Never miss a good chance to shut up

• Never miss a good chance to shut up.


• Always drink upstream from the herd.


• If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.


• There are three kinds of men:


• The ones that learns by reading.


• The few who learn by observation.


• The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.


• Letting the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than putting it back.

~ Will Rogers

surprise them with restraint and generosity

What Nelson Mandela’s character said about South African whites in the movie “Invictus”:
“We have to surprise them with restraint and generosity.”

It Was Perfect

“A man who was completely innocent,
offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others,
including his enemies,
and became the ransom of the world.
It was a perfect act.”

~ Mahatma Gandhi
(Indian Philosopher, internationally esteemed for his doctrine of nonviolent protest influenced by Jesus Christ, 1869-1948)

"We want revenge, and we want blood."

"We want revenge, and we want blood."

ABU MOHAMED, a protester in Azra, Syria, a southern town that witnessed the highest death toll Friday.
New York Times, 4/23/11
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/world/middleeast/
23syria.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha3

the truth of the thing signified is surely present there

The Lord's Supper
John Calvin "can be regarded as occupying a position roughly midway between" (McGrath) the doctrines developed by Martin Luther on the one hand and Huldrych Zwingli, on the other:
"Believers ought always to live by this rule: whenever they see symbols appointed by the Lord, to think and be convinced that the truth of the thing signified is surely present there. For why should the Lord put in your hand the symbol of his body, unless it was to assure you that you really participate in it? And if it is true that a visible sign is given to us to seal the gift of an invisible thing, when we have received the symbol of the body, let us rest assured that the body itself is also given to us." (Calvin); that is, "the thing that is signified is effected by its sign" (McGrath).[65]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation

65.^ McGrath, A. 1998. Historical Theology, An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought. Blackwell Publishers: Oxford, p.199.

Love Rules Without Rules

Love Rules Without Rules

~ Italian proverb

Relax!

quotes from Martha Beck:
March 2008 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine
http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Life-Coach-Martha-Becks-5-New-Best-Pieces-of-Advice/

One day—a day that has lingered in my memory despite countless attempts to repress it—I went skiing with a group of expert athletes in blizzard conditions. My friends wanted to ski runs with names like Panic Attack and Months in Traction, while I preferred Pokey Li'l Pony and Easy Does It. At first, my friends ribbed me good-naturedly. Then they realized I was serious, and became silently ashamed for me. Of course, I tensed up. After my third face-plant, the best skier in the group told me gently, "Martha, every scary obstacle is just an invitation to relax."

One of my favorite fictional characters is a parrot from Tom Robbins's Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. The parrot speaks words only once in a great while, and he says just one thing: "People of the world: Relax!"

"You could hit a hole in one and still lose a golf tournament, and you could win without ever hitting a hole in one. A great golfer is someone who usually gets the ball somewhat closer to the hole than most other people. Almost everything in life functions this way. No break is big enough to end all your problems, but consistently getting reasonably close to your objective, task after task, will put you far ahead of most other people. So dream of the hole in one, but know you can be a champion just by getting it on the green."

~ Martha Beck

Resentment

A poison one swallows with the expectation the other person will die,
welling up from lack of forgiveness.

Religious Conviction and Evil

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

Pascal

Will God get what he wants?

from a review of Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, HarperOne, 2011

He points out the many New Testament passages that point in this direction, like "in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them" (2 Cor. 5:19), and Jesus' statement, "When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself" (John 12:32). He adds to that verses about God's omnipotence and God's desire that all should be saved.
And then he asks the arresting question, "Will God get what he wants?"

Jesus: "do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matt. 10:28, ESV)

John Wayne as a protective paternal figure

From: Emanuel Levy, John Wayne: Prophet of the American Way of Life, The Scarecrow Press, Inc.: Metuchen, N.J. and London (1988), page 1:

John Wayne was born as Marion Michael Morrison on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, a small town in Iowa. His father, Clyde L. Morrison, was a druggist of Scottish descent, and his mother, Mary Margaret Brown, of pure Irish stock... When he was six, the family moved to Lancaster in Southern California, where his father settled on a ranch...

Levy, page 161:

Wayne's sexuality [in his movie roles] is also monogamous; he neither betrays his screen wives nor flirts with married women. But his domesticity tends to be more familial than marital, family and children are at the center of his pictures. "The longer Wayne kept his promise, kept providing, stayed true, kept being there despite cancer and illnesses and age itself," Michael Malone observed, "the more valued the strength of his fidelity and the integrity of his identity came to be." Women's attraction to the values he stood for was so strong that in the 1970s even the feminists came to admire him as a protective paternal figure.

three stringent rules for living

From: George Carpozi Jr., The John Wayne Story, Arlington House: New Rochelle, NY (1972), page 17:

Clyde Morrison [John Wayne's father] was of Scottish descent... [John] Wayne describes his father as the "kindest, most patient man [he] ever met," saying that the elder Morrison never had an unkind thought in his mind and rarely spoke harshly to his son or anyone else. Nor did he ever lecture young Marion [John Wayne]. But he did teach him three stringent rules for living which have the ring of orders tumbling from the lips of Davy Crockett in the nineteenth century:
1. Always keep your word.
2. A gentleman never insults anybody intentionally.
3. Don't go around looking for trouble. But if you ever get in a fight, make sure you win it.

Our limitation is God's opportunity

quotes from same kind of different as me: a modern-day slave, and international art dealer, and the unlikely woman who bound them together, by Ron Hall & Denver Moore with Lynn Vincent, Thomas Nelson, Nashville, Tennessee, 2006.

There's somethin I learned when I was homeless: Our limitation is God's opportunity. When you get all the way to the end of your rope and there ain't nothin you can do, that's when God takes over.
I remember one time I was hunkered down in the hobo jungle with some folks. We was talkin 'bout life, and this fella was talkin, said, "People think they're in control, but they ain't. The truth is, that which must befall thee must befall thee. And that which must pass thee by must past thee by."
You'd be surprised what you can learn talkin to homeless people. I learned to accept life for what it is. ...
Sometimes to touch us, God touches someone that's close to us. This is what opens our eyes to the fact there is a higher power than ourselves, whether we call it God or not. ...
And I can tell you something else--I don't care what no doctors say, Miss Debbie ain't goin nowhere till she finished the work here on earth that God gave her to do.
Denver Moore, p. 169-170

When we let Miss Debbie down into the ground, I knowed it wadn't nothin but her earthly body. But I still felt my heart sinkin right down into that hole. ...
And I told Him I didn't like it. That's the good think 'bout God. Since He can see right through your heart anyway, you can go on and tell Him what you really think. ...
I cried and cried out loud and told Miss Debbie that was the most important thing she taught me: "ever man should have the courage to stand up and face the enemy," I said, "cause ever person that looks like a enemy on the outside ain't necessarily one on the inside. We all has more in common that we think. You stood up with courage and faced me when I was dangerous, and it changed my life. You loved me for who I was on the inside, the person God meant for me to be, the one that had just gotten lost for a while on some ugly roads in life."
Denver Moore, p. 192-193

Why Avoiding Rejection Is a Major Mistake

"At 40 I now believe rejection is God's way of kicking you to higher ground."

~ Suzanne Finnamore

The Promises of God Are True

Tom Long, a former preaching professor at Princeton, says that while he was at Princeton, he went to a nearby Presbyterian church that prides itself on being an academic, intellectual church. Early on, he said, he went to a family night supper and sat down next to a man, introduced himself, told him he was new, and said, “Have you been here long?”

“Oh yes,” the man said. “In fact I was here before this became such a scholarly church. Why I’m probably the only non-intellectual left. I haven’t understood a sermon in over 25 years.”

“Then why do you keep coming,” Tom asked?

“Because every Monday night a group of us get in the church van and drive over to the youth correctional center. Sometimes we play basketball, or play games. Usually we share a Bible story. But mostly we just get to know these kids and listen to them.

“I started going because Christians are supposed to do those kind of things. But now I could never stop. Sharing the love of God at that youth center has changed my life.”

And then he said this profound statement. “You cannot prove the promises of God in advance, but if you live them, they’re true, every one.”

intense anger over injured dignity

The Wall Street Journal
THE SATURDAY ESSAY
MARCH 12, 2011
Is China Next?
By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Will the protests that have swept the Middle East inspire a similar movement in China, or is that country's middle class more interested in the material than the political?

quote:
"Over the course of three short months, popular uprisings have toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, sparked a civil war in Libya and created unrest in other parts of the Middle East. They also have raised a question in many people's minds: Are all authoritarian regimes now threatened by this new democratic wave? In particular, is China, a rising superpower, vulnerable to these forces?"
...
"Perhaps the most relevant thinker for understanding the Middle East today and China tomorrow is the late Samuel Huntington—not the Huntington of "The Clash of Civilizations," who argued that there were fundamental incompatibilities between Islam and democracy, but the Huntington whose classic book "Political Order in Changing Societies," first published in 1968, laid out his theory of the development "gap."
Observing the high levels of political instability plaguing countries in the developing world during the 1950s and '60s, Mr. Huntington noted that increasing levels of economic and social development often led to coups, revolutions and military takeovers. This could be explained, he argued, by a gap between the newly mobilized, educated and economically empowered people and their existing political system—that is, between their hopes for political participation and institutions that gave them little or no voice. Attacks against the existing political order, he noted, are seldom driven by the poorest of the poor in such a society; they tend to be led, instead, by rising middle classes who are frustrated by the lack of political and economic opportunity."
...
"It is certainly true that the dry tinder of social discontent is just as present in China as in the Middle East. The incident that triggered the Tunisian uprising was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, who had his vegetable cart repeatedly confiscated by the authorities and who was slapped and insulted by the police when he went to complain. This issue dogs all regimes that have neither the rule of law nor public accountability: The authorities routinely fail to respect the dignity of ordinary citizens and run roughshod over their rights. There is no culture in which this sort of behavior is not strongly resented."
...
"All social revolutions are driven by intense anger over injured dignity, an anger that is sometimes crystallized by a single incident or image that mobilizes previously disorganized individuals and binds them into a community."

—Mr. Fukuyama is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His new book, "The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution," will be published next month.

http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424052748703560404576188981829658442
.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read

Don't be so humble

"Don't be so humble;
you're not that great."

~ Golda Meir

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

SOS - Stuck on Stupid

~ Iyanla Vanzant

Handling a Temper Tantrum

Michael Potegal, Ph.D., a pediatric neuropsychologist at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis:
"When you comfort a child in the middle of a tantrum, you reinforce the behavior. Instead, say 'I'm sorry you're upset. When you calm down, I'll give you a hug and we can talk about what happened.'"
This way, you offer support and sympathy while still showing your tot how to regulate his emotions.
"Since that meltdown, I've learned to say 'I'm not talking to you while you're behaving like this,'" [My friend Mana Heydarpour of New York City] says.

"Why toddlers throw temper tantrums"
http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/02/21/
toddlers.temper.tantrums.parenting/
index.html?hpt=Sbin