“You have impact when people you impact impact others and you don’t even know — that’s fruit.” ~ ???
Pastor Bob quoted someone as having said this at the conference — it might have been Pastor Rory. Or Deacon Elliott. Or someone else. Does anyone reading this who was at the conference know who it was? I –obviously — appreciated the words, but in my frantic scribbling lost the attribution.
“The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.”
~ Thomas Merton
Recently I found the whole Serenity Prayer. You’re probably very familiar with the first part — it seems to be everywhere. But the second part I’d never heard before. I think it’s the best part of the whole thing. Here it is:
The Serenity Prayer
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.~Reinhold Neibuhr
One of the premises for my work in progress, The Other Side of the Sky is that the setting will include a loose analogy to Christians as citizens of the Holy City and ambassadors of that city to the world. With that in mind I’ve been reading a book called From Inside a US Embassy: How the Foreign Service Works for America where I came across the following descriptions. I thought they were especially interesting when considered in light of our spiritual calling as Believers in Christ:
“The Foreign Service is a career like no other. It is much more than a job; it is a uniquely demanding and rewarding way of life. As representatives of the United States (Ed: or the kingdom of God?) to foreign governments, Foreign Service members have a direct impact on people’s lives and witness history in the making. They work alongside highly talented colleagues and face the unexpected every day, in situations that push their ingenuity and creativity to the limit.
“But a Foreign Service career also imposes significant demands. Typically, Foreign Service members spend two-thirds of their careers overseas, sometimes in unhealthy or isolated locations. They live for extended periods of time far from parents, siblings, and old friends, and sometimes without familiar amenities or modern medical facilities. Due to increasing international terrorism, [they] face physical danger and may be required to serve an ‘unaccompanied’ tour or to remain at their duty posts in harm’s way after their families are evacuated.”
A week or so ago Rush Limbaugh was commenting on the prevailing story of the day, which was that no one seems to be able to find the oil that has spewed into the Gulf. Ed Overton, a professor of environmental studies at Louisiana State University, had said that, “Mother Nature is doing what she’s supposed to do and we’re losing most of [the oil] to microbial degradation in the ocean.”
Regarding which Rush had this to say:
“The earth, Mother Nature — and to me, by the way, when I say Mother Nature’s taken care of it, who’s Mother Nature? Mother Nature — listen to me on the left, listen to me on the left, Mother Nature, you know who it is? God. You spell it G-o-d. Mother Nature is God. Mother Nature is not a tree trunk. Mother Nature is not some forest somewhere in the Amazon. Mother Nature is the God of the Bible, the God of creation, and the God of creation taking care of all this despite our folly ’cause God loves us.”
Pretty cool.
“Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well; the chiefest part of which is to observe those excellencies which delight a reasonable reader
~ John Dryden (finest quotes.com, quotes.daddy.com,)
I really like this quote. I think it meshes well with the command that we, as Christians, are to build each other up rather than tear each other down. As Eph 4:29 instructs:
“Let no unwholesome word proceed from your mouth, but only such as is good for edification according to the need of the moment, so that it will give grace to those who hear. “
[John Dryden (9 August 1631 – 1 May 1700) was an influential English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. (From Wikipedia article)]
I’ve had this quote in my file for some time. I’m not sure who said it. Possibly Col Thieme. (If any of my readers recognize this piece and know the person who originated it, please let me know). Anyway, given the vote by our Congress on Sunday, it seems apropos…
HOW WE ARE LOSING OUR FREEDOM:
MARRIAGE AND THE INSECURE GENERATIONInsecure husbands result in insecure wives.
Insecure parents result in insecure children.
Insecure children produce an insecure generation.
Insecure generations demand security.
In demanding security from government, an insecure generation becomes an entitlement generation.
Entitlements are offered to the insecure generation by insecure politicians.
The vehicle for entitlements become some form of socialism offered by an insecure government divorced from the establishment principle found in the infallible Word of God.
To finance this pseudo security of socialism an insecure government gains power, security and entitlement for itself through confiscation of wealth by unjust taxation, redistribution of wealth in the name of the greater good for the greater number.
In the process, utopian socialism combines with Marxism to establish economic and political doctrine based on false theories of dialectical materialism and promotion of class warfare. The result is big government which provides pseudo security to the insecure through public lies and false promises. Sugar coated with tricky words of demagoguery which results in destruction of human freedom.
Instead of government being the servant of the people, the entitled insecure people become the slave of big government.
And it’s happening right before our eyes.
Saw this today on Rush Limbaugh’s site and thought he expressed it so well, I wanted to share.
I don’t fall in the PC trap that every opinion has validity. It doesn’t. Opinions which are wrong are worthless. And just because you might be wrong with your opinion and you are human and you have feelings and shouldn’t be insulted, if you’re wrong, you’re wrong, and I’m not afraid to tell anybody they’re wrong. I’m not afraid to tell myself I’m wrong. It doesn’t happen much, that’s why, but you’re never going to be properly educated unless you eventually tell yourself you’re wrong. “My opinion counts just as much as –” no, it doesn’t if it’s wrong. “Yes, it does Mr. Limbaugh, my opinion is valid. I think I have a brain and my opinion –” If you’re wrong, you’re wrong. ~Rush Limbaugh, December 10, 2009
I will add that I believe everyone has the right to hold an opinion, valid or not,and while I don’t think you should be afraid to tell someone they are wrong, I also think that it’s mostly unnecessary — futile, even — to go around trying to straighten people out. Freedom guarantees us the right to hold whatever opinions we desire. If our thoughts and opinions are foolish, and we act upon them in foolish ways, we will pay the price. Rush, however, is an entertainer and an educator and the whole point of his show is to express his opinion. If you don’t like it you don’t have to listen. But I did think his point that all opinions are not equal was dead on.
The inability to predict outliers (events which lie outside the realm of regular expectations) implies the inability to predict the course of history, given the share of these events in the dynamics of events.
But we act as though we are able to predict historical events, or, even worse, as if we are able to change the course of history. We produce thirty year projections of social security deficits and oil prices without realizing that we cannot even predict these for next summer — our cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events are so monstrous that every time I look at the empirical record I have to pinch myself to verify I am not dreaming. What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it…
Our inability to predict in environments subjected to the Black Swan, coupled with a general lack of the awareness of this state of affairs, means that certain professionals, while believing they are experts, are in fact not. Based on their empirical record, they do not know more about their subject matter than the general population, but they are much better at narrating — or worse, at smoking you with complicated mathematical models. They are also more likely to wear a tie.
From the Prologue of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
“Con men understand that their job is not to use facts to convince skeptics but to use words to help the gullible to believe what they want to believe.
“No message has been more welcomed by the gullible, in countries around the world, than the promise of something for nothing.
~Thomas Sowell
(From his September 11, 2009 National Review Online article “Charlatan-in-Chief“)
