Part Five: Ray Edwards In Search Of Heroes Interview Was Awesome" by Ralph Zuranski
Ray Edwards In Search Of Heroes Interview
Ralph Zuranski: What is the dream or vision that sets the course of your life?
Ray Edwards: I know how this is going to sound. I’ve been thinking about it because I knew you were going to ask this question. How will I answer that without sounding like I’ve got some grandiose ideas about myself?
Here is what it truly is. The larger vision, I’m not talking about the short term goals. We all have those I would presume.
My vision for my life is to be able to fulfill the purpose that God has for me, to be able to help as many people as I possibly can in whatever ways I possibly can and to enjoy the fulfillment and the freedom that living that dream gives to me. I think that while that might sound like a really generalized answer to the questions, for me at least it is very specific.
It’s taken me a long time to arrive at a place where I know clearly what I want to do with my life. Now, there are a lot of details that we are not talking about that go into supporting that. I think that is where the true rewards come in.
I have financial goal. I have a car that I want. We have a vacation we want to take and things like that but to me, those are truly sign posts along the way. Those are not the end of the journey.
Ralph Zuranski: You know I really agree with that. That’s my perspective in life also. Do you take a positive view of the set backs and the mistakes that you’ve made? How important is that for people to take a positive view?
Ray Edwards: Absolutely I do, Ralph. I think that to view your mistakes or your setbacks as anything other than learning experiences just doesn’t help you. I am not talking from a spiritual standpoint now. I am being very practical.
If I were to take the mistakes that I’ve made and beat myself up over them or to lament them and really spend time dwelling on how stupid I was, because there are plenty of episodes in my life where I could show you I was stupid. If I didn’t take those experiences and learn something from them then they truly were stupid mistakes.
But I believe that if we take our mistakes and learn a lesson from them so that we don’t make the same mistakes again or so that we can help someone else not make the same mistakes, then I believe they were valuable learning experiences. I think it is true of setbacks too.
We have setbacks in our life that have nothing to do with our making a mistake. It’s just that sometimes whether we understand it or not, sometimes bad things happen to good people. There is a book written by Rabbi Kushner on that very subject. It’s one of the influential books in my life because that was a question that I always had. Why does bad stuff happen to good people?
I don’t think that we always know the answer to that question. I’m not sure that it is a productive question to ask. I think it is important and productive to realize that bad things do happen to good people and truly they can be what we make of them.
The world is full of stories that you and I are both familiar with of people who were handed the lousiest hand in the poker game of life that you could possible ask for. They were given terrible challenges to overcome, physical impediments, emotional impediments, being born in the midst of a war torn third world country or having a terrible disease.
I am not saying that there are good things about those afflictions. What I am saying is that I believe the human spirit can find positive meaning even in the worst experiences. Look at Victor Franko who was in a Nazi concentration camp and took away from that experience the ideas and the emotions and the wisdom that caused him to write a book called Man’s Search for Meaning.
I truly believe that we need to take a view of our set backs, our challenges and our problems and ask ourselves, “What can I learn from this? What can I make of this? How can this be useful to me or to someone else?”
I know that is not always the easiest thing to do. Certainly in my life even though I have known those ideas and those principles for a long time, I know that when the chips are down and things are really tough, sometimes it’s hard to remember to do that. That is a challenge that I think is worth pursuing.