Several years ago, Dr. Heartsill Wilson wrote a quote of inspiration titled “The Beginning of a New Day” that has helped a lot of people take stock of where they are and have made a commitment to do better in the future.

First, let me give you the quote, and then I have some follow-up comments to make.

“This is the beginning of a new day. God has given me this day to use as I will. I can waste it or use it for good. What I do today is important because I am exchanging a day of my life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever, leaving something in its place I have traded for it. I want it to be a gain, not a loss – good not evil, success not failure; in order that I shall not regret the price I paid for it.”

If you will take a moment and reread that, I believe you will agree it has a tremendous amount of potential to help any of us take stock of where we are and, if we have any time left on this earth, to make a commitment to use it wisely. As I thought about this, I realized once more that we indeed only have one day at a time, and we are not guaranteed tomorrow. Yes, each new day gives us a chance to do better. I recall back in the days when I worked for the Nightingale-Conant Corporation in Chicago that they had a theme, “Human Beings are Improvable,” and this is so true.

This kind of thinking led me to title my new book, “Your Future Begins Today.” The book contains a wealth of information that will help any person use more of their God-given potential. I am most excited because we plan for it to be used in our nation’s schools to teach young children what is right and what is wrong, the things my father grilled into me when I was growing up. As you may know, a lot of children do not get this kind of information, which I feel is one of the reasons our culture has become so violent. It seems there is a deadly shooting almost every day in our state’s capital city, duplicated many times over in every major city in the nation.

As you go to bed tonight, regardless of where you live or how old you are, I hope you will think about your future and how you can do better in the coming days. The other day I got out my pencil and a small calculator. Taking the average life expectancy, which is around 78 years, I tabulated just how many days each of us has, including weeks, months and years. Here is what I came up with: 28,470 days, 4,056 weeks, 936 months. Of course, you can break it down still further into hours, minutes and seconds. As you can see, that is a lot of time that most of us are given to make a difference in our life and in the lives of others.

Please allow me to go on record by saying that I don’t like what is currently happening in our country. I don’t like all the bickering and fighting, especially in our government. I long for the days when we had unity and we all wanted what was best for our country. We need to all understand that we can disagree without being disagreeable. A democracy, which our forefathers established when the U.S. Constitution was adopted back in 1787, embodied the concept that every vote counted and the majority ruled.

If we did not like what was taking place, we had the right to work to change it, but we all had the best interests of our nation at heart. At the very core of the future of our nation are our schools, and what we teach our children is very important. Even our very young children must be taught the reasons why we have the greatest nation in the world.

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(For a personally signed copy of my new book ‘Your Future Begins Today’ send $20 — includes postage & handling — to Jim Davidson, 2 Bentley Drive, Conway, AR 72034.)