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Recently I was reading a book by Stephen Covey in which he wrote that “we are where we are today because of choices that we made yesterday.”  Life, Covey said is an accumulation of our choices.  When we choose to save our money today instead of spending it, we choose to prosper financially tomorrow.  When we choose to pursue a higher education today, we choose to prosper intellectually tomorrow.  And so it goes that in virtually every area of life, the choices we made in the past have a profound impact upon our present state of being.  If we are bold enough to admit that our current state of affairs is not the fault of circumstances or conditions, but rather, the result of choices that we made in the past, then we discover a sense of peace and ownership of our current state…whatever we should find it to be.  As I understood this concept from Covey’s book, I had an additional thought that Covey did not express.  Believing that human beings have the power to change their destiny by changing the way they think, I applied Covey’s idea to the concept of change.  If you should find yourself in a predicament that you do not like, then the power to change that predicament rests in a change of thinking and choices.  A few years back, for example, the Hardee’s fast food company found itself in an awful predicament.  In the early 1980’s the company made a poor decision in an effort to cut costs and changed their signature hamburger recipe.  They sacrificed quality for profits, and paid the price in lost business.  By the end of the next decade, the company was facing financial ruin.  With their hamburger reputation shot, they attempted to draw customers with roast beef sandwiches and fried chicken…warring for the business of Arby’s and KFC.  By the turn of the millennium, Hardee’s had lost its vision to sell hamburgers, and was widely known as the worst of all fast food options available anywhere.  The temptation was, I am sure, to blame external conditions or circumstances like the community, changing consumer tastes, bad advertising, or 10 other external excuses for why the company was facing financial ruin.  That sort of thinking…avoiding responsibility for personal decisions that lead to demise, cost the company its clientele, and ultimately its ownership, and in 1997, the company was sold to new owners.  It took a few years to clean up the mess and recast a vision throughout the company, but by 2003, Hardee’s had eliminated secondary products that distracted them from their true vision of being a dynamic hamburger joint, and refocused its attention on selling the best hamburgers available from a fast food place anywhere.  They revamped their hamburger recipe and dedicated themselves to quality.  Additionally, they refused to blame circumstances or conditions for their demise and accepted the responsibility that success for the company required a change of thinking, and doing.  Their first advertisements accepted responsibility for poor quality and lousy food in the past, but then promised the consumer that if they would try a Hardee’s “thickburger” now, that the last place they would ever go for a hamburger would become the first.  Hardee’s swallowed the hard pill of accepting responsibility for its demise, stopped blaming external factors, and realized that the choices they had made in previous days were the reason that they found themselves in their predicament.  How do you apply this to your own setting?  You are where you are because of decisions that have been made in the past.  We must understand that the choices we make today will determine where we are tomorrow.  An honest ownership of where we are, acceptance of responsibility that we are here because of our former choices, a renewal of a Biblical vision for our lives, and an action plan to pursue that vision is critical…if tomorrow is to be any different than today.