No Man is an Island

Loneliness is contagious. That’s the conclusion of University of Chicago psychologists. A long-term study of several thousand people showed the more contact you have with lonely people, the more likely you are to going to describe yourself as lonely. Even having a lonely friend of a friend increases your chances. The effect is greater for women and more pronounced through friends than spouses and siblings.

Stephen Goforth

Beginnings & Endings

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. TS Eliot

Life and Death

A newborn is soft and tender,
A crone, hard and stiff.
Plants and animals, in life, are supple and succulent;
In death, withered and dry.
So softness and tenderness are attributes of life,
And hardness and stiffness, attributes of death.

Laozi
Tao Te Ching

Growing Me

What am I doing today that is growing me to make me better tomorrow? John Maxwell

Admiration and Awe

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me. Neither of them need I seek and merely suspect as if shrouded in obscurity or rapture beyond my own horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with my existence.

Immanuel Kant

Rightness

You're right not because others agree with you, but because your facts are right. Warren Buffett

Talents Squandered

Your unused talents give you no advantage over one who has no talents at all.

Acting.. Within & Without

Your circumstances.. shall not long remain if you but perceive an ideal and strive to reach it. You cannot travel within and stand still without. James Lane Allen

On Purpose

What are you doing on purpose to grow yourself? And what are you doing on purpose to grow the people around you? John Maxwell

Why bother with the Begats?

Ever wonder why first chapter in the New Testament is a boring list of so-and-so begat so-and-so? Look carefully at the lives of the people listed at the start of Matthew’s Gospel. The genealogy was a knockout punch to the legalist caught up in descendents and lines of purity. Matthew introduces the glorious Messiah.. as a descendent of harlots, murderers and liars. Let it be known that Jesus Christ is the friend of sinners.

He came crashing through the barriers that said, “You have to be born spiritual out of the ‘right kind’ of people.” And today, he comes crashing through barriers you’ve erected too. The barriers that place God in a nice comfortable corner where you can keep an eye on him. He breaks down those excuses that say, “God, you can’t use me. You can’t love me. I’m a sinner.”

God built a monument to grace on that genealogy. That’s why you shouldn’t shy away from admitting your past for what it was. It can be a monument to God’s grace in our lives. That’s when God can use us the most: When we realize who we are, where we come from and how much are lives are dependent on God grace. Just like those people in the genealogy. You stack up a row of harlots and liars and murderers and cheaters bathed in grace and what do you have? You have Jesus. That’s the way God works.

Stephen Goforth

Anger Punishes

You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger. Buddha

Opportunity Arrives

You probably won’t hear opportunity knock if you the television set is always on.

How to Lose

You never lose by loving. You always lose by holding back.

Authority Opinions

Einstein was a great man in science and a very great man in mathematics, but when he got out of his field of competence, which he often did, the result was pathetic. In an article written expressly for the New York Times magazine he said, “It is, therefore, easy to see why the churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees.” The statement is thoroughly false. Indeed, modern science was nourished by the church and by the institutions founded by the church. This includes Princeton University, where Einstein was living when he wrote the article. What this shows is that a man need not be trusted in one field merely because of his competence in another.

D. Elton Trueblood
Philosophy of Religion

Creating God

You may safely assume that you have created God in your own image, when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Fighting.. Again

You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. Margaret Thatcher