A World Classroom: 2010.05

20100514

The Solution

Sometimes it's the most obvious advice that we need to hear most often and most repeatedly. So let's sustain that custom with today's brief post.

No matter what problems you are facing, prayer is solace, solution, and the way forward. Whatever is not right in your life, whether you know what that is or not, begins to be solved when you sit in silence and set yourself to commune with your Creator. All will be well. As Boyd Bailey says, "Be still, listen, and let Him love you and revive you."

It is no wonder that prayer is one of the most common characteristics of the saints. Prayer is an immediate way of getting closer to God. We are called as Christians to live our lives so as to bring ourselves closer to God. So why do we waste so much time thinking about the grass of the field, which is thrown into the oven tomorrow, when God is right there waiting for us?

It is quite literally true to assert that God has all the time in the world; He can wait.

But can we?

20100510

Random Thoughts

Once again borrowing a page from the book of Thomas Sowell, I present several "Random Thoughts." These are neither as political or as entertaining as his, but they are certainly random; their status as thoughts may be justifiably contested by the reader:

1. I was taught to examine life and learn from it, that daily experiences are not isolated events that fade into the past, but connected lessons in the School of Human Experience—which will teach us volumes if we are willing to pay attention. This perspective comes with a price. It's quite a bit like exercise: it demonstrates our limits every time. The daily challenges of life have a way of highlighting our weakness in bright colors, of pointing out what we did wrong and showing us what would have been the best action to take (hindsight is 20/20, after all). But the practice of examining life's challenges for lessons also is like exercise in this simple and striking fact: provided we don't place undue stress on ourselves, each struggle makes us stronger. And knowing that makes us thankful for trials.

2. The only man more formidable than him with nothing to lose is him with something to fight for.

3. Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? (Henry David Thoreau)

That is all.

Good day!

Joezilla

Prayer of St. Francis

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is darkness, light. And where there is sadness, joy. O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born...to eternal life. Amen.

Read This Now

"I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best ones, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d experience after being clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of grace. It’s like the revelation I had when I was a kid the first time I ever flew in an airplane: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold onto and take back with you when you descend once more beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather."

To read the entire article, click here.