“Life is no straight and easy corridor along
which we travel free and unhampered,
but a maze of passages,
through which we must seek our way,
lost and confused, now and again
checked in a blind alley.
But always, if we have faith,
a door will open for us,
not perhaps one that we ourselves
would ever have thought of,
but one that will ultimately
prove good for us.”
~A. J. Cronin
Taken from the dedication of Who Moved My Cheese?
“Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”
Recently, I heard a co-worker share about an argument that they had with their teen. They shared that they finally got their point across. They, the parent, were right but that it was a hollow victory. It was hollow because that person recalled how many times their parent had been right and how little love there is in being right.
Then last night I heard this quote from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “I’d much rather be happy than right any day.”
It made me think – would I rather be happy than right? More precisely, would I rather show love than be right?
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something is more important than fear. The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all. From now on you’ll be traveling the road between who you think you are and who you can be. The key is to allow yourself to make the journey.”
~Meg Cabot, but I heard it in The Princess Diaries
Oh tragedy it’s taken so many
Love lost cause they all forgot who You were
And it scares me to think that I would choose my life over You
My selfish heart divides me from You
It tears us apart
So tell me what is our ending
Will it be beautiful?
~Selected portions of Barlowgirl’s Beautiful Ending lyrics
“It’s also humbling. We like to think we make up our minds about important issues based on rational, unbiased assessment of the available facts. But the evidence assembled by Kahan and Peters shows that our beliefs, even something as scientifically oriented as climate change, are driven by a psychological need to fit in. And so we create strategies for doing this.”
~Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics podcast “The Truth Is Out There…Isn’t it?”
“There are two different ways of getting in to a swimming pool. The first way, you take your toe, you carefully test the water’s temperature. And if that feels OK slowly get in to the water letting your body adjust to the cold. Then there’s the second way of getting in to a pool..You…JUMP! That’s me.”
~Molly Shannon, Superstar
This quote from David Wells struck me this morning. From his book, God in the Wasteland:
turned to a God that we can use rather than to a God we must obey; we have turned to a God who will fulfill our needs rather than to a God before whom we must surrender our rights to ourselves. He is a God for us, for our satisfaction — not because we have learned to think of him in this way through Christ but because we have learned to think of him in this way through the marketplace. In the marketplace, everything is for us, for our pleasure, for our satisfaction, and we have come to assume that it must be so in the church as well. And so we transform the God of mercy into the God who is at our mercy…if the sunshine of his benign grace fails to warm us as we expect, if he fails to shower prosperity and success on us, we will find ourselves unable to believe in him anymore.
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
~Eleanor Roosevelt
I work in a manufacturing environment that sits next to our national office. As a result you wind up with people in uniforms from the manufacturing environment and people from the national office who wear business casual. It’s easy to perceive this as a class distinction. Folks in the manufacturing environment allow themselves to feel this class distinction, to feel inferior. The same could go for people who work in cubicles versus having an office. It’s a perceived class distinction. You can choose to believe it or choose not to. It all comes down to fear and self-confidence. Are you going to allow a uniform or a cubicle to define your worth?
Recently, we attended my husband’s eleven year high school reunion. It made me recall this quote from Hope Floats:
“Childhood is what you spend the rest of your life trying to overcome.”
~Birdee Pruitt