Keion Henderson - Memory Loss

I want to use a subject today called memory loss. The reason I want to talk about this is that I think one of the detriments to your success is that you remember too much. Everybody 's afraid to lose their memory; we’re taking omega-1s, 2s, 3s, 6s, and everyone 's taking all these things just to improve their memory because we think that it’s a great thing to remember. But what if I told you that one of the most detrimental things you could do to your destiny is remember your past? There 's an old saying that says yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and the only thing that you have is a gift, which is why they call it the present. It’s the power of now. I’m not a huge baseball fan, but I went to a baseball game the other day. The LA Dodgers were playing the Houston Astros, and we were at Minute Maid Park in Houston. I was watching the pitchers throw the ball over and over again, and it reminded me of a man that any sports fan in the house, any baseball people, will know. There was a guy way back in the day in the 70s playing baseball, I think even back into the 60s if I’m not mistaken. His name is Tommy John, and he was a pitcher, one of the greats of all time. In this particular reiteration of the story, after throwing the pitch repeatedly, the story is told that he blew out his arm; he permanently damaged a ligament in his pitching elbow from throwing the ball over and over again. He struck out many people repeatedly, and that’s where some of you are in your life right now. A tendon is the thing that connects two joints and allows for flexibility without injury. He threw that ball over and over again, but he injured that tendon. See, that’s one of the things the devil does to you because success requires you to do things over and over again, and he’ll cause you to hurt in an area where you cannot perform that task repeatedly. So, you have to love every day, but sometimes the enemy will try to hurt your heart so that you can’t do it, and you have to forgive every day. I remember riding in the car with Nathan today, and he was telling me about something Pastor Billy said, and it shook me to my core. He was talking about Pastor Paul 's mom and dad, who I think were some of the greatest leaders in the history of the Christian world. He said that she said you can make it if you just don’t get bitter. When I tell you it touched my heart, it truly did, because if you get bitter, you cannot get better. If you get injured in your heart, then you cannot love, and the Bible says they will know we are Christians by our love. That 's why the enemy is trying to hurt your heart; through love, you can achieve so much, and if you cannot love, then you are just sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. Tommy was known as one of the greatest pitchers of all time. To put this into perspective, he pitched to Mickey Mantle and Mark McGwire. Some women are looking at me like, «Can you please get out of the sports analogy? I have no idea what you’re talking about.» Okay, let me do it this way: he played 26 seasons. His career was so long that John F. Kennedy was president when he started, and George Herbert Walker Bush was president when he retired. Does that help? Okay, let me put it this way: Mary Kay was doing great; let me see if I can find something. Mary Kay was giving out pink Cadillacs, and you could be diamond in the company. Does that help anybody? He was a pitcher for such a long time. Halfway through his career, he blew out his elbow, and it just so happened that they had a clinical trial study of a surgery that could take the healthy tendon from the other elbow and replace it in the injured arm, and today we call that the Tommy John surgery. Do you know that he blew his arm out, but after they fixed his elbow with this surgery they had concocted, the doctor told him, «Sir, you have a 99% chance of failure. I can only guarantee with the accuracy of 1% that this surgery will work .» Most people would have retired. Who goes into surgery with only a 1% chance? Who does that? For me to do it, they would have to talk about 50%, 60%, 70%, or 80%, but 1%? I said, «You know what? It’s the Lord 's will. I’ll just leave this arm as it is because there’s no way I’m going under the knife and going through rehab for 1%.» But he did it, and after he came back from that surgery, he went on to play another 13 seasons. He won another 164 games with a 1% chance, and when asked why he did it and how he had enough guts to stick with it, he said, «I have always learned to divide my life into two categories: things I can control and things I cannot.» And I came all the way from Houston to tell you…