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