UNIQUELY YOU

Everyone may have a similar story to share, but not one person all throughout history, in today's world, or in the future will ever be able to live your story exactly in the same way or in the same order as events take place in your life.

TRIBULATIONS

Tribulation is the fertilizer for patience; being grounded in the love of God speeds up a spurt of growth in patience; understanding the tenderness of our God helps to strengthen roots and cause shoots to sprout in our patience;

THEOLOGY

"...a theology which does not take fire, I maintain, is a defective theology; or at least the man's understanding of it is defective." Charles Swindoll

DOING WHAT ONE WANTS TO DO

"They must do what they have to do, to do what they want to do...

FLESH OVER SPIRIT

"Whatever weakens your reasoning, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes away your relish for spiritual things, in short, if anything impeaches the authority and the power of the flesh over the spirit, that to you becomes sin, however good it is in itself."

ENVISIONING THE POSSIBILITIES

"Anyone who toils away at the soil must think a few weeks ahead or envision next year's garden, for most gardeners are convinced that improvement is one the way." Visions of Paradise

VISION OF PARADISE

"In our effort to improve on nature, we are guided by a vision of paradise. Whether the result is a horticulture masterpiece or only a modest vegetable patch, it is based on the expectation of a glorious future." Visions of Paradise

SEEDLINGS

"Seedlings are pampered in the beginning to assure a healthy start, and then allowed to grow freely. Plants thrive on this benign neglect." Visions of Paradise This is so true of people as well...to an extent.

EXERCISE OF OPTIMISM

"...gardening is an exercise in optimism." Visions of Paradise

LEGITIMATE REFRESHMENT

"Anything that refreshes you without distracting, diminishing, or destroying your final goal is a legitimate pleasure."

MASTERPIECE

"While basic gardening - making things grow - is easy, creating a masterpiece is more difficult." Visions of Paradise

BASIC HUMAN PROBLEM

"The basic human problem is that everyone believes that there is a God and I am it. There is a God and I am not it."

SPIRITUAL GROWTH

"Whenever I get depressed by a lack of spiritual growth, I realize that my very dismay is a sign of progress. I have the sense of slipping further from God mainly because I have a clearer idea of what God desires and how far short I fall."

HEALING

"...I cannot receive healing unless I accept God's diagnosis of my wounded state. God already knows who we are; we are the ones who must find a way to come to terms with our true selves."

LET GOD BE GOD

"To let God be God, of course, means climbing down from my own executive chair of control. I must uncreate the world I have so carefully fashioned to further my ends and advance my cause."

HABIT OF ATTENTION

"Ah, a habit of attention. Be still. In that focus, all else comes into focus. In that rift in my routine, the universe falls into allignment."

TAKE A HOLIDAY

"God invites us to take a holiday, to stop being God for a while, and let him be God..." Simon Tugwell

DIRECTION OF PRAYER

"It occurs to me, thinking about prayer, that most of the time I get the direction wrong. I start downstream with my own concerns and bring them to God. I inform God as if God did not already know. I plead with God, as if hoping to change God's mind, and overcome divine reluctance...

QUILT OF HOLES

Quilt of Holes As I faced my Maker at the last judgment, I knelt before the Lord along with all the other souls. Before each of us laid our lives like the squares of a quilt in many piles; an angel sat before each of us sewing our quilt squares together into a tapestry that is our life.....

WHERE DOES GOD FIT?

"Increasingly, time pressures crowd out the leisurely pace that prayer seems to require...We have the constant sensation of not enough: not enough time, not enough rest, not enough exercise, not enough leisure. Where does God fit into a life that already seems behind schedule?"

PROLONGING YOUTH

"It is the fever of creation and hard work that prolongs my youth and succors me." Adolphe Adam

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

"Whenever people break through these barriers of their own selfconsciousness, however, they find a wistful kid waiting for permission to be natural and free and to thumb a nose at the polite predictability of every day life."

OPENING NEW CORNERS

"Hoarding begets shrinking, while daring begets expansion and opening up new corners in our consciousness. Each time we open up a new corner, we discover more corners we hadn't known about. Frustrating perhaps, but it gives life a fine excitement."

BEYOND EXPECTATIONS

"When we withhold the fullness of our capabilities, we diminish those capabilities. When we explore beyond where we feel safe and secure, we discover abilities beyond our expectations."

PARADOX

"The paradox is, of course, that when we are free enough to allow a flop, we are usually free enough not to have one."

COASTING IN LIFE

"Part of the time when nothing works, we deserve to have nothing work because we are trying to coast on incomplete slap-dash preparation."

OVER DOING IN LIFE

"When we 'over-look', 'over-try,' over-instruct' in our lives, we do the same ankle-twisting stumbling. We miss the essence of an experience as a constant discovery, a consciousness of being, a journey with a view of peaks and far horizons rather than a necessary trudg...e along a dusty pathway."

FREE SPIRIT

"The fear of course, is that without docility we might not learn. When we restrain the free intuitive spirit we cut ourselves off from an important half of our built-in-learning team. When we are addicted to either praise or criticism...we are in danger of missing that conversion process."

IMAGINATION

"I sometimes enhance my enjoyment by giving full rein to the intuitive side of my nature, allowing imagery to develop, characters to emerge, and invisible dancers within to respond to the choreography of the music."

IDEAS

"If you feel resistance to a new idea there is probably a reason for it and it would be against your nature to force it...An idea that you are resistant against now may find you in a more receptive mood or you may suddenly have a new conception of it.....

BOTHERSOME JUDGES

We can lessen the power of these nagging, bothersome judges that continually degrade us and stifle our spontaneity. We aren't doomed to constant censorship from these commentators on our every act and thought. There is even a chance that we can come to terms with them and find the good in them.....

FOLLOW THE LEADER OR NOT

"...[how many] times I've followed the advice of an "expert" who supposedly knows the way, only to find that the directions are garbled, or that they work for the expert but not for me, and I have to find my own path through the woods."