Today’s Quote 5/31/07

Matthew Henry
Extraordinary afflictions are not always the punishment of extraordinary sins, but sometimes the trial of extraordinary graces. Sanctified afflictions are spiritual promotions.

An atheist’s version of happiness

Sigmund Freud at age fourty-four wrote of his “new realization of the nature of ‘happiness’: one has to assume happiness when fate does not carry out all its threats simultaneously.”

To be loved by God

CS Lewis quotes a verse in the New Testament that states, “Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.” Lewis then observes observes that “we were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest ‘well pleased.”

To become an object God can love may require alteration. Some of our unhappy and painful experiences change us into beings God can love and find pleasure in. And when we are such as he can love without impediment, we can then in fact be happy.

Today’s Quote 5/30/07

John Calvin
Whomever the Lord has adopted and deemed worthy of his fellowship ought to prepare themselves for a hard, toilsome, and unquiet life, crammed with very many and various kinds of evil. It is the Heavenly Father’s will thus to exercise them so as to put his own children to a definite test. Beginning with Christ, his first-born, he follows this plan with all his children.

Just a thought from Groucho

Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.  Groucho Marx

Today’s Quote 5/29/07

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.  Redd Foxx

Today’s Quote 5/28/07

Teddy Roosevelt
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, great devotions; … who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Today’s Quote 5/28/07

It’s a dangerous business going out your front door.
- JRR Tolkien

Today’s Quote 5/27/07

The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.  Fran Lebowitz

Today’s Quote 5/25/07

 “Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty.”   Flannery O’Connor