This document discusses how choosing a path in life inevitably comes with both positives and negatives. It notes that there is no easy or trouble-free life, and that greater ambitions will require dealing with larger issues. It uses the metaphor of a silversmith refining silver in the flames to represent how challenges and difficulties in life transform us into our best selves as long as we allow ourselves to be shaped by experiences.

1. When you choose to drive,
you have to accept traffic jams.
When you choose to be health conscious,
you have to forego being tongue conscious.
With income will come income tax.

2. Anything you choose in life comes along with
its own inherent positives and negatives.
What folly it is to search for a rose bush
without the thorns !
When you choose one face of the coin,
you have also chosen the
other side of the coin.

3. Don’t ask for a trouble-free, blessed life.
Not even the mahatmas could embrace a
trouble-free blessed life.
There is no such life.

4. Bigger the ambition, greater will be the issues.
When you want to walk, the issues are few.
When you choose to run a marathon,
obviously there are more issues to deal with.
When you choose to merely exist,
you face lesser issues.

5. When you choose to live worthy to your potential,
Then you have to solve larger issues.
By lifting one end of the stick,
you have already picked up the other end.
Only if you are willing to be chiselled,
you will become the idol worthy
of being worshipped.

6. There is no easy way to the top and
those who made it to the top
didn’t make it easy.
After all, there has to be
a difference between a
history reader and a history maker.

7. Once a woman had an appointment with a silversmith
to watch him at work. As she watched the silversmith,
he held a piece of silver over the fire and let it heat up.
He explained that one had to hold the silver
in the middle of the fire where the flames
were hottest for all the impurities
to get burnt away.
She asked the silversmith if it was true
that he had to sit there in front of
the fire the whole time.

8. The man affirmed that he not only had to sit there
holding the silver, but also had to keep his eyes
on the silver the whole time.
If the silver was left a moment too long
in the flame, it would be destroyed.
The woman then asked, “How do you know
when the silver is fully refined ?”
He smiled and answered,
“Oh, that’s easy…..
when I see my image in it.”

9. If you are feeling the heat of life, remember that
God has HIS eye on you and will keep watching you
Until He sees HIS image in you.
In every man sleeps a prophet.
God became man, so that man can
again become God,
Life isn’t a furnace that’s burning you
but one that’s transforming you
into glittering silver.