The Time To Change Is Now...

I recently was asked to come up with a tag line for my foundation. I had to think about it a lot, what was an appropriate tag line for this mess, I mean vision that I had created? There were so many things running through my mind and I was having a hard time to deciding just what would be the most effective.  Over the next few days while I was dwelling on it I was told a story about a young man I had met in early 2020 who came to me for work. At the time we were working on a very labor intensive job and it was still cold out and wasn’t a lot of fun, but then again not many of our jobs are, we do manual labor! He didn’t last much longer than a day or two but that seems to be the case with a lot of people that come into my office so I didn’t think much of it at the time. And now here we are almost a year later and he had called the guy who referred him to work with us to tell him that he can’t stop thinking about that day and the choices that he made after that day.  Now he has gotten himself into some trouble that he has to deal with before he can even consider working full time again. I was thinking a lot about that story all that day and was thinking about how many times I hear similar stories and that’s when my tag line hit me!  The time to change is now, there will always be an excuse for waiting but nobody knows what the future holds for them. I am constantly telling my participants of The Plan B Foundation that life is not easy, it never will be, it is hard, really hard.  And it is easier on the inside, there are no bills to pay, no sick kids to deal with, no family drama, all of that is dealt with by someone else when you are in prison. When you come out, they want you to help out with everything, after all you were away because of the mistakes you had made and they supported you while you were away. It is easy to say that working full time is too hard and I will go back to what I was doing before, make some easy money and then I will work later. It generally doesn’t work that way, it is rare to find a person that stopped doing illegal things to live a better life just one day. It is generally because something else has forced them to stop, violence, addiction or jail. There will always be a reason to wait to change, waiting is easy, change is the hard part and that won’t ever be easy.