It’s not the claws of the cat that bothers me. Rather, it’s the fact that I gave him a reason to use them.
Don’t pay attention to the size of the mountain in front of you. Rather, think about what the view from the summit is going to be like.
I don’t know that our dreams died. Rather, I think that they were abandoned because that leaves us with the dream that maybe, in some nearly impossible way we can somehow still achieve the dream, for without a dream it us who dies.
The size of an ending will never offset the inevitability of a beginning.
There’s plenty of things that are wrong in our world, and we can give them free reign to completely define our view of the world. Or we can focus on the fact that what’s wrong with the world are the essential raw materials from which a person of determination crafts everything which is right.
Might I wish to be all that I can be and not fall victim to all that I fear to be.
The last time I saw it, its hull was crushed and it laid helpless against the incessant swells that rolled up upon the shallows within which it laid canted and broken. Yet, in the hands of a seasoned sailor who saw potential in the carnage, it was hauled out the swells, lovingly repaired, and the next year it pushed out past the swells that had held it helpless and it sailed again. And although our hulls are crushed beyond hope of repair and we find ourselves helplessly awash in the incessant swells of our sin, with God we too can sail again.
I’m not certain that the greatest thrill was actually being rescued. Rather, I think that the greatest thrill was finally realizing that I would be. And the cry of an infant two thousand years ago was that realization.
Christmas does not invite you to something that happened in history. Rather, Christmas is God inviting you to something that’s already shaping your eternity.
In whatever battle we're facing, we too often lose hope. And once we've lost hope we've not only lost the battle, we've lost everything else as well.
Christmas is opportunity while everything else in life is the hope of opportunity.
Christmas is not a story of hope. It is hope.
I believe in Christmas because God is the only Being I know Who is so utterly selfless as to do such a thing, and so incredibly ingenious as to figure out how to do it.
Sometimes I wonder if the cost of my dream is less about the efforts to achieve it and more about disappointment I’ll experience if it doesn’t happen. But then I remember that the nature of a dream is such that it is worth dreaming even if it never comes true.
If it’s all meaningless then why are we discussing that it’s all meaningless, for such a conversation is of itself meaningless. So, maybe the fact that we’re having a meaningless conversation about life being meaningless evidences that it’s not.
The darkness might keep us from seeing the hope around us, but it does not have the power to remove the hope around us.
If I take into consideration the scope of my sorely limited vision, I slowly begin to realize that the less I can see something the greater it actually might be. And maybe that’s what vision is all about.
For many, their dream is simply to survive until tomorrow. And in these situations, my prayer is not that God would alter their circumstances nor change their heart. Rather, it is that they would invite God into both.
f all we see are cinders and ashes, all we see is ‘what was’ at the expense of what the cinders and ashes are preparing to be.
Hope sees what we can’t. And because we can’t, hope asks us to believe that it can.
