Govern Thyself First

He that would govern others, first should be the master of himself.

Philip Massinger

"Love Freedom Heartily"

He who would do some great things in this short life must apply himself to work with such a concentration of force as, to idle spectators who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity.

Francis Parkman

Do Some Great Things

He who would do some great things in this short life must apply himself to work with such a concentration of force as, to idle spectators who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity.

Francis Parkman

Education: Not Always The Solution

Want of care does us more damage than want of knowledge

Benjamin Franklin

Easy Living

Would you live with ease, do what you ought, and not what you please.

Benjamin Franklin

"The Highest Reward"

The highest reward for a person's toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.

John Ruskin

"Tact"

Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy

Sir Issac Newton

"Know When Help Does Not Help"

The more help a person has in his garden, the less it belongs to him.

William H. Davies

"A Few Persuasive Words"

It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.

Robert Southey

"Opportunity In Disguise"

Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them.

Esther P. Lederer

"Well-Timed Is The Key"

"Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech"

Martin Farquhar Tupper

"Living Messages"

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see

Neil Postman

"Always Calculate The Real Price"

The real price of everything is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.

Adam Smith

"What Lies Within"

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared with what lies within us

Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Certain Gain"

No gain is so certain as that which proceeds from the economical use of what you already have."

Latin Proverb

"Progress = Rejecting Falsehoods"

Very much of what we call the progress of today consists in getting rid of false ideas, false conceptions of things, and in taking a point of view that enables us to see the principles, ideas, and things in right relation to each other.

William Hoard

"As The Flowers Do The Sun"

Keep your face upturned to [God] as the flowers do the sun. Look, and your soul shall live and grow

Hannah Whitall Smith

Sifting Gold From Sand

Perhaps a new wave of plague or persecution is what is needed to sift gold from sand. In that day we shall see “faith” that Paul would think worth writing home about.

Andree Seu

"Accepting And Offering Up The Sufferings Of Love"

We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.

C.S.Lewis
The Four Loves pp170

"Eternal Love Embodies Love Himself"

In Heaven I suspect, a love that had never embodied Love Himself would be equally irrelevant. For Nature has passed away. All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.

C.S.Lewis
The Four Loves pp188

"Dressing Our Souls For The Daylight Of The Next World"

It will be infallible judgment. If it is favourable we shall have no fear, if unfavourable, no hope, that it is wrong. We shall not only believe, we shall know, know beyond doubt in every fibre of our appalled or delighted being, that as the Judge has said, so we are: neither more nor less nor other. We shall perhaps even realize that in some dim fashion we could have known it all along. We shall know and all creation will know too: our ancestors, our parents, our wives or husbands, our children. The unanswerable and (by then) self-evident truth about each will be known to all. I do not find that pictures of physical catastrophe - that sign in the clouds, those heavens rolled up like a scroll - help one so much as the naked idea of Judgment. We cannot always be excited. We can, perhaps, train ourselves to ask more and more often how the thing which we are saying or doing (or failing to do) at each moment will look when the irresistible light streams in upon. it; that light which is so different from the light of this world - and yet, even now, we know just enough of it to take it into account. Women sometimes have the problem of trying to judge by artificial light how a dress will look by daylight. That is very like the problem of all of us: to dress our souls not for the electric lights of the present world but for the daylight of the next. The good dress is the one that will face that light. For that light will last longer.

C.S.Lewis

What God Wants

If God answered all your prayers immediately, you would have yourself a fine prayer-dispenser machine—not a relationship. But God is into relationship, as evidenced by His having been in one for all eternity. Here are a few good things God wants for you in the deserts and ambiguity that stretch between asking and receiving:

* He wants you to have a chance to get to know Him.
* He wants you to have a chance to get to know yourself.
* He wants to expose your idols—and deal with them—in a natural way.
* He wants you to be in the story with Him, co-creating it as an authentic agent and not a puppet.
* He wants you to watch him weave the circumstances of your life into a work of art.
* He wants you to come to the point of surrendering completely.
* He wants you to learn to trust Him.
* He wants you to know what perplexity and the silence of God feel like, so that you can help others who are going through it.
* He wants you to have...joy at the way He finally answers your prayer, rather than the lesser joy of an answer given too soon.
* He wants you to get to see, when you emerge from the desert, that He was there all along.
* He wants you to have a chance to hold on tight to him in the middle of the story, when you see no light—and then He wants to reward you for that...
* He wants to give you a chance to walk by faith and not by sight, not as a mere slogan or abstract doctrine but as an every-moment dance.
* He wants to give you a chance to learn that praying, as Miller writes, is “inseparable from repenting, serving, managing, waiting,” and not an add-on in your life.
* He wants to give you “victory over little pockets of evil,” writes Miller.
* He wants to give you a chance to reject what seem like answers to prayer on a silver platter that have, as Miller writes, “little tests of integrity” attached to them.

He wants relationship. How about you?

Andree Seu/ Paul Miller "A Praying Life"

Thank You, God, For The White Water

"Last night I realized that I am the person who eagerly desires a destination and has resisted the means God sends to take me there.

One should expect that at a certain level of training, in whatever discipline, the tests would become more difficult. No one begins white water rafting on a Level 6 course. The able teacher will start the neophyte on a Level 1 river, placid waters with minor ripples. As the student masters first sporadic choppiness and then larger waves, he will be ready for the rapids.

The goal is perfection of skills and the subjugation of the body and mind and will. God leaves no guesswork regarding His goal...“This is the will of God, your sanctification.”

Let us say a person were to pass God’s piddling baby tests...What kinds of tests would follow? How would He ratchet up the course to a level 2, or 3, or 4, or 5?...I looked into the pit of despair and, uncharacteristically, I recognized it for what it was—white water for my training in sanctification."

Andree Seu

Eliminating The Foundation = Architectural Destruction

My brother, who lived in France for a quarter century, once told me there is a fancy school for future diplomats in the Paris area where a survey produced the results that many students could not name the three Persons of the Trinity (Joseph, Mary, Jesus?)...I do find it passing strange—and not a little significant—that in the quest to produce well-educated graduates of fine universities, our educators have eliminated from consideration the one book that, more than any other, created Western Civilization.

Andree Seu