But today is not yesterday, and the Reb could do nothing but listen to the worst imaginable words – We couldn’t save her – told to him by a doctor he had never met before that night. How could this happen? She had been perfectly normal earlier in the day, a playful child, her whole life before her. We couldn’t save her? Where is the logic, the order of life?
Some of our greatest problems in ministering to people is that they knew us back before we came to the Lord.
They just looked at his past. And when we’re still looking at ourselves through our past, we’re not seeing what God has done. What He can do! We’re not seeing the little things that happen in our lives –.
That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another.
Do the kinds of things that come from the heart. When you do, you won’t be dissatisfied, you won’t be envious, you won’t be longing for somebody else’s things. On the contrary, you’ll be overwhelmed with what comes back.
The tension of opposites? “Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn’t. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted. “A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.
Did you ever hear a sermon that felt as if it were being screamed into your ear alone? When that happens, it usually has more to do with you than the preacher.
She wanted to melt into the ground at that moment, just hot wax into a puddle and disappear through a sewer grate. His eyes. That look. No interest. Total humiliation.
I seemed to slip in a time warp when I visited Morrie, and I liked myself better when I was there.
Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved.
Cover design by Phil Rose.
The day he learned that he was terminally ill was the day he lost interest in his purchasing power.
Every muscle he has was as tight as a piano wire.
Ask yourself, ‘Why did God create but one man?’” the Reb said, wagging a finger. “Why, if he meant for there to be faiths bickering with each other, didn’t he create that from the start? He created trees, right? Not one tree, countless trees. Why not the same with man? “Because we are all from that one man – and all from that one God. That’s the message.
He wakes up the next morning and he has a fresh new world to work with, but he has something else, too. He has his yesterday.
I watched him now, his hands working gingerly, as if he were learning to use them for the first time. He could not press down hard with a knife. His fingers shook. Each bite was a struggle; he chewed the food finely before swallowing... The skin from his wrist to his knuckles was dotted with age spots, and it was loose, like skin hanging from a chicken soup bone.
Music is in the connection of human souls, speaking a language that needs no words.
But it’s hard to explain, Mitch. Now that I’m suffering, I feel closer to people who suffer than I ever did before. The other night, on TV, I saw people in Bosnia running across the street, getting fired upon, killed, innocent victims... and I just started to cry. I feel their anguish as if it were my own. I don’t know any of these people. But – how can I put this? – I’m almost... drawn to them.
There are moments on earth when the Lord smiles at the unexpected sweetness of His creation. This was one of those moments. “What’s.
But the Reb, I’d learned, was like a tough old tree; he bent with the storms but he would not snap.