Stumbling Over A Quarter To Pick Up A Penny: UnderstandingYour Life's Spiritual Periods is a book that teaches you how to remain in God's Power while dealing with life's everyday challenges. "Stumbling Over A Quarter To Pick Up A Penny" is a metaphor for how you deal inappropriately with your life's challenges-whether they are related to relationships, illicit behavior, wealth, health or spiritual peace of mind. The Six Spiritual Periods: Probation, Preparation, Conquest, Power, Decline, and Servitude are the different stages of life that you find yourself in while dealing with those challenges. Oftentimes you are not in God's Power, where you want to be, but in one of the other five. To get to God's Power or to remain in it, you need to understand the principles of the Six Spiritual Periods that are contained in this book. The stories in this book are built around a recent awareness that God gave me of how to unlock the understanding of life's Six Spiritual Periods. They are an accumulation of my personal "stumbling" experiences blended together with Biblical stories and Scripture references that I use to reveal to you how important it is to have a correct understanding of which of the Six Spiritual Periods that you are currently living your life in. Written for individuals of all ages, the book takes less than four hours to read, but its unique insights can last a lifetime. So read the stories, complete the Determining Your Life's Spiritual Period Worksheet and then enjoy the personal happiness fostered by your new understanding of how God's Power works.

Stumbling Over A Quarter To Pick Up A Penny

Understanding Your Life's Six Spiritual PeriodsBy Hayward C. Townsend Sr.

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2009 Hayward C. Townsend Sr.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4490-0853-6

Contents

Introduction: Homeless...............................................................11. Decline: May I Help You?..........................................................92. Servitude: Lying at First Light...................................................193. Probation: The Psychic Plowboys Experience........................................314. Preparation: Baby Eagles and Piano Lessons........................................395. Conquest: Can You Hold Your Breath?...............................................476. Power: Riding to the Games........................................................557. Conclusion: How Do You Do It?.....................................................718. Steps to Using the Understanding of the Six Spiritual Periods.....................75Determining Your Life's Spiritual Period Worksheet...................................87Pictures.............................................................................91Endnotes.............................................................................101Acknowledgements.....................................................................103

Chapter One

Decline: May I Help You?

If you try hard enough you can pin-point an exact moment when you realize that you were turning away from God ... not completely turned away but turning away from Him. It's that time in your life when what you are doing has stopped working for you. It's the point when you are no longer in God's Power but beginning to enter a Decline period in your life.

For me, it was about 9:30 one overcast fall morning in 1976. I remember pulling my gray Corvette way too fast into the parking lot of what was then The Treasury Store. The Treasury Store was a subsidiary of the JCPenny Company and was located on the southwest corner of Elvis Presley Blvd and Holmes Road in the Southwest Memphis community called Whitehaven. It had a full-service grocery store under the same roof as a major retail department store. There was a full-service gas station island out front. It was one of those stores that helped to pioneer the concept that Wal-Mart uses so profitably today.

The gas pump attendant was a man in his late forties with red hair and a red beard that was peppered with gray. He was a skinny man about six feet tall and looked to weigh about 140 pounds. He had on a dingy, short-sleeved shirt that looked beige but you could see that at some time earlier it had been white. On the right side of the shirt, opposite the store logo and inside of an embroidered red oval, was the name Earl. Earl had on navy blue pants that had black grease around the top of the side pockets and on the knees. The pants hung down over his beat-up brown work boots. He was chewing a big wad of tobacco and a small stream of juice was running out of one of the corners of his mouth. I could tell that he wasn't comfortable with the idea of providing full service for me on my expensive sports car. He was supposed to check my oil level, the air in my tires and clean my windshield while he pumped my gas but I could tell that if anything got cleaned or checked in the next 10 minutes it would be me doing the cleaning and the checking.

Anyway, once Earl composed himself he walked up to my car, looked at me and said, "May I help you?" Now, since my JCPenny credit card was maxed out and would have been declined I couldn't say, "fill her up" so I said, "Yeah, you can help me ... can you pump me one dollar worth of regular?" and handed him a crisp one dollar bill through my window. He froze still and didn't make a move to pump my gas. From the sudden gleam in his earlier dull eyes, a new smirk on his mouth and the twitch of his left jaw, I could tell that I had just given him the opening that he needed to get into my business ... and he proceeded to try to take a little wind out of my sail. "I wouldn't have a car like that", he said, "if I couldn't afford gas for it".

Now I can't tell you what I said to him at that time for two reasons. One was because what I said was purely reactionary and I don't remember exactly what I said. The other is because I can no longer repeat the part that I do remember, but I'm sure he heard me because after he told me "where to go", he crumpled up the dollar bill and threw it back at me through my t-top. He didn't know that I was "on my way there" anyway and that I didn't need his directions. He just knew where to hit me though and the blow that he delivered to my pride was devastating because it was true.

The gas station attendant had picked up on the fact that my briefly-enjoyed Power period of the past few years was over and that my life was in Decline and headed towards Servitude. Everyone that I came into contact during that time knew that except me. I was in denial and I didn't want to give up any ground. But the fact is that Decline usually follows Power and since I had eliminated the behavior that kept me in God's Power, I was no longer there and hadn't been there for quite some time. I had stopped practicing the habits that helped me stay in Power; I had stopped going to worship service, attending my college classes regularly, and I no longer had gainful employment. I was focusing on my present position in life and not focusing on the future that God had prepared me for.

I had allowed other peoples' opinions and mores to dictate my life and was too conflicted to tell myself "Hayward ... you are not in Power when you have an expensive car and can't afford gas for it. You are not in Power when you are hiding your car to keep it from being repossessed. You are not in Power when you feel the need to lie to yourself and others about anything and everything. You are not in Power when what you are accomplishing causes you to sin against God or cause others to sin against Him ... you are in Decline."

My above story leads to the following important fact about being in a Decline period in your life:

You enter into a Decline period in your life when you stop doing the things that keep you in God's Power.

How Are Your Habits?

Many people go into Decline periods in their life unaware, as I had done during this stage in my life. You give up your "good practices", the group of essential habits that keep you in God's Power. Practices like: taking time for your morning prayer, having private time with God, and showing up to the midweek worship service that re-charges your faith and keeps you spiritually connected. You stop volunteering to help others. You become callous and you begin to ignore or justify the hurt that your actions and the actions of others cause God's people.

When you are in Decline you find ways to start removing the positive influences that exist in your life ... the one's that God put there to help you to succeed. You get too smart to be involved in any type of organized learning and you stop participating in any form of organized meetings. You ignore an import rule for personal and spiritual growth that says, "If you are always the wisest person in all of the meetings that you attend then you need to attend some different meetings". You abhor discipline of any kind and unknowingly you have created the perfect environment to one day find...