Gratitude: Take One
If you want to turn your life around, try thankfulness. It will change your life mightily.
Gerald Good, “From Possibility to Reality”
Gratitude: Take Two
A spirit of ingratitude is the first step toward apostasy.
Ammon S. Kauffman, personal conversation
Word for the Living
In the face of death, live humanly. In the middle of chaos, celebrate the Word. Amidst Babel, speak the truth. Confront the noise and verbiage and falsehood of death with the truth and potency and the efficacy of the Word of God. Know the Word, teach the Word, nurture the Word, preach the Word, defend the Word, incarnate the Word, do the Word, live the Word.
William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land
Imagine This
If you want to change a people’s obedience, you must change their imagination.
Paul Ricouer, pd in The Other Side
Timely Reminder
Time, like an ever-rolling stream, soon bears us all away. We fly forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.
Isaac Watts, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past”
Double Standard
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, pd in “A Word A Day”
Good Question
A mother I know has a different way of asking the same question [“How was your day?”]. As she tucks her children into bed each night … she asks them a question: “Where did you meet God today?” And they tell her, one by one: a teacher helped me, there was a homeless person in the park, I saw a tree with lots of flowers in it. She tells them where she met God, too. Before the children drop off to sleep, the stuff of this day has become the substance of their prayer.
Dorothy C. Bass, Receiving the Day
Daily Prayer
Day by day, dear God, of you three things we pray:
to see you more clearly,
love you more dearly,
follow you more nearly,
day by day.
Amen.
Richard Of Chichester (c. 1197-1253)
For God’s Sake, Try Again
The thing to do when you have made a mistake is not to give up doing what you were doing and start something altogether new, but to start over again with the thing you began badly and try, for the love of God, to do it well.
Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas
Don’t Let the Past Undo You
… people need to appreciate that the past cannot be undone; it must be gotten over.
Chicago Tribune
Lost Faculty
Learning from experience is a faculty almost never practiced.
Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly
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