Good Response!

During the 1976 USA bicentenary celebrations, the Procrastinators Club of America sent a letter of complaint to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London. In 1752 this company had cast the original Liberty Bell, which was defective from the beginning and developed its famous crack almost ninety years later. Their tongue-in-cheek complaint included queries about a warranty and a possible replacement. It was great publicity for them, as it summarised their philosophy "never do today what you can put off for a long time yet."
What they didn't expect was the company's reply, which showed they were every bit as good at customer service as the club was at putting things off.
"We will be pleased to provide a replacement bell, if you would be so kind as to return the damaged bell to us in its original packaging."

Unexpected

It is easy for the devout to join up with the shepherds and fall into place at the crib and look out into the surrounding night and say, “Look at those silly intellectuals wandering about after a star, with no religious sense at all! Look at that clumsy camel, what an unspiritual animal it is! Look what odd gifts of self-consecration they are bringing; they’re certainly not the sort of people who’d make it in a church!” But we must remember that the child who began by receiving these very unexpected pilgrims had a woman of the streets for his faithful friend and two thieves for his comrades at the end: and looking at these two extremes let us try to learn a little of the height and breadth and depth of his love – and then apply it to our own lives.

- Evelyn Underhill

The Christmas Story

There’s nothing romantic about the Christmas story. If anything, it offers a slice of a brutal world in which a child is born on the street, so to speak, with next to nothing in the way of rights and security, and not even a home. He whose birthday we celebrate at Christmas said, even as a grown man, “I have nothing. I am nowhere at home. Even at night, I have no place to rest or lay my head”.…But now this man from Nazareth comes to us and invites us to mirror God’s image, and shows us how. He says: you too can become light, as God is light. Because what is all around you is not hell, but rather a world waiting to be filled with hope and faith.

- Jörg Zink

Representing Christ

The living Word once took on flesh in Mary’s son. The eternal, living Word – Christ – now takes on a new body in the church. Therefore the apostle Paul said that a mystery was entrusted to him, which he calls the body of Christ (Col. 1:24-26). The fact that the church is the body of Christ means that he becomes visible and real in the world today.
Just as Christ was in Mary, so Christ wants to live in us who believe and love. If Christ is real in us then we will live in accordance with and reflect the character of God’s future. The future kingdom receives form in the church.
For this reason the church must represent now God’s peace and justice in our world. This is why it cannot shed blood or tolerate private property. This is why the church cannot lie or take an oath. This is why it cannot tolerate the destruction of bridal purity and of faithfulness in the marriage of husband and wife. This is why the church expends all its life and energy to make room for God to bring everything under his rule.  

Eberhard Arnold

Christmas is the Promise

That God became a mother’s son; that there could be a woman walking the earth whose womb was consecrated to be the holy temple and tabernacle of God – that is actually earth’s perfection and the fulfillment of its expectations.
So many kinds of Advent consolation stream from the mysterious figure of the blessed, expectant Mary. The grey horizons must grow light. It is only the immediate scene that shouts so loudly and insistently. Beyond the present tumult there exists a different realm, one that is now in our midst. The woman has conceived the Child, sheltered him beneath her heart, and given birth to the Son. The world has come under a different law. Christmas is not only a historic event that happened once, on which our salvation rests. Christmas is the promise of a new order of things, of life, of our existence. 

Alfred Delp

The Magi

The mysterious men from the Orient followed the star and discovered the place where the secret of love lay in the helplessness of a human baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes in the feeding trough of an animal. They discovered the place where God’s love came down. That is the most important thing for every person, to discover in his own time and at his own hour the place where God’s love has broken through, and then to follow the star that has risen for him and to remain true to the light that has fallen into his heart.
The birth of God’s Son is God’s challenge for each of us to manifest his love. There is no manifestation of love quite so complete as that of a life lived in unity and community, a love where houses and doors and hearts are kept open to all.

Eberhard Arnold

Beyond Imagining

The god we have chosen as the highest ideal recognisable by our understanding is certainly not the true God, because God cannot be grasped by our intellect – or if so, we would be capable of forming only a very human, even if perhaps well intended, picture of a godly being. This picture would be very fragmentary and contradictory, and would make God accessible only to intellectuals, to those with highly trained minds, whereas God often lives most purely in those who are simple and childlike.
Now that is not to say that there should only be simple people or, to put it bluntly, that stupidity is godly and desirable. But it does mean that we should understand where the limits of human reason lie and that there is much above and beyond these limits that can only be grasped by faith. And that becomes possible for the person who lets all that is human become silent in order to stand before the divine in adoration, reverence, and awe.

Annemarie Wächter

Expert Calculates Santa's Christmas Eve Workload

Some people will have a stressful load this Christmas season. Take Santa, for instance. Phillip Bump, a technology writer for The Atlantic, has attempted to provide a tongue-in-cheek answer to an important question: what exactly is Santa's yearly workload? Bump calculated the number of Christian children in the world and the geographic distribution of those children around the globe. After factoring in all the nuances of time zones, distance between houses, and how many children live in each house, Bump shared his conclusions about Santa's yearly task:
[Based on CIA estimates] there are just over 526,000,000 Christian kids under the age of 14 in the world who celebrate Christmas on December 25th. In other words, Santa has to deliver presents to almost 22 million kids an hour, every hour, on the night before Christmas. That's about 365,000 kids a minute; about 6,100 a second.
Bump mentions a few caveats: not all Christians celebrate Christmas on December 25th, the CIA's data isn't always up-to-date, and some non-Christians celebrate Christmas too. But all in all, Santa has an enormous job to do! He has to serve over a billion kids in one night as he pulls a huge sleigh with nine reindeer, while he tries to avoid being detected and shot down by the North America Aerospace Defense Command—and don't forget that one of his reindeer has a very shiny nose.

Philip Bump, "Santa's Christmas Eve Workload, Calculated," The Atlantic (14 December 2011)

Success

It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done

- Samuel Smiles

Standards

Let us be about setting high standards for life, love, creativity, and wisdom. If our expectations in these areas are low, we are not likely to experience wellness. Setting high standards makes every day and every decade worth looking forward to

- Greg Anderson

The Nature of God

The unity of love involves a descent of the lowest kind. God became the equal of the lowliest and took on the form of a servant. But this servant’s form is not merely something he puts on, like the beggar’s cloak, which, because it is only a cloak, flutters loosely and betrays the king. No, it is his true form. For this is the unfathomable nature of boundless love, that it desires to be equal with the beloved.
Look, then, there he is – God! Where? There! Don’t you see him? The Child is the God, and yet he has no place to lay his head. It is sheer love and sheer sorrow to want to express the unity of love and then to not be understood.
But God suffers all things, endures all things, is tried in all things, hungers in the desert, thirsts in his agonies, is forsaken in death, and becomes absolutely the equal of the lowliest of human beings – look, behold the man!
God is not zealous for himself but out of love wants to be equal with the most lowly of the lowly. What power! When an oak seed is planted in a clay pot, the pot breaks; when the new wine is poured into old wineskins, they burst. What happens, then, when God the king plants himself in the frailty of a human being? Does he not become a new person, a new vessel?

Soren Kierkegaard

Obtaining Wisdom

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.

- Confucius

Encouragement

Whenever you commend, add your reasons for doing so; it is this which distinguishes the approbation of a man of sense from the flattery of sycophants and admiration of fools.

- Richard Steele

Empathy

How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.

- George Washington Carver

Rounded Education

Our emotions need to be as educated as our intellect. It is important to know how to feel, how to respond, and how to let life in so that it can touch you.

- Jim Rohn

Four words

Much wisdom can be crowded into but four words: In God we trust. This too shall pass. Live and let live. Still waters run deep. Bad news travels fast. Love laughs at locksmiths. Nothing succeeds like success. Charity begins at home. Politics make strange bedfellows. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Man proposes, God disposes. Let sleeping dogs lie.

Perseverance

When the morning's freshness has been replaced by the weariness of midday, when the leg muscles give under the strain, the climb seems endless, and suddenly nothing will go quite as you wish - it is then that you must not hesitate

- Dag Hammarskjold

Success

The one human quality that must be developed is self discipline for success. The will power to force yourself to do what you know you should do when you should do it, whether you like it or not, whether you feel like it or not. Success is tons of discipline

- Brian Tracy

Failure to Count the Cost in Building Projects

Apparently many people don't know how to count the cost for their building projects. That's why cost overruns, which stem from "an underestimation of the actual cost during budgeting," are notoriously common. Here are some famous cost overruns:
· The Suez Canal cost 20 times as much as the earliest estimates.
· The Sydney Opera House cost 15 times more than was originally projected.
· The Concorde supersonic airplane cost 12 times more than predicted.
· When Boston's "Big Dig" tunnel construction project was completed, the project was 275 percent ($11 billion) over budget.
· The Channel Tunnel between the UK and France had a construction cost overrun of 80 percent, and a 140-percent financing cost overrun.
A study of cost overruns published in the Journal of the American Planning Association found that 9 out of ten construction projects had underestimated costs. Overruns of 50 to one hundred percent were also common. Another group studied IT projects and also found that the average cost overrun was 43 percent. This study also found that 70 percent of the projects were over budget, exceeded time estimates, and had estimated too narrow a scope.

adapted from Wikipedia, "Cost Overrun," last accessed on 1-7-13

A Mirror

People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Freedom

Freedom consists not in doing what we like but in having the right to do what we ought.

- Pope John Paul II

Rest

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.

- Sir John Lubbock

Perspective

In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.

- Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

Rainbows

Entertainer Dolly Parton once said that if you want the rainbow, you have to put up with the rain.
Rainbows are beautiful, but Dolly is right - it takes both rain and sunshine to create one. It's the same with life. In most lives there are dark and bright spots; there's joy and sorrow. The few people who have never known adversity invariably don't have lives that are as rich and satisfying as those who have. If you can handle it, adversity makes you stronger. It also makes you a kinder and more empathetic person. At the end of a life without adversity, it's hard to find a rainbow.

Contrast

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.

- Anne Bradstreet (1612 - 1672)

Adversity

Adversity is a severe instructor, set over us by one who knows us better than we do ourselves, as he loves us better too. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This conflict with difficulty makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.

- Edmund Burke

Choice

Every life form seems to strive to its maximum except human beings. How tall will a tree grow? Answer...as tall as it possibly can. Human beings, on the other hand, have been given the dignity of choice. You can choose to be all or you can choose to be less. Why not stretch up to the full measure of the challenge and see what all you can do?

- Jim Rohn

Justification

People always have two reasons for the things they do:
1) The logical reason, and
2) The real reason.

The Greatest Power

The greatest power we have is the power of choice. It's an actual fact that if you've been moping in unhappiness, you can choose to be joyous instead and, by effort, lift yourself into joy. If you tend to be fearful, you can overcome that misery by choosing to have courage. Even in darkest grief you have a choice. The whole trend and quality of anyone's life is determined in the long run by the choices that are made.

- Norman Vincent Peale

An Enduring Truth

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

- Abraham Lincoln

The Greatest Need

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Opinions

We must love them both - those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject. For both have laboured in the search for truth, and both have helped us in the finding of it.

- St. Thomas Aquinas

Success and Failure

Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.

- Jim Rohn

True Love

What is TRUE LOVE? The late Father James Keller, founder of The Christophers, put it this way:
Love delights in giving attention rather than attracting it.
Love finds the element of good and builds on it.
Love does not magnify defects.
Love is a flame that warms but never burns.
Love knows how to disagree without becoming disagreeable.
Love rejoices at the success of others instead of being envious.

Decisions

You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage - pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically - to say 'no' to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger 'yes' burning inside. The enemy of the 'best' is often the 'good.'

- Stephen Covey

African Proverb

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.

- African proverb -

Wisdom

All truly wise thoughts have already been thought thousands of times, but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Reason

I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.

- Galileo Galilei

Lesson from History

History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.

- B. C. Forbes

Achievements

I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith. What is faith if it is not translated into action

- Mahatma Gandhi

The Best Days

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments

- Gustave Flaubert

The Harder Task

It is much harder to ask the right question than it is to find the right answer to the wrong question.

- E. E. Morison (1909 - 1995)

Researchers Develop Faster Ketchup Flow

An article in Time.com noted that ketchup flows out of a glass bottle at a rate of .028 miles per hour. That's slower than a Galapagos tortoise, which, according to the San Diego Zoo, zips along at a blazing 0.16 miles per hour, or almost six times faster than ketchup.
But impatiently tapping your ketchup bottle soon might be a thing of the past. Dave Smith, a PhD candidate at MIT, and a team of MIT mechanical engineers and nano-technologists have offered a possible solution to this ketchup flow problem. After months of research, Smith and his team developed LiquiGlide, which they define as a "kind of structured liquid [that's] rigid like a solid, but lubricated like a liquid." The researchers say that coating the inside of a bottle with LiquiGlide will cause ketchup and other sauces to slide out faster than a Galapagos tortoise. Smith claims that the sauce industry, which rakes in $17 billion a year, would love to get their hands on the invention.
The Time.com article concluded: "Let's hope some big [ketchup] companies bite. I'm tired of waiting five minutes for ketchup to land on my cheeseburger."
Possible Preaching Angles: This illustration shows the ridiculous level of impatience that sometimes exist in our culture--the desire to have everything we want (even spiritual transformation) right now.

Keith Wagstaff, "MIT Scientists Figure Out How to Get Ketchup Out of the Bottle," Time.com (22 May 2012)

Marriage Is Like a Formal Dinner in Reverse

Germans sometimes use a culinary metaphor for marriage, comparing the lifelong journey of marriage to a formal French or German dinner menu—except the courses are served in reverse order.
According to this analogy, marriage actually begins with the last course—dessert. There's a season of sweetness. But, sadly, the sweetness doesn't always last. Temptations and distractions often follow this dessert-like honeymoon phase. In a formal French dinner, the second course includes a seductive selection of cheeses. At times there are so many cheese selections that diners get focused on flirting from one plate to the next. The third course consists of a beautifully prepared salad that adds freshness and vitamins to the meal. The fourth and main dish is the red meat course, the long, substantial, satisfying and nutritious body of any good dinner or marriage. The fifth course consists of a light fish or seafood dish that can be fraught with dangerous bones. Finally, the menu of a marriage ends with an enjoyable tray of hors d'oeuvres. After decades of commitment, mastering all the earlier courses of marriage, a husband and wife are rewarded with the delight of remaining committed throughout the entire journey of life.
In the end, they've truly become one. The French might compare their union to the blend of two famous kinds of grapes—Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. When these grapes are blended together they become the mellow Bordeaux wine that is loved around the world.

Matthias Pankau, Leipzig, Germany, "50th Wedding Anniversary Mediation for Gillian and Uwe Siemon-Netto" (May 12, 2012)

Winners

History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats.

- B. C. Forbes

Success

The great difference between those who succeed and those who fail does not consist in the amount of work done by each but in the amount of intelligent work. Many of those who fail most ignominiously do enough to achieve grand success but they labour haphazardly at whatever they are assigned, building up with one hand to tear down with the other. They do not grasp circumstances and change them into opportunities. They have no faculty for turning honest defeats into telling victories. With ability enough and ample time, the major ingredients of success, they are forever throwing back and forth an empty shuttle and the real web of their life is never woven.

- Og Mandino

A Test

I am a big believer in the 'mirror test.' All that matters is if you can look in the mirror and honestly tell the person you see there, that you've done your best.

- John McKay

Patience

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.

- Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)

Gifts

We have been miseducated about gift giving. We believe gifts must always bear a price tag or be given for a particular reason...The real joy in giving comes when we give what we have spontaneously...

- Iyanla Vanzant

Value

To feed men and not to love them is to treat them as if they were barnyard cattle. To love them and not respect them is to treat them as if they were household pets.

- Mencius, philosopher (c. 380-289 BCE)

Remembrance Day Thought

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children

- Jimmy Carter

Searching

In truth everything and everyone
Is a shadow of the Beloved,
And our seeking is His seeking
And our words are His words...
We search for Him here and there,
while looking right at Him.
Sitting by His side, we ask:
"O Beloved, where is the Beloved?"

- Rumi, poet and mystic (1207-1273)

The Important Moments

Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these

- Susan B. Anthony

Two Steps

All things are created twice. There's a mental or first creation, and a physical or second creation of all things. You have to make sure that the blueprint, the first creation, is really what you want, that you've thought everything through. Then you put it into bricks and mortar. Each day you go to the construction shed and pull out the blueprint to get marching orders for the day. You begin with the end in mind.

- Stephen Covey

What Brings Life

Life energy flows when we create, or when we help another person's creativity flower by encouraging them in some way.
Think of the sense of joy and satisfaction that one can derive from the simple act of planting flowers, cooking a meal, writing a poem, solving a problem, painting a picture, dressing with flair, or doing your job to the best of your abilities.
Creativity brings us life, and by using our creativity we help bring the world into being

- Joan Borysenko

What is produced

The soul attracts that which it secretly harbours; that which it loves, and also that which it fears; it reaches the height of its cherished aspirations; it falls to the level of its unchastened desires. Every thought-seed sown or allowed to fall into the mind, and to take root there, produces its own, blossoming sooner or later into act, and bearing its own furtive of opportunity and circumstance. Good thoughts bear good fruit; bad thought, bad fruit.

- James Allen

Great Things

It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment; in these qualities old age is usually not only not poorer, but it is even richer

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

Have You Been Praying for Armadillos?

Christian comedian Ken Davis tells the following story about waiting for a "sign from God." A Christian gets on an empty city bus, walks to rear, and sits down. Lord, he prays, if you want me to speak to someone about you, please give me a sign. At the next stop another passenger boards the bus, goes all the way to the back, and sits down right next to the Christian. The passenger asks, "Do you know anything about Jesus?"
The Christian excuses himself for a moment and slowly bows his head and once again prays,
Lord, if you really want me to talk to this stranger, I need just one more sign. Please turn the bus driver into an armadillo.
Have you been praying for armadillos?
Have you been waiting for a sign from God you really hope never comes before you get serious about following him?

Clare De Graaf, The 10-Second Rule (Howard Books, 2013), page 51

The Better Option

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though chequered by failure...than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Dreams

Dreams are renewable. No matter what our age or condition, there are still untapped possibilities within us and new beauty waiting to be born

- Dr. Dale Turner

Aiming high

To dream anything that you want to dream, that is the beauty of the human mind. To do anything that you want to do, that is the strength of the human will. To trust yourself, to test your limits, that is the courage to succeed

- Bernard Edmonds

Creativity

Looking to the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

- Vincent Van Gogh

Perspective

Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are

- Malcolm Forbes

Practice

I have always approached practice as a kind of proving ground, especially with rookies. They might have seen me on television, read about me...and might think they know what I'm all about...I want them to know it isn't gossip or rumours. I want them to know it all comes from hard work

- Michael Jordan

Measures

If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it

- Stanley Marion Garn, anthropologist (1922- )

The Greatest Challenge

Leadership is the great challenge of the 21st century in science, politics, education, and industry. But the greatest challenge in leadership is parenting. We need to do more than just get our enterprises ready for the challenges of the twenty-first century. We also need to get our children ready for the challenges of the 21st century.

- Jim Rohn

The Way Up

You can't fly a kite unless you go against the wind and have a weight to keep it from turning somersaults. The same with man. No man will succeed unless he is ready to face and overcome difficulties and is prepared to assume responsibilities.

- William J. H. Boetcker

The Best Teacher

It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.

- Samuel Smiles

Failure

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

- Denis Waitley

Permission to Remain a Child

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives

- Albert Einstein

The Finest Hour

I've never known a man worth his salt who in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn't appreciate the grind, the discipline...I firmly believe that any man's finest hour - this greatest fulfillment to all he holds dear - is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle, victorious

- Vince Lombardi

The Hardest Decisions

Dwight D. Eisenhower once warned John F. Kennedy that "as President, the only decisions you'll be asked to make are the hard ones. That's because the people working under you will keep all the easy ones for themselves!" That is true in any organization. Difficult decisions defy gravity. They travel uphill until they reach the person at the top

- Carmen Mariano

Where Evil is Found

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A Gift Every Day

You wake up in the morning, and your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. No none can take it from you. And no one receives either more or less than you receive

- Dr. Thomas Arnold Bennett

From Failure to Success

It is important to acknowledge a mistake instantly, correct it, and learn from it. That literally turns a failure into a success. Success is on the far side of failure

- T. J. Watson (1874 - 1956) Founder of IBM

'White Elephant' Gifts Distract Us from Serving God

Gordon MacDonald shares the following story:
In ancient days when the king of Siam had an enemy he wanted to torment and destroy, he would send that enemy a unique gift, a white elephant, a live, albino elephant. These animals were considered sacred in the culture of that day. So the recipient of that elephant had no choice but to intentionally care for the gift. This elephant would take an inordinate amount of the enemy's time, resources, energy, emotions, and finances. Over time the enemy would destroy himself because of the extremely burdensome process of caring for the gift.
Our spiritual enemy uses the same strategy on us …. Let's say you buy season tickets to [your favourite sports team], but because you still have a lot of games to go to, you no longer have time to serve in some area of ministry. Or let's say you buy a summer cottage, but now you miss most weekend worship services between the beginning of May and the end of September. Or let's say you buy a health club membership to get in shape. You used to get up early in the morning to read your Bible and pray, but now you don't have time because you're working out before you go to work. Or let's say you buy a spot for one of your kids on a traveling sports team, and now you're too busy to join our community impact ministry as we serve the poor.
Are there white elephants in your life? Are you spending money on things that take your time away from God? The money isn't the problem; the activities aren't necessarily the problem; the problem is a white elephant "gift" that has pulled you away from God-honouring pursuits.

adapted from Jim Nicodem, "The Gravity of Greed,"

'Fast Food Culture' Promotes Impatience

In 1960 McDonald's operated 200 restaurants. By 2012 they had 31,000 restaurants. In 2012 there were more than a quarter-million fast-food restaurants in America, and on any given day one in four Americans will eat at least one meal at a fast-food restaurant. For many people around the world fast-food symbolises speed, efficiency, and convenience.
Sanford DeVoe, a researcher at the University of Toronto, wanted to explore if our "fast-food culture" was changing our lives in ways beyond just our eating habits. So DeVoe and another colleague conducted a series of experiments in which researchers subliminally flashed corporate logos for McDonald's, KFC, Taco Bell, Burger King, Subway, and Wendy's. A control group saw other images but no fast-food logos. When the two groups were asked to do an unrelated task, the fast-food group tried to complete it much faster than the non-fast-food group. In another experiment, flashes of fast-food images made students less able to sit back and enjoy music. A third experiment found that people exposed to fast-food logos showed a greater reluctance for saving.
Based on these experiments, DeVoe has concluded that fast food helps us save time, but even just thinking about fast food restaurants make us live with more speed and less patience. DeVoe said, "Fast food culture … doesn't just change the way we eat but it can also fundamentally alter the way we experience our time."
DeVoe claims that the impatience promoted by our fast-food culture and mindset "stops us from smelling the roses."

Frank Partnoy, Wait: The Art and Science of Delay (Public Affairs, 2012), pp. 55-58;

Science Daily, "Exposure to Fast Food Can Make Us Impatient," (26 March 2010)

Mistakes

To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future

- Plutarch

Wisdom and Folly

True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance

- Akhenaton

A Life Philosophy

My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment

- Oprah Winfrey

Americans Show Increased Belief in Miracles

A 2012 article about Americans' belief in miracles summarized the following statistics gathered from recent surveys:
* 55 percent of Americans are "certain" that miracles happen (a 20 percent increase from 1991)
* 80 percent believe that miracles "certainly" or "probably" occur.
* 42 percent of Americans with no religious affiliation believe in miracles (compared to 32 percent from 20 years ago). In other words, the strongest gains in openness to miracles were reported by those who attend services infrequently.
* 23 percent of respondents said they had witnessed a miraculous physical healing and 16 percent said they had received a miraculous healing.
* 75 percent of respondents said they had prayed to God to receive healing from an illness or injury; nearly 85 percent had prayed for someone else's healing.
The author of the article concluded that the increasing openness to miracles "is not being driven by any one generation, but seems to be more of a cultural shift …. There's still a profound interest in spiritual things …. [As Americans in general] we are not in this uniform march toward secularism."

David Briggs, "Belief in miracles climbs in the age of Oprah," Association of Religion Data Archives (27 October 2012)

Mistakes

To err is human, to blame it on someone else is more human.

Lance Armstrong's Slide into Self-Deception

In 2001, Lance Armstrong made an anti-doping commercial for Nike in which he strongly disavowed using illegal drugs. In the commercial, Armstrong boldly states, "This is my body, and I can do whatever I want to it. I can push it. Study it. Tweak it. Listen to it. Everybody wants to know what I'm on. What am I on? I'm on my bike busting my [butt] six hours a day. What are you on?"
In 2006, during sworn testimony in a dispute over his $5 million bonus, Armstrong said he wouldn't take drugs because he had too much to lose. "(The) faith of all the cancer survivors around the world. Everything I do off the bike would go away, too …. It's not about money for me …. It's also about the faith that people have put in me over the years. So all of that would be erased." In October 2012, Armstrong was stripped of his seven Tours de France victories and permanently banned from cycling and any World Anti-Doping Agency sanctioned events. Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, claimed that Armstrong's USPS team "ran the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping program that sport has ever seen." Tygart also said, "The USPS Team doping conspiracy was professionally designed to groom and pressure athletes to use dangerous drugs, to evade detection, to ensure its secrecy and ultimately gain an unfair competitive advantage …." It was a doping program "organised by individuals who thought they were above the rules."

sources: YouTube, "Lance Armstrong Nike Commercial (2001)," last accessed 9 October 2014; Sports Illustrated, "USADA to ban Armstrong for life" (24 August 2012)