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Be careful how you live…
…“Your life may be the only Bible some people read.” ~ William Toms
“Knowledge speaks, wisdom listens.” ~ Jimi Hendrix
These days it seems like our ship is badly listing and the waters around us are rising fast.
Generations of humane wisdom is being cast aside.
- Why?
- For what reason?
- To what end?
Whatever the world looked like a short time ago, it looks different now.
It has the feel of the Old Testament flood.
We’re getting ready for a “Noah lesson.”
You know the story…
Noah built an ark because, according to the Bible (Genesis, chapters 6–9), God intended to send a great flood to cleanse the world of human wickedness and corruption.
Surviving this current cleansing won’t be easy.
We are all facing the same question: What wisdom will we take onto OUR ark to see us through the journey?
We certainly wouldn’t want to build a new world, in a new era — without bringing the great teachings from the past.
Here are a few lessons worth remembering:
Pope Leo XIV
“The Church should serve as an ark of salvation sailing through the waters of history and a beacon that illumines the dark nights of this world.”
Henry Ward Beecher
“Do not be troubled because you have not great virtues. God made a million spears of grass where He made one tree. The earth is fringed and carpeted not with forests, but with grasses. Only have enough of little virtues and common fidelities, and you need not mourn because you are neither a hero nor a saint.”
Jane Addams
“The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”
Hugh Prather
“Unless I accept my faults I will most certainly doubt my virtues.”
Ernest Hemingway
“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow [human]. True nobility is being superior to your former self.”
Susan B. Anthony
“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants for them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”
Paul Tillich
“The awareness of the ambiguity of one’s highest achievements – as well as one’s deepest failures – is a definite symptom of maturity.”
Abraham Lincoln
“You can tell the greatness of a [person] by what makes them angry.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of life and light no longer flow into our souls.”
Minna Thomas Antrim
“Don’t lose your grip upon your conscience. God put it in your breast to act as sentinel over your weaknesses.”
Mark Twain
“To get full value of joy, you must have somebody to divide it with.”
Andrew Carnegie
“The [one] who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”
Viktor Frankl
“We should not ask what the meaning of our life is, but rather must recognize that it is we who are asked.”
Rudyard Kipling
“Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.”
James Lendall Basford
“Never rob your character to enrich your pocket.”
Michael Josephson
“People who fight fire with fire end up with only the ashes of their own integrity.”
Frederick Douglas
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men and women.”
Austin Gentry
“And the devil whispered ‘You can’t withstand the storm.’ The warrior replied, ‘I am the storm.’”
Perhaps I would carve this thought onto the entryway of the ark:
“In this life-long fight, to be waged by every one of us singlehanded against a host of foes, the last requisite for a good fight, the last proof and test of our courage, … must be loyalty to truth.” ~ Thomas Hughes
Just a thought…
Pat