July 18
All of us have wondered at times why God doesn't do more to fix our problems. But our human eyes often fail to see that God isn't rushing to change our circumstances because he is concerned with a much more serious problem--our character. While you struggle with the woes of this world, God's main occupation is preparing you for the world to come. The focus of what God is doing in your life takes place in you, not around you. -- Andy Stanley, "Like A Rock"
"Worry looks around, sorry looks back, Faith looks up." No doubt it sounds strange, but in order to love God with all your strength, you have to admit that you are weak and that your strength is limited. By doing this, you acknowledge God as the true source of your strength, and that in your weakness, he is strong. You become strong as you become totally dependent upon him, allowing his strength to work through you. God doesn’t ask you to take steps of faith alone; he is with you in every step, filling you with a grace-charged strength. God only asks you to take one step of faith at a time.
Sweatshirt with Pigpen from Charlie Brown on it with the saying: “The world needs messy people ... Otherwise the neat people would take over.”
"Nothing shows a man's character more than what he laughs at." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"When you have a purpose in life, a vision for what you want to achieve, and know why you want to achieve it, work becomes fun, and the time you spend working seems to just whiz by." -- Clayton J. Moore
"One man practicing sportsmanship is better than a hundred teaching it." -- Knute Rockne
"What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has." -- Arthur Schopenhauer
"Don't wait until the storm passes over, learn to dance in the rain." -- Unknown
"Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it with use." -- Ruth Gordon, actress
JOY 9
"If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much." -- Jim Rohn
My Living Will Last night, my kids and I were sitting in the living room and I said to them, "I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and fluids from a bottle. If that ever happens, just pull the plug."
They got up, unplugged my Computer, and threw out my wine!
The little so-and-sos!
"The person who pays an ounce of principle for a pound of popularity gets badly cheated." -- Ronald Reagan
The Highest Priority
Have you ever been in a hurry and buttoned up a long overcoat with lots of buttons and when you were done, found out that the coat was uneven? What went wrong? I'll tell you what went wrong. When you don't get the first button in the right hole, all the rest are out of sequence too, right?! That's a parable about life. Jesus said it this way in the Sermon on the Mount: "Seek first God's kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well." (Matthew 6:33) If the Lord is not the high priority in your life, then, like the overcoat, so many other things in life will be out of whack as well.
A Priorities
A time management guru, a professor in the business school at Harvard, speaks about A, B, and C priorities, and then he notes that too many people spend too much of their time on the C priorities! And then he asks, "Why do you think that is?" The answer is that the C priorities are, first, much easier to accomplish, and, second, give you the impression that you are actually getting something done. In other words you can keep busy with the C priorities all day and never get to the more important things. The lesson from Mary and Martha is "Don't let the good (the C priorities) get in the way of the best (the A priorities). Sound like anyone you know?
Our prayer should be:
"Slow me down, Lord. I'm goin' too fast.
I can't see my brother when he's walking past.
I miss a lot of things day by day when it comes my way.
Slow me down, Lord, I'm goin' too fast."
Mickey Rivers, a one time outfielder for the Texas Rangers professional baseball team, stated his philosophy of life: "Ain't no sense worrying about things you got control over, because if you got control over them, ain't no sense worrying. And there ain't no sense worrying about things you got no control over either, because if you got no control them, ain't no sense worrying."
There are two great days in a person's life -- the day we are born and the day we discover why. William Barclay
Created for Faith not Fear
I am inwardly fashioned for faith, not for fear. Fear is not my native land; faith is. I am so made that worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life; faith is the oil. I live better by faith and confidence than by fear, doubt and anxiety. In anxiety and worry, my being is gasping for breath--these are not my native air. But in faith and confidence, I breathe freely--these are my native air. A John Hopkins University doctor says, "We do not know why it is that worriers die sooner than the non- worriers, but that is a fact." But I, who am simple of mind, think I know; We are inwardly constructed in nerve and tissue, brain cell and soul, for faith and not for fear. God made us that way. To live by worry is to live against reality. E. Stanley Jones,
Martin Luther said that those who listen are those who are truly wise, because they always begin anew so that they may forget the things that are behind and stretch themselves to what is ahead. But the lukewarm and the hypocrites, he said, think they have already chosen what is best. "They forget what is before them and fall back into what is behind them, and there they rest and snore."
If we are willing to take hours on end to learn to play a piano, or operate a computer, or fly an airplane, it is sheer nonsense for us to imagine that we can learn the high art of getting guidance through communion with the Lord without being willing to set aside time for it. It is no accident that the Bible speaks of prayer as a form of waiting on God. --Paul S. Rees
The young man from Mississippi came running into the store and said to his buddy, "Bubba, somebody just stole your pickup truck from the parking lot!" Bubba replied, "Did you see who it was? "The young man answered, "I couldn't tell , but I got the license number.
When we stand in the middle of a lifestorm, it seems as if the storm has become our way of life. We cannot see a way out. We are unable to chart a course back to smoother waters. We feel defeated--and broken. Will that brokenness produce a cynicism that will keep us forever in the mire of "if only" thinking? Or will we yield up that brokenness to the resources of One who calms the winds and the waves, heals the brokenhearted, and forgives the most grievous of sins? The choice is ours. --Verdell Davis, "Riches Stored in Secret Places"
There are two types of chaos: the chaos of creativity vs. the chaos of over-creation and incompletion. Which one best describes you? —Leslie Boyer, “Managing Chaos,”
If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.
Only 14 percent of evangelicals in the United States believe poverty is something that churches should take the lead in addressing. That's still more than triple the rate of the average population (4 percent). - Source: Barna.org (June, 2007)
Americans spent more last year on bottled water than on iPods and movie tickets -- a whopping $15 billion.
"Being a Christian doesn't mean hovering above the ugliness of life. It means we are given the weapons necessary to face wickedness with the hope of creating something good in its place." - Paul Coughlin, No More Jellyfish, Chickens, or Wimps
"The God-life cannot be domesticated or used – it can only be entered into on its own terms. Holiness does not make God smaller so that he can be used in convenient and manageable projects; it makes us larger so that God can give out life through us, extravagantly, spontaneously. The holy is an interior fire, a passion for living in and for God, a capacity for exuberance in the presence of God." - Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way
Police excuse angry computer user for outburst BERLIN (Reuters) - A German man who startled his neighbors when he hurled his computer out of the window in the middle of the night, was let off for disturbing the peace by police who sympathized with his technical frustrations. Police in the northern city of Hanover said they would not press charges after responding to calls made by residents in an apartment block who were woken by a loud crash in the early hours of Saturday. Officers found the street and pavement covered in electronic parts and discovered who the culprit was. Asked what had driven him to the night-time outburst, the 51-year-old man said he had simply got annoyed with his computer.
"Who hasn't felt like doing that?" said a police spokesman.
While escaping any official sanction the man was made to clear up the debris.
If people keep gaining weight at the current rate, fat will be the norm by 2015, with 75 percent of U.S. adults overweight and 41 percent obese, U.S. researchers predicted on Wednesday.
Eating beef ' is less green than driving'
Producing 2.2lb of beef generates as much greenhouse gas as driving a car non-stop for three hours, it was claimed yesterday. Japanese scientists used a range of data to calculate the environmental impact of a single purchase of beef. Taking into account all the processes involved, they said, four average sized steaks generated greenhouse gases with a warming potential equivalent to 80.25lb of carbon dioxide.
This also consumed 169 megajoules of energy.
That means that 2.2lb of beef is responsible for greenhouse gas emissions which have the same effect as the carbon dioxide released by an ordinary car travelling at 50 miles per hour for 155 miles, a journey lasting three hours. The amount of energy consumed would light a 100-watt bulb for 20 days.
"I expect to pass through the world but once. Any good therefore that I can do, or
any kindness I can show to any creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer it, for I shall not pass this way again." -- Stephen Grellet
"If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere." -- Frank A. Clark
"What is harder than rock, or softer than water? Yet soft water hollows out hard rock. Persevere." -- Ovid, Roman poet
"The person rowing the boat seldom has time to rock it." -- Author Unknown
FEEL USELESS AND HOPELESS?
Ever feel like the world is a tuxedo - and you're a pair of brown shoes? Just remember, you're in good company
NOAH was a drunk
ABRAHAM was too old
ISAAC was a daydreamer
JACOB was a liar
GIDEON was afraid
JONAH ran from God
ZACCHAEUS was too small
TIMOTHY was too young
JOHN the BAPTIST was called "crazy"
And all of them, and each of us, is forgiven by God in Christ Jesus! Look out world, here we come!
When the train goes through a tunnel and the world gets dark, do you jump out? Of course not. You sit still and trust the engineer to get you through. --Corrie Ten Boom
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke
"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." -- Albert Einstein
"Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph." -- Haile Selassie
"Worry looks around, sorry looks back, Faith looks up." No doubt it sounds strange, but in order to love God with all your strength, you have to admit that you are weak and that your strength is limited. By doing this, you acknowledge God as the true source of your strength, and that in your weakness, he is strong. You become strong as you become totally dependent upon him, allowing his strength to work through you. God doesn’t ask you to take steps of faith alone; he is with you in every step, filling you with a grace-charged strength. God only asks you to take one step of faith at a time.
Sweatshirt with Pigpen from Charlie Brown on it with the saying: “The world needs messy people ... Otherwise the neat people would take over.”
"Nothing shows a man's character more than what he laughs at." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"When you have a purpose in life, a vision for what you want to achieve, and know why you want to achieve it, work becomes fun, and the time you spend working seems to just whiz by." -- Clayton J. Moore
"One man practicing sportsmanship is better than a hundred teaching it." -- Knute Rockne
"What a man is contributes much more to his happiness than what he has." -- Arthur Schopenhauer
"Don't wait until the storm passes over, learn to dance in the rain." -- Unknown
"Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it with use." -- Ruth Gordon, actress
JOY 9
"If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much." -- Jim Rohn
My Living Will Last night, my kids and I were sitting in the living room and I said to them, "I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and fluids from a bottle. If that ever happens, just pull the plug."
They got up, unplugged my Computer, and threw out my wine!
The little so-and-sos!
"The person who pays an ounce of principle for a pound of popularity gets badly cheated." -- Ronald Reagan
The Highest Priority
Have you ever been in a hurry and buttoned up a long overcoat with lots of buttons and when you were done, found out that the coat was uneven? What went wrong? I'll tell you what went wrong. When you don't get the first button in the right hole, all the rest are out of sequence too, right?! That's a parable about life. Jesus said it this way in the Sermon on the Mount: "Seek first God's kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well." (Matthew 6:33) If the Lord is not the high priority in your life, then, like the overcoat, so many other things in life will be out of whack as well.
A Priorities
A time management guru, a professor in the business school at Harvard, speaks about A, B, and C priorities, and then he notes that too many people spend too much of their time on the C priorities! And then he asks, "Why do you think that is?" The answer is that the C priorities are, first, much easier to accomplish, and, second, give you the impression that you are actually getting something done. In other words you can keep busy with the C priorities all day and never get to the more important things. The lesson from Mary and Martha is "Don't let the good (the C priorities) get in the way of the best (the A priorities). Sound like anyone you know?
Our prayer should be:
"Slow me down, Lord. I'm goin' too fast.
I can't see my brother when he's walking past.
I miss a lot of things day by day when it comes my way.
Slow me down, Lord, I'm goin' too fast."
Mickey Rivers, a one time outfielder for the Texas Rangers professional baseball team, stated his philosophy of life: "Ain't no sense worrying about things you got control over, because if you got control over them, ain't no sense worrying. And there ain't no sense worrying about things you got no control over either, because if you got no control them, ain't no sense worrying."
There are two great days in a person's life -- the day we are born and the day we discover why. William Barclay
Created for Faith not Fear
I am inwardly fashioned for faith, not for fear. Fear is not my native land; faith is. I am so made that worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life; faith is the oil. I live better by faith and confidence than by fear, doubt and anxiety. In anxiety and worry, my being is gasping for breath--these are not my native air. But in faith and confidence, I breathe freely--these are my native air. A John Hopkins University doctor says, "We do not know why it is that worriers die sooner than the non- worriers, but that is a fact." But I, who am simple of mind, think I know; We are inwardly constructed in nerve and tissue, brain cell and soul, for faith and not for fear. God made us that way. To live by worry is to live against reality. E. Stanley Jones,
Martin Luther said that those who listen are those who are truly wise, because they always begin anew so that they may forget the things that are behind and stretch themselves to what is ahead. But the lukewarm and the hypocrites, he said, think they have already chosen what is best. "They forget what is before them and fall back into what is behind them, and there they rest and snore."
If we are willing to take hours on end to learn to play a piano, or operate a computer, or fly an airplane, it is sheer nonsense for us to imagine that we can learn the high art of getting guidance through communion with the Lord without being willing to set aside time for it. It is no accident that the Bible speaks of prayer as a form of waiting on God. --Paul S. Rees
The young man from Mississippi came running into the store and said to his buddy, "Bubba, somebody just stole your pickup truck from the parking lot!" Bubba replied, "Did you see who it was? "The young man answered, "I couldn't tell , but I got the license number.
When we stand in the middle of a lifestorm, it seems as if the storm has become our way of life. We cannot see a way out. We are unable to chart a course back to smoother waters. We feel defeated--and broken. Will that brokenness produce a cynicism that will keep us forever in the mire of "if only" thinking? Or will we yield up that brokenness to the resources of One who calms the winds and the waves, heals the brokenhearted, and forgives the most grievous of sins? The choice is ours. --Verdell Davis, "Riches Stored in Secret Places"
There are two types of chaos: the chaos of creativity vs. the chaos of over-creation and incompletion. Which one best describes you? —Leslie Boyer, “Managing Chaos,”
If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.
Only 14 percent of evangelicals in the United States believe poverty is something that churches should take the lead in addressing. That's still more than triple the rate of the average population (4 percent). - Source: Barna.org (June, 2007)
Americans spent more last year on bottled water than on iPods and movie tickets -- a whopping $15 billion.
"Being a Christian doesn't mean hovering above the ugliness of life. It means we are given the weapons necessary to face wickedness with the hope of creating something good in its place." - Paul Coughlin, No More Jellyfish, Chickens, or Wimps
"The God-life cannot be domesticated or used – it can only be entered into on its own terms. Holiness does not make God smaller so that he can be used in convenient and manageable projects; it makes us larger so that God can give out life through us, extravagantly, spontaneously. The holy is an interior fire, a passion for living in and for God, a capacity for exuberance in the presence of God." - Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way
Police excuse angry computer user for outburst BERLIN (Reuters) - A German man who startled his neighbors when he hurled his computer out of the window in the middle of the night, was let off for disturbing the peace by police who sympathized with his technical frustrations. Police in the northern city of Hanover said they would not press charges after responding to calls made by residents in an apartment block who were woken by a loud crash in the early hours of Saturday. Officers found the street and pavement covered in electronic parts and discovered who the culprit was. Asked what had driven him to the night-time outburst, the 51-year-old man said he had simply got annoyed with his computer.
"Who hasn't felt like doing that?" said a police spokesman.
While escaping any official sanction the man was made to clear up the debris.
If people keep gaining weight at the current rate, fat will be the norm by 2015, with 75 percent of U.S. adults overweight and 41 percent obese, U.S. researchers predicted on Wednesday.
Eating beef ' is less green than driving'
Producing 2.2lb of beef generates as much greenhouse gas as driving a car non-stop for three hours, it was claimed yesterday. Japanese scientists used a range of data to calculate the environmental impact of a single purchase of beef. Taking into account all the processes involved, they said, four average sized steaks generated greenhouse gases with a warming potential equivalent to 80.25lb of carbon dioxide.
This also consumed 169 megajoules of energy.
That means that 2.2lb of beef is responsible for greenhouse gas emissions which have the same effect as the carbon dioxide released by an ordinary car travelling at 50 miles per hour for 155 miles, a journey lasting three hours. The amount of energy consumed would light a 100-watt bulb for 20 days.
"I expect to pass through the world but once. Any good therefore that I can do, or
any kindness I can show to any creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer it, for I shall not pass this way again." -- Stephen Grellet
"If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere." -- Frank A. Clark
"What is harder than rock, or softer than water? Yet soft water hollows out hard rock. Persevere." -- Ovid, Roman poet
"The person rowing the boat seldom has time to rock it." -- Author Unknown
FEEL USELESS AND HOPELESS?
Ever feel like the world is a tuxedo - and you're a pair of brown shoes? Just remember, you're in good company
NOAH was a drunk
ABRAHAM was too old
ISAAC was a daydreamer
JACOB was a liar
GIDEON was afraid
JONAH ran from God
ZACCHAEUS was too small
TIMOTHY was too young
JOHN the BAPTIST was called "crazy"
And all of them, and each of us, is forgiven by God in Christ Jesus! Look out world, here we come!
When the train goes through a tunnel and the world gets dark, do you jump out? Of course not. You sit still and trust the engineer to get you through. --Corrie Ten Boom
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke
"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it." -- Albert Einstein
"Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph." -- Haile Selassie
posted by joypastordon at 10:46 PM
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