the bad decisions they have made.
And it usually works!
How often do you put yourself in the company of people who challenge your beliefs and expand your concept of what abundance is?
I have lived a life that demonstrates the power of achieving prosperity like few others ever have. I have gone from sickness to abundant health. I have transformed myself from a dishwasher in a pancake house to a multi-millionaire. And I have grown from someone contemplating suicide, to living a joyful life of happiness and fulfillment.
That metamorphosis was the result of a number of factors. Changing my beliefs, spending time in daily self-development, learning how the laws of prosperity work, and other things. But the underlying element that drove ALL of these things was that I changed the people in my life.
In my case, I changed where I lived, and where I worked. I stopped hanging out with my victim friends.
