Nick Froze Himself to Death
You become what you believe

Our thoughts and expectations have tremendous power and influence in our lives. We receive what we believe. This principle works as strongly in the negative as it does in the positive.

Nick was a big, strong, tough man who worked in the railroad yards for many years. He was one of his company's best employees: always there on time, a reliable, hard worker who got along well with the other employees. But Nick had one major problem. His attitude was chronically negative. He was known around the railroad yards as the most pessimistic man on the job. He perpetually feared the worst and constantly worried, fretting that something bad might happen.

One summer day, the crews were told that they could go home an hour early in order to celebrate the birthday of one of the foremen. All the workers left, but somehow Nick accidentally locked himself in a refrigerated boxcar that had been brought into the yard for maintenance. The boxcar was empty and not connected to any of the trains.

When Nick realized that he was locked inside the refrigerated box car, he panicked. Nick began beating on the doors so hard that his arms and fists became bloody. He screamed and screamed, but his coworkers had already gone home to get ready for the party. Nobody could hear Nick's desperate calls for help. Again and again he called out, until finally his voice was a raspy whisper.

Aware that he was in a refrigerated boxcar, Nick guessed that the temperature in the unit was well below freezing, maybe as low as five or ten degrees Fahrenheit. Nick feared the worst. He thought, What am I going to do? If I don't get out o f here, I'm going to freeze to death. There's no way I can stay in here all night. The more he thought about his circumstances, the colder he became. With the door shut tightly, and no apparent way of escape, he sat down to await his in evitable death by freezing or suffocation, whichever came first.

To pass the time, he decided to chronicle his demise. He found a pen in his shirt pocket and noticed an old piece of cardboard in the corner of the car. Shivering almost uncontrollably, he scribbled a mes sage to his family. In it Nick noted his dire prospects: "Getting so cold. Body numb. If I don't get out soon, these will probably be my last words." And they were.

The next morning, when the crews came to work, they opened the boxcar and found Nick's body crumpled over in the corner. When the autopsy was completed, it revealed that Nick had indeed frozen to death.

It was not cold!

However, the investigators discovered that the refrigeration unit for the car in which Nick had been trapped was not even on! In fact, it had been out of order for some time and was not functioning at the time of the man's death. The temperature in the car that night-the night Nick froze to death-was sixty-one degrees Fahrenheit. Nick froze to death in slightly less than normal room temperatures be cause he believed that he was in a freezing boxcar. He expected to die! He was convinced that he didn't have a chance. He expected the worst. He saw himself as doomed with no way out. He lost the battle in his own mind. [1]

For Nick, the thing he feared and expected to happen came to pass. Many people today are similar to Nick. They're always expecting the worst. They expect defeat. They expect failure. They expect mediocrity. And they usually get what they expect; they become what they believe.

The irony is that we can choose to believe for good things. Allah (swt) told us "I am as My servant thinks of me. Let him thinks of Me as he wishes" [2]. God will be to you according to what your belief in Him. If you believe that your current circumstances won't change to the better then, in a way, you are saying that the power of circumstances is greater than the power of God. God is there for you and He wants to help you. But first, you have to choose to believe in His powers to help you.

When business gets a bit slow, don't expect to go bankrupt; don't make plans for failure. Pray and expect God to bring you customers. If you go through difficulties in your marriage, don't simply give up in frustration and say, "I should have known that this marriage was doomed from the start." No, if you do that, you're responding as Nick did. Your low expec­tations will destroy your marriage; your own wrong thinking will bring you down. You've got to change your thinking. Change what you expect. Quit expecting to fail. Start believing that you are going to succeed.

Remember, you get what you really believe in, whether good or bad.

salam
Ahmad
[1]- "Empires of The Mind", by Denis Waitley
[2]- Hadith Qudssi