47 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 10-3-12”

  1. “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” -Rudyard Kipling, “If”.

    “Sometimes you can’t see the forest because of the trees.”

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  2. Life is hard, it’s harder if you’re stupid-John Wayne

    Life is good, it’s not always great, but it’s always good- Brian Buffini

    Life isn’t about weathering the storms, it’s about learning to dance in the rain-stolen from a friend so author unknown

    You are out of your rabbit- @$$ed mind–James Black

    And then for those who are out for revenge:
    Time heals all wounds.
    Time wounds all heels.

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  3. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. Ecc 3:11

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  4. “My mind is a neighborhood I try not to go into alone.” -AnneI Lamott

    “I do not understand the mystery of grace –only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.” -Anne Lamott

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  6. “If what you did yesterday still looks big today, then you haven’t done much today.” – author unknown

    “If a man speaks his mind in the forest, and no woman is around to hear him, is he still wrong?” – Sir Ken Robinson (not sure if he was quoting someone else, or if the quote is original with him)

    “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered with failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” – Teddy Roosevelt

    “They snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory.” – Dad

    “I was surprised at my own amazement!” – Dad

    “We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.” – Calvin Coolidge

    “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” – Jesus

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  7. Good morning everyone. i can’t think of a real quote right now. My dad used to tell me, “A fool has to learn everything the hard way.”
    Back in the early fifties, my sister was friends with a girl named Willanel. They went different ways after school and marriage and drifted apart Nell went to the same school I did, only later. I get spam from a “Classmates” site, and her name showed up there.
    On a whim, I joined Classmates and contacted her. I sent her address to my sister.
    After almost sixty years, they have reconnected.
    🙂

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  8. Wherever you go, there you are. – Buckaroo Bonzai

    That’s apparently obvious to all but the most keen observers – my brother

    A difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. T. Jefferson

    Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. – St. Paul

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  9. “Things are the way they are because they got that way.” Gerald Weinberg
    “There’s no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” Gerald Weinberg

    Mr. Weinberg is a retired computer consultant who has written several wonderful books, my favorites being “Are Your Lights On?” and “Secrets of Consulting” (which isn’t particularly about computer consulting but is “for anyone giving or getting advice”). I highly recommend both.

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  11. From today’s Times-News

    I told my best friend that I was having an affair.
    She turned and asked, “Are you having it catered?”
    That, my friends, is the definition of “Old”.

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  12. “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

    “Reason is always reasonable, even in the last limbo, in the lost borderland of things… Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elaphantine sapphire. But son’t fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ ” – G. K. Chesterton

    “Every morning, lean thine arm awhile upon the window sill of heaven and gaze upon the Lord. Then, with the vision in thy heart, turn, strong, to meet thy day,” – Unknown

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  13. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you..Golden rule

    If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing right..my dad

    (I have 5 small children in my home. These sayings are used most every day)

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  14. A couple more:

    Seen on a poster (author unknown):
    There are those who make things happen.
    There are those who watch things happen.
    And there are those who say, “What happened?”

    From 1st Arrow during election season 2008:
    “[Our dentist] is neither left wing nor right wing.
    He’s bite wing.”

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  15. Good quotes everyone.

    Well, except Linda and this outburst.

    “p.s. GO O’s!!!!!”

    That kinda crazy talk is just uncalled for.

    🙂

    And it doesn’t matter what the O’s do now. If the Yankees win tonight, they’re the AL East Champions. AGAIN!

    But the O’s losing works too. Then it doesn’t matter if the Yanks win or not.

    I’ll be watching both games tonight. It’ll be a lot more fun than the debates.

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  16. I know we have a prayer thread now, but just so more people read it, I’m posting a prayer request here. A good friend of mine has a brother, Donny, who is in a medically-induced coma. He was having uncontrolled seizures. Both her parents are deceased and he is her only sibling. Please pray he can be safely brought out of the coma and that he will not have brain damage. Thanks!

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  19. Allen, our local AM station is carrying the game instead of the debates; I got a chuckle out of that.

    We’re amused by the fact that a one-game playoff would be held here in Baltimore, a fact that was decided before the season started and probably with the sentiment, “Well, THAT will never happen.”

    Check in with me tomorrow.

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  20. Good morning all. There are some great quotes on here and nearly all of them show us that God uses people to instruct and inspire us to do greater things than we thought we were capable of. No man is an island?

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  21. “Knowing one thing about a person doesn’t mean you know everything about that person. ”

    Although said by a character in a TV show, rather than some famous sage, this line has returned to my mind over and over, especially when I’m inclined to criticize the statement or action of someone I don’t actually know.

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  22. “The people made the Constitution, and the people can unmake it. It is the creature of their will, and lives only by their will. But this supreme and irresistible power to make or to unmake resides only in the whole body of the people, not in any subdivision of them. The attempt of any of the parts to exercise it is usurpation and ought to be repelled by those to whom the people have delegated their power of repelling it.”
    -Cohens vs Virginia 1821 (Chief Justice John Marshall)

    “…the power to tax involves the power to destroy…”
    -McCulloch vs Maryland 1819 (Chief Justice John Marshall)

    “But I and others, who are right-minded Christians on all points, are assured that there will be a resurrection of the dead, and a thousand years in Jerusalem, which will then be built, adorned, and enlarged, the prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah and others declare.”
    (Justin Martyr, Dialogue of Justin, Chp. 80)

    “For when the threescore and two weeks are fulfilled, and Christ is come, and the Gospel is preached in every place, the times being then accomplished, there will remain only one week, the last, in which Elias will appear, and Enoch, and in the midst of it the abomination of desolation will be manifested, viz., Antichrist, announcing desolation to the world….”
    [Hippolytus, On Daniel, II, 22]

    “”If, however, any shall endeavour to allegorize (prophecies)
    of this kind, they shall not be found consistent with themselves in
    all points, and shall be confuted by the teaching of the very
    expressions (in question)”.
    (Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book V, Chapter 35)

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  23. My all-time favorite quote is:

    “In prayer, it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”

    It’s from John Bunyan, who was jailed for preaching that people should pray in their own words and not the words, written by some committee, in a printed prayer book. I think there are many good books of prayers but, unless the writer’s words are reflective of what’s in your heart, you are just performing lip service and not reaching out to God.

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  24. A sampling of G. K. Chesterton quotes:

    Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy.

    The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—“free-love”—as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment.

    From time to time, as we all know, a sect appears in our midst announcing that the world will very soon come to an end. Generally, by some slight confusion or miscalculation, it is the sect that comes to an end.

    Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.

    This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. . . . It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom—that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

    I know this feeling fills our epoch, and I think it freezes our epoch. For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre’s castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.

    But whatever be the truth about exceptional intelligence and the masses, it is manifestly most unreasonable that intelligent men should be divided upon the absurd modern principle of regarding every clever man who cannot make up his mind as an impartial judge, and regarding every clever man who can make up his mind as a servile fanatic. As it is, we seem to regard it as a positive objection to a reasoner that he has taken one side or the other. We regard it (in other words) as a positive objection to a reasoner that he has contrived to reach the object of his reasoning. We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end. We say that the juryman is not a juryman because he has brought in a verdict. We say that the judge is not a judge because he gives judgment. We say that the sincere believer has no right to vote, simply because he has voted.

    As the word “unreasonable” is open to misunderstanding, the matter may be more accurately put by saying that each one of these Christian or mystical virtues involves a paradox in its own nature, and that this is not true of any of the typically pagan or rationalist virtues. Justice consists in finding out a certain thing due to a certain man and giving it to him. Temperance consists in finding out the proper limit of a particular indulgence and adhering to that. But charity means pardoning what is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.

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  25. Just when I thought it was safe to live with my appliances, a new problem has cropped up! I’ve broken my sliding door!

    I’m about to start teaching 1-3 John to my Tuesday morning Bible study, but over the summer, my Sunday school class tackled it. We were on 1 John 3:20-24 on Sunday and as we discussed confession, I got caught up in the difference between how Christians view confession and how those who do not share our believes see it.

    Here goes.

    As a Christian, you have a fundamental understanding that goes to the heart of who you are and how you live your life. You KNOW you’re forgiven. You KNOW that there is nothing that can separate you from the Father. You KNOW that He who is faithful and just will forgive you your sins and cleanse you from all unrighteousness.

    You KNOW the power of forgiveness. The simplicity of it may still boggle your mind, and you may have difficulty grasping that yes, even that monstrous sin was covered by Jesus at his death–and he loves you all the same.

    For believers, confession is gift–it takes that burning, sickening load of guilt from our shoulders and frees it–into Corrie Ten Boom’s description of a spot in the deepest ocean where your sin disappears from view and God hangs a sign that says, “no fishing.”

    Yes, it may be hard to confess your sin, but if you ask someone in the Christian community to forgive you–they will do so. (And if they don’t, that’s their problem with God and you are done).

    If you’re in the world, though, confession is a completely different animal.

    It suggests punishment–you’ll be punished if you confess doing something wrong. Look at the ends people go to in order to not be caught or to not admit they did something.

    Confession is terrifying because it takes away your sense of “control” and hands it to someone else. In the world, you have no faith a person will forgive you and once you confess, they may make your life even more difficult.

    You all know this, but what it said to me is, whenever you run into people who condemn Christians for “taking back” those who have eggregiously sinned (Jim Bakker, Bundy, whomever), you’re dealing with people who do not understand forgiveness and how freeing it is.

    There are still consequences to choices–Bakker went to jail where he belonged and Bundy to the electric chair, which he thought was a fitting end–but the peace that comes through forgivenes is a priceless gift.

    They just don’t get it.

    And therefore they don’t know how much they’re missing.

    Blessings on your day; it’s been lovely to have some time this morning to think and read.

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  26. Cheryl – Did you see what I posted last night explaining the difference between possums & opossums? I think the part I chose to quote didn’t mention the fact that we in America have opossums, & possums are in Australia, New Zealand, etc. Interesting, huh?

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  28. If you get paid enough you will like your job. My father, Thomas Buckles

    For those of you who are interested in what rents are in your area, go here.

    http://www.rentometer.com

    I think the prices are high, but it is just a data base. Do you suppose people (Land Lords) put in what they would like rents to be?

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  29. And another one:

    Do not let the children pass a day without distinct efforts, intellectual, moral, volitional; let them brace themselves to understand; let them compel themselves to do and to bear; and let them do right at the sacrifice of ease and pleasure: and this for many higher reasons, but, in the first and lowest place, that the mere physical organ of mind and will may grow vigorous with work. – Charlotte Mason

    I submit that that is a good one for us adults, who weren’t so trained, to cultivate in ourselves as well. (Speaking mostly to myself here.)

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  30. Karen, I guess I looked at the possum/opossum question differently than you said it. Yes, I knew there were other animals called “possums” in other lands. (I’ve spent many hours of my life reading about animals and have many books on mammals; I even have a book on Australian animals.) Nevertheless, the animal in America that is officially called an “opossum” is most frequently called a “possum,” particularly by those most likely to encounter them. In fact, I read once (don’t know if this is true) that to pronounce the initial “o” is actually to mispronounce it; that “possum” isn’t an informal pronunciation or a regional thing, but the correct pronunciation. (Merriam-Webster’s lists the syllable in parentheses, meaning sometimes it is pronounced and sometimes it isn’t; but that doesn’t tell us which is the original or standard pronunciation.)

    People in England may say that Americans don’t have robins, and indeed we don’t have the same robin that the English do. But the American robin is “a robin,” though it is not the same bird. (And American football is football, too, though it isn’t the same game; here we call their game “soccer.”) In other words, from an American standpoint, there is no difference between a “possum” and an “opossum.” We don’t have the animals called “possums” in other countries, but we have plenty of the ones called “possums” in ours, and in America there is no difference between a possum and an opossum. When you hear someone mention a possum, they aren’t confusing the two animals or using the wrong word for the American animal; possum is correct for it as well.

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  31. “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” – John Wooden (I had an IT manager that loved to use this one)

    I can’t believe this one hasn’t been mentioned yet:

    “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.” – Thomas Sowell

    Finally, Romney should forget about trying to use, “There you go again” tonight. He should go with this one:

    “It’s not that our liberal friends are ignorant, it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” – Ronald Reagan

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  32. Scott, I’m in IT and I used to have this poem over my desk: “When given a job to be done, it’s best not to neglect it. I’ve found that doing it fast, leaves more time to correct it.”

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  33. Fun thread today…I love all these quotes. Every time another favorite quote pops into my head today, I pop over here with it.

    How about this one from Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

    Maybe that one could make it into the debates tonight…

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  34. Hey, anybody need a remedy for fruit flies? They were never a problem for me anywhere else I lived–ripe bananas or peaches might bring them, but I’d then have a few for a week or two and they were gone, no big deal–but somehow here they breed and establish themselves.

    Anyway, my husband found a very effective remedy–by accident–several years ago, and we’re using it, and he’s right that it works. If anyone else has that issue, simply get a vinegar shaker (not sure if that’s what they’re called, but at the store they’ll be with small glass kitchen implements, salt and pepper shakers, pepper grinders, etc.)–it’s basically a small bottle with a metal lid that comes up to a small point with a very small hole at the top. Put a couple of inches of apple cider vinegar in it, place it on the counter (ideally near your fruit), and they’ll go in but won’t/can’t go back out. We’ve had at least a dozen go into the one in the kitchen in the 24 hours it has been there, and several more have found the one in the library. Cheap, easy, effective.

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  35. Good Afternoon, Y’all!

    Also an Einstein quote: “I don’t have to know anything, I just have to know where to find it when I need it.”

    Also- “A teacher affects eternity: he can never tell where his influence stops” – Henry Adams

    and- “You better bring friends!” – me

    Linda Shaffer- I understood that the playoff site was based on the leading wild card contender playing at home…how could that have been decided early?

    Oh…go O’s!

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  36. I HATE PNC Bank!!!!! I CLOSED my account! Now I get an email telling me it is over-drawn. They let a draft go through, cause it to open and over draw it!!!!!!!
    I don’t want to give them another 36 Dollars when I changed everything!!!!!!

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  37. Kim, don’t answer an e-mail.
    Let them send something by USPS.
    This could be a spam for a scam.
    Regardless of its problems, all official correspondence is still by USPS.
    You might want to talk to them on the phone, if you can find a real person.
    Which is a different problem.

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  38. Anyone here care to come to the rescue of a severely technologically inept computer user? How do you print a copy of a PDF? I just received an e-book in PDF format and can read it just fine, but I would like to print it out, and whenever I click “Print”, the document disappears from the page. Does it make a difference which browser I’m using? (I generally use Firefox.) Help, please! 😉

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  39. 6 Arrows,

    Try right clicking and select print preview. It should open it in another box. That’s what I had to do to print PDF’s from my daughters school.

    But they may have set it up so you can’t print it if it’s copyrighted material, which I’m assuming an e-book is. They don’t want you using a cheaper print version and may have it that way so you are forced to buy the more expensive printed book.

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  41. AJ, the author says in the forward to the book that copying is not only permissible, but recommended. Perhaps I should contact her? I just thought the problem was with me and my lack of knowledge about such things.

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  43. First Arrow to the rescue! The book’s printed out and laying on the desk beside me! Don’t ask me how we got it, but between my attempts to find something that worked before 1st Arrow got home, and his attempts to print it, we somehow struck on a combination of steps that got it all rolling! PTL! 🙂

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  45. WOOOOO HOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

    The Yankees win the AL East. And as an added bonus, by thumping the Red Soxs (spits)

    So all I have to say now is……

    Let’s go Rangers!!!!!!!!

    🙂

    What? Hey better them than the O’s. The Rangers are easier to beat right now.

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