*The Two Young Couples -1"

I read about a young couple in college, studying to get their degrees. They lived in an apartment complex next door to another young college couple, so the two couples soon became good friends. They had a lot in common.

The second couple, however, seemed to get all the breaks. They lived in the corner apartment, and it was much bigger and nicer than the other units in that complex. They furnished their apartment with brand-new furniture. The other couple barely had any furniture, and the pieces they did have were old hand-me-downs. One couple wore nice clothes, the latest fashions, while the other couple wore the same clothes again and again. At one point, both of the men were trying to get an assistant teaching job at the university. Once again, the second man got it.

The first young man was extremely frustrated that he couldn’t seem to get any breaks. To top things off, at Christmastime, the second couple received a brand-new fancy sports car from their parents. The first couple drove an old beat-up pickup truck. It didn’t have any air-conditioning, and they lived in a hot and humid part of the country. Many times they’d be driving to class in the morning, sweating and miserable, and they’d look over to see their friends in that brand-new sports car.

As this sort of thing continued, the young man became more negative and depressed. He started complaining about their circumstances, and before long he was at odds with his wife. They started arguing and fighting. Ironically, they had never before had problems in their relationship, but negative attitudes will quickly spread to every area of our lives and drag us down.

One day, this young man was in his statistics class on campus. He’d spent several hours entering an enormous amount of data into his computer. He was working on this long, complicated equation. He had to get the numbers all lined up. He got them in the right order in the right column, and then he hit the “enter” key on his computer, asking it to give him the answer. As he did, he sat back and folded his arms. He thought it would take ten to fifteen minutes for the computer to analyze and calculate all that information. But much to his surprise, he looked up to find that the computer was already finished. He couldn’t believe it. He thought That is amazing! It took me hours to put this in, and the computer gave me the answer in less than one-tenth of a second. About that time, the professor came by and noticed that the student looked perplexed and befuddled.

“What’s wrong?” the professor asked.

“Well, sir, nothing’s wrong. I just spent all this time putting data in the computer, and I don’t really see how it could calculate it that rapidly.”