We didn’t used to think that having several of these little risk factors were a big deal. But it is. These little risk factors add up in a way that is worse for you than one big risk factor.
I want to be the first to bless you on what God has blessed you with – fighting in the heart of the Muslim world that was a battleground for large historic Islamic wars and what is now the place of Islam’s greatest war in the present era.
Most of us wait until we’re in trouble, and then we pray like the dickens. Wonder what would happen if, some morning, we’d wake up and say, “Anything I can do for You today, Lord?”
The United States grants the favors of the second, third, or fifty-seventh chance, and its citizens remain free to invent for themselves whatever character draws a crowd or pays the rent.
What’s wonderful is to read the different translations – some done in 1600 and some in 1900 – of the same passage. It’s fascinating to watch the same tale repeated in such a different way by two different centuries.
How many of us have been first attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism from Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere.
Meditating means bringing the mind back to something again and again. Thus, we all meditate, but unless we direct it in some way, we meditate on ourselves and on our own problems, reinforcing our self-clinging.
Every time you look at a house in Los Angeles, the real-estate agent will tell you that someone famous once lived there. It always seemed irrelevant to me: Does a property gain value just because Alfred Hitchcock used to eat breakfast there?
