Pray for me to learn quickly what I need to learn.
At times God’s best pupils experience the most rigorous and continuous courses. Eventually those who prove to be men of Christ will thereby become distinguished alumni of life’s school of affliction, graduating with honors.
So much depends, therefore, upon our maintaining gospel perspective in the midst of ordinariness, the pressures of temptation, tribulation, deprivation, and the cares of the world.
A new calling can beckon us away from comfortable routine and from competencies already acquired.
There will be many fine and wonderful men and women of all races and creeds-and of no religious creeds at all-who will lead decent and useful lives.
I thank the Father that His Only Begotten Son did not say in defiant protest at Calvary, “My body is my own!” I stand in admiration of women today who resist the “fashion of abortion, by refusing to make the sacred womb a tomb!”
Conscience warns us not to sink our cleats too deeply in mortal turf, which is so dangerously artificial.
I know sanctification comes not with any particular calling, but with genuine acts of service, often for which there is no specific calling.
I know the celestial criteria measure service, not status; the use of our talents, not the relative size of our talent inventories. I know that Church membership is not passive security but continuing opportunity.
If the nearly one-and-a-half million babies aborted in America each year could, somehow, vote, chameleon candidates would find fresh reason to be concerned about abortion, whereas now they are unconcerned.
We are in bondage to that which overcomes us. See also 2 Peter 2:19.
Patience helps us to view imperfections in others more generously to the end that we may learn to be more wise than they have been.
Ultimate hope constitutes the anchor of the soul.
When we don’t like to face up to hard facts, we use soft words. We do not speak about killing a baby within the womb, but about “termination of potential life.” Words are often multiplied to try to cover dark deeds.
Each day I see all about me the fruits of commandment-keeping.
Your task is to conquer yourselves, not ships, lands and castles. This battle is the one in which you especially are to ‘come off conqueror.’ It is fought every day. In fact, it is a continuing process which commenced a long, long time ago.
Those who turn against the Church do so to play to their own private gallery, but when, one day, the applause has died down and the cheering has stopped, they will face a smaller audience, the judgment bar of God.
The great challenge is to refuse to let the bad things that happen to us do bad things to us. That is the crucial difference between adversity and tragedy.
Unproductive worry – like Parkinson’s proverbial law – tends to expand to fill the time available.
Spent time-like a spent bullet-tells us much about its “processor.” for we see not only the residual slug, but indicators of how spent time is grooved by a man’s soul, a reliable indicator of what a man is like.