Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Resistance is experienced as fear; the degr...
One of the supreme paradoxes of baseball, and all sports, is that the harder you try to throw a pitch or hit a ball or accomplish something, the smaller your chances are for success. You get the best results not when you apply superhuman effort but w...
I sometimes find, especially among my peers, that authenticity is not a…means of growing in holiness, but a convenient cover for endless introspection, doubt, uncertainty, anger, and worldliness. So that if other Christians seem pure, assured, and ...
Even today there still exists in the South--and in certain areas of the North--the license that our society allows to unjust officials who implement their authority in the name of justice to practice injustice against minorities. Where, in the days o...
Although sex was something they both regarded as perilous, marriage had, by contrast, seemed safe– a safe house in a world of danger; the ultimate haven of two solitary, fearful souls. When you were single, this was what everyone who was already ma...
The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals. Abrahamic religion mixes explosively with (and gives strong sanction to) ...
When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as on the fast track for beatification, and thus to qualify her for eventual sainthood, the Vatican felt obliged to solicit my testimony and I thus spent several hours in a...
Truth is, life is going shake you, it will rip you right out of your comfort zone;just when you feel settled, it will shock you with some trauma and make you face adversity in the most undesirable of ways... And here is the question of it all? What's...
There is one secret place...it is beautiful and peaceful, where gentle water flows, and most beautiful garden grows, yet, nobody could ever go to... You reach deep within my soul drawing out all the dreams that I hid beneath the doubt for long castin...
Calm, gleam of your emerald kingdom raising my spirit beyond for perspective welcomes a smooth adventure with your golden waves of knowledge and wisdom nurturing the life within...never still, never quiet... Your voice calls out to me, and I follow t...
When I came to again—parched, pain rampaging through my intestines—I was in my bed. The little bedside lamp illuminated two anxious faces, my sister’s and Mrs. P.’s (the latter looking a shade guilty, I noted, no doubt realizing that it was e...
They said that you would never make it, but you did. They said that you would quit, but you persevered and fought through every obstacle that came your way. They said that you didn’t have what it takes, but you proved them ALL wrong. Not only do yo...
Disquite Sonnet I wish that I could find the words to tell You were it hurts; nothing breaking my skin Slices whispering in my brain like hell Leaking suggestions of a morose grin Cannot collect my thoughts long enough to Share them in an understanda...
Two distinctive traits especially identify beyond a doubt a strong and dominant character. One trait is contempt for external circumstances, when one is convinced that men ought to respect, to desire, and to pursue only what is moral and right, that ...
I'll always remember being called by my mother who beckoned me to look at the screen where a young man was being tortured by the church. Bag over his head, rolling on the ground, crying, suffocating, vomiting while the congression continues yelling c...
This American system of ours', he shouted, 'call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if only we seize it with both hands, and make the most of it'. A month later in New York...
But I got through the review, for all their Latin and French; I did, and if you doubt me, you just look at the end of the great ledger, turn it upside down, and you'll find I've copied out all the fine words they said of you: "careful observer," "str...
What I admire about the modern atheist is not at all his logic, but rather his gift of imagination. There will always be the cartoon versions of Christianity further perpetuated by the extremist atheists who do not possess the humility to ask real sc...
O cousin Kate, my love was true, Your love was writ in sand: If he had fooled not me but you, If you had stood where i stand, He'd not have won me with his love, Nor bought me with his land; I would have spit into his face And not have taken his hand...
We can reject everything else: religion, ideology, all received wisdom. But we cannot escape the necessity of love and compassion.... This, then, is my true religion, my simple faith. In this sense, there is no need for temple or church, for mosque o...
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even...
