LIVING
Live life fully while you’re here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You’re going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process! Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don’t try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human. Constantly find ways to improve yourself. Be a lifelong learner. Take the time now to set up your Master System so that the game of life is winnable. Let your humanity- your caring for yourself and others- be the guiding principle of your life, but don’t treat life so seriously that you lose the power of spontaneity, the pleasure that comes from being silly and being a kid.
- Anthony Robbins
SUCCEED
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
NEW LIFE
“Every day is a new life to a wise man.” Each morning I said to myself, ‘Today is a new life.’ I have succeeded in overcoming my fear of loneliness, my fear of want. I am happy and fairly successful now that I shall never again be afraid, regardless of what life hands me. I know now that I don’t have to fear the future. I know now that I can live one day at a time – and that ‘Every day is a new life to a wise man.’
Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own: He who, secure within, can say: Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today. – Roman Poet Horace
- How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie
PEACE
May today there be peace within. May you trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith in yourself and others. May you use the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content with yourself just the way you are. Let this knowledge settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every one of us.
- Mother Teresa
TIME
Nobody ever has to be afraid of time. Time has never hurt anybody yet. Time is a medium in which change takes place. It is not time that makes a baby grow up; it is change. Things change, and in order to change, there has to be a sequence of change. There cannot be 2 before there is 1. And there cannot be 3 before there is 2, and there cannot be 5 before there is 4. They change in a sequence, and that sequence is time.
- AW Tozer
EMBRACE
Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy – the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.
- Brene Brown
JOURNEY
In Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland, Alice encounters a grinning Cheshire Cat.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” asked Alice.
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter much which way you go,” said the Cat.
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”
You, yourself, not someone else, need to determine where you want to go and what you want to do in your life. And once you make that decision, you can begin mapping a plan to get there and focusing on that objective every single day. It’s about you and your opportunity to do things you never thought you could do. It’s about turning uncertainties into certainty. It’s about your voyage and your victorious outcome.
- Squire Rushnell
LIKE A TREE
You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind. We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the center: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection.
- The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis
LOVE
Love sparks moments of profound goodness. Love helps us look beyond what’s best for ourselves and focus on what’s best for others. Love is what makes us put aside differences and see how much we share in common. Love helps us be kind to those who are cruel to us. And at the root of it, love -not duty- is what makes a firefighter run into a flaming building to save someone he or she has never met.
- Rudy Giuliani
EXISTENCE
Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one.
– C.G. Jung
CHILDLIKE FAITH
As a child, I can remember loving people quickly without preconceived notions and ideas, without expectations and with an innocence of faith. “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; now that I have grown, I am done with childish ways and have put them aside.” Yet, there are three areas in which we can remain childlike: in the way we love, in the way that we forgive, and in the area of faith.
Childlike faith requires trust. It requires believing without seeing. Tell a child that Santa Claus is coming down the chimney on Christmas Eve to deliver gifts to them and they believe. They believe without actually seeing him come down the chimney and eat those cookies that they so preciously left for him. Hebrews says that faith is the evidence of things hoped for, the substance of things not seen. Walking in love requires faith, faith that when we walk in love it will make a difference in another person’s life, whether we see the end result or not.
- Precious Pearl
JUGGLING
Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – work, family, health, friends and spirit – and you’re keeping all of these in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls – family, health, friends and spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for balance in your life.
- Bryan Dyson
FEAR
Fear keeps us rooted in the past. Fear of the unknown, fear of abandonment, fear of rejection, fear of not having enough, fear of not being enough, fear of the future–all these fears and more keep us trapped, repeating the same old patterns and making the same choices over and over again. Fear prevents us from moving outside the comfort–or even the familiar discomfort–of what we know. It’s nearly impossible to achieve our highest vision for our lives as long as we are being guided by our fears.
- Debbie Ford
VALUES
I decided early in life what my values were going to be. Those values basically define the direction I want my life to go. They also help me to know where I don’t want to go. Having made those big decisions, I work to manage them on a daily basis, which requires some discipline.
Discipline and decision-making complement one another. If I make decisions without having the daily discipline, I have a plan without a payoff. If I have discipline but I haven’t made the important decisions, then I have regimentation without reward. But when I put the two together, I give myself great odds for success.
- John C. Maxwell
ORIGAMI
I’ve learned that God sometimes allows us to find ourselves in a place where we want something so bad that we can’t see past it. Sometimes we can’t even see God because of it. I’ve found it’s because what God has for us is obscured from view, just around another bend in the road. All along, what God wants for us is something much different, something more tailored to us. While painful at the time, I can see now, many years later when I look in the rearview mirror of my life, evidence of God’s tremendous love and unfolding adventure for me. And when each of us looks back at all the turns and folds God has allowed in our lives, I think we’ll conclude in the end that maybe we’re all a little like human origami and the more creases we have, the better.
- Love Does, Bob Goff
INSTRUMENT
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; when there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; and where there is sadness, joy.
Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood, as to understand, to be loved as to love; for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying [to ourselves] that we are born to eternal life.
- St. Francis of Assisi
FORGIVENESS
After spending a lifetime counseling other couples, I am convinced that there are no healthy marriages without apology and forgiveness. I draw this conclusion from the reality that all of us are human and humans sometimes do and say things that are demeaning to other people. These unloving words and actions create emotional barriers between the people involved. Those barriers do not go away with the passing of time. They are removed only when we apologize and the offended party chooses to forgive.
I wish I had known that apologizing is a sign of strength.
- Gary D. Chapman
WISDOM
Being a student and asking questions will produce knowledge. Knowledge is good. It is the first step toward gaining wisdom, and it takes wisdom to build a life, a home and a family. Wisdom is more than knowledge. It certainly requires knowledge about what is true, but wisdom is knowledge coupled with knowing what to do. Wisdom comes from experience – your own or, for the smart ones out there, that of others. Wisdom has a cost. You don’t need to stick your hand in the fire to know that it is hot. It’s enough to see the burn on the person who did.
-Holly Wagner
TWO WOLVES
One evening a Cherokee elder told his grandson about the battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between the two ‘wolves’ that live inside us all. One is Unhappiness. It is fear, worry, anger, jealousy, sorrow, self-pity, resentment, and inferiority. The other is Happiness. It is joy, love, hope, serenity, kindness, generosity, truth, and compassion.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
- Native American Wisdom
JOB, CAREER, OR CALLING
One day an old woman walked up to a dusty building site where three strong, young men were working hard laying bricks. She walked up to the first man and asked him what he was doing. He replied rather rudely, “Can’t you see? I’m laying bricks. This is what I do all day – I just lay bricks.” She then asked the second man what he was doing. He replied, “I’m a bricklayer and I’m doing my work. I take pride in my craft, and I’m happy that what I do here feeds my family.” As she walked up to the third man, she could see that his eyes were full of joy and his face was as bright as the day. When she posed the same question to him, he replied with great enthusiasm, “Oh, I’m building the most beautiful cathedral in the whole world.”
Those who feel they’re following a calling experience greater satisfaction from their work and more happiness in their lives.
- A Tale of Wisdom from Happy for No Reason, Marci Shimoff
STARS & SERVANTS
Yet as I now reflect on the two groups side by side, stars and servants, the servants clearly emerge as the favored ones, the graced ones. Without question, I would rather spend time among the servants than among the stars: they possess qualities of depth and richness and even joy that I have not found elsewhere. Servants work for low pay, long hours, and no applause, “wasting” their talents and sills among the poor and uneducated. Somehow, though, in the process of losing their lives they find them.
- Philip Yancey
LIVING or EXISTING?
Living is no low-risk proposition. If life is an adventure, then danger is inherent to the journey. In the same way freedom and fear are great adversaries. How often have we surrendered our freedom under the weight of our fears? This is one of the main reasons we abdicate living for existing. As mundane and routine as it is, existing does provide for us a level of certainty, predictability, and safety. Freedom is wild and wide-open. It is filled with unchartered territory and unmapped terrain.
- Erwin McManus
RESISTANCE
Resistance is fear. But Resistance is too cunning to show itself naked in this form. Why? Because if Resistance lets us see clearly that our own fear is preventing us from doing our work, we may feel shame at this. And shame may drive us to act in the face of fear.
Resistance doesn’t want us to do this. So it brings in Rationalization. Rationalization is Resistance’s spin doctor. Instead of showing us our fear (which might shame us and impel us to do our work), Resistance presents us with a series of plausible, rational justifications for why we shouldn’t do our work. Resistance is always lying. It is an engine of destruction.
- The War of Art, Steven Pressfield
DARING GREATLY
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
- Theodore Roosevelt
IDENTITY
Freedom comes from commitment, not from copying. It comes from finding your own voice, not following another’s.
I hear people say, “I would like to be like Donald Trump” or, “I would like to be like Tiger Woods.” And I think to myself, is that is really true? Do you want to be Donald Trump or Tiger Woods? Are you willing to create the environment, the behavior, the skills and the belief system in order to have the identity that they have?
It is not about copying anything. It is about making an environment that supports the highest version of you. Out of the environment you create, you will be able to behave in a way that is congruent with the highest version of yourself. Out of this behavior, you will develop the skills. Then from the skills, you will create the belief system, and out of the belief system, you can cultivate your own identity.
- Joe Stumpf
BEAUTY FOR ASHES
As part of God’s restoration process, the Lord gives beauty for ashes. Isaiah 61:3.
You may have been hurt in the past and have kept the ashes of that hurt somewhere close at hand. Every once in a while you may get them out and regrieve over them. But you need to let go of those ashes, allowing the wind of the Holy Spirit to blow them away to where they cannot be found again.
This is a new day. There is no more time left for grieving over the ashes of the past. You have no future in your past.
God has the same good plan for you that He had the moment you arrived on this planet. He has never changed His mind. From the moment the enemy hurt you, God has had your restoration in His heart.
- He Restoreth My Soul, Joyce Meyer
WOMEN
You deserve a man who will honor you. You deserve a man who admires you, cares for you and is dedicated to bringing out the best in you.
I’ve told my daughter many times, “Be careful with your heart. Make sure that a man earns the right to have access to your heart. You are a beautiful young woman – don’t spend time with a man who doesn’t see that clearly.”
So many girls today don’t believe they are valuable as a woman – “a loved without measure daughter of the king.” Women so often, deep inside, believe they need to make significant compromises, try to be someone they are not or tolerate abusive, manipulative or exploitive relationships to be loved and honored.
Right after a painful breakup – young women can be more vulnerable to feeling bad about who they are – more than any other time in their life. Some retreat into some quiet depressing zone – others launch into overdrive.
You have something to do in the world that is more satisfying than you could imagine. Using the powerful quality that is discovered in being a compassionate, smart and confident woman can completely transform how you see yourself and how you see life.
- Oasis LA Church, Pastor Philip Wagner
MEN
It takes more courage to reveal insecurities than to hide them, more strength to relate to people than to dominate them, more ‘manhood’ to abide by thought-out principles rather than blind reflex. Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles and an immature mind.
- Alex Karras
RELATIONSHIPS
I’m puzzled by lovers who claim that their romantic partner is the only person they need in their lives or that time together is the only activity necessary for emotional fulfillment. Humans are designed to live in groups, explore ideas, and constantly learn new skills. Trying to get all this input from one person is like trying to get a full range of vitamins by eating only ice cream. When a couple believes “We must fulfill all of each other’s needs,” each becomes exhausted by the effort to be all things to the other and neither can develop fully as an individual.
It amazes me how often my clients’ significant others feel threatened when the clients revive childhood passions or take up new hobbies. I encourage people to bring their spooked spouses to a session so we can discuss their fears. The hurt partners usually come in sounding something like this: “How come you have to spend three hours a week playing tennis (or gardening or painting)? Are you saying I’m not enough to keep you happy?” The healthiest response to such questions is “That’s right, our relationship isn’t enough to make me completely happy—and if I pretended it were, I’d stunt my soul and poison my love for you. Ever thought about what you’d like to do on your own?” Sacrificing all our individual needs doesn’t strengthen a relationship. Mutually supporting each other’s personal growth does
- Martha Beck
PERMISSION TO LIVE
For years, I have said to myself, “I want to go to Italy. I want to learn all about the culture.” But I denied myself that pleasure because I had another voice that said, “I have to work. I can’t take time off. Going to Italy, going to Europe, is selfish and I’ll do that when I retire. I’ll do that when I’m done working.” The trip to Italy would be something that I have to save for the end of my life. Now I’m telling you the truth about what’s holding me back from really living my dream and really living my life, I had to reflect on my deepest truth, that I was holding back because I wasn’t giving myself permission to really live a life that I chose to live.
- Joe Stumpf
SUPPORTIVE NETWORK
We all need more than God and a best friend. We need a group of supportive relationships. The reason is simple: having more than one person in our lives allows our friends to be human. To be busy. To be unavailable at times. To hurt and have problems of their own. To have time alone. Then, when one person can’t be there for us, there’s another phone number to call.
We’re all a group of lumpy, bumpy, unfinished people, who ask for help and give help, who ask again and give again. And when our supportive network is strong enough, we all help each other mature into what God intended us to be: “showing forbearance to one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:2-3)
- Boundaries, Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend
THE MISSING PIECE
Humans, as a species, are constantly, and in every way, comparing themselves to one another, which, given the brief nature of their existence, seems an oddity and, for that matter, a waste. Nevertheless, this is the driving influence behind every human’s social development, their emotional health and sense of joy, and, sadly, their greatest tragedies. It is as though something that helped them function and live well has gone missing, and they are pining for that missing thing in all sorts of odd methods, none of which are working. Their greater tragedy is that very few people understand they have the disease. This seems strange as well because it is obvious. To be sure, it is killing them, and yet sustaining their social and economic systems. They are an entirely beautiful people with a terrible problem.
Now that God was gone, now that He wasn’t around to help us feel that we were loved and important and good, we were looking for it in each other, in a jury of peers.
- Searching for God Knows What, Don Miller
SAFE PEOPLE
We would all want “safe people” in our lives that help us. But the problem is, how do we recognize them? What do they look like? When we asked people to describe a “safe person” to us, they gave us these descriptions:
A person who loves me no matter how I am being or what I do
A person whose influence develops my ability to love and be responsible
Someone who creates love and good works within me
Someone who gives me an opportunity to grow
Someone who increases love within me
Someone I can be myself around
Someone who allows me to be on the outside what I am on the inside
Someone who helps me to deny myself for others and God
Someone who allows me to become the me that God intended
Someone whose life touches mine and leaves me better for it
Someone who touches my life and draws me closer to who God created me to be
Someone who helps me to love others more
- Safe People, Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend
FUTURE
The future-based person sees the Big Opportunity is ahead of them. They believe that the best is yet to come. They know that a stronger, more evolved version of themselves is yet to arrive because they are always creating bigger, bolder promises. And they must grow into that future. They are a future-based person because they are constantly creating a more evolved person that takes intentional, intelligent risks because they believe in themselves. They have a strong sense of self-image and they know that, because they are always learning and growing and taking full responsibility and adding continuous value to other people’s lives, that their future is brighter than ever before.
- Joe Stumpf
PAIN
Pain is a pesky part of being human, I’ve learned it feels like a stab wound to the heart, something I wish we could all do without, in our lives here. Pain is a sudden hurt that can’t be escaped. But then I have also learned that because of pain, I can feel the beauty, tenderness, and freedom of healing. Pain feels like a fast stab wound to the heart. But then healing feels like the wind against your face when you are spreading your wings and flying through the air! We may not have wings growing out of our backs, but healing is the closest thing that will give us that wind against our faces.
- C. JoyBell C.
SUFFERING
The question was whether an ape which was being used to develop a poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously, the group replied that of course it would not; with its limited intelligence, it could not enter the world of man, i.e., the only world in which the meaning of its suffering would be understandable. Then I pushed forward with the following question: “And what about man? Are you sure that the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos? Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man’s world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?”
- Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Emil Frankl
GRIEVING
And I felt like my heart had been so thoroughly and irreparably broken that there could be no real joy again, that at best there might eventually be a little contentment. Everyone wanted me to get help and rejoin life, pick up the pieces and move on, and I tried to, I wanted to, but I just had to lie in the mud with my arms wrapped around myself, eyes closed, grieving, until I didn’t have to anymore.
- Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott
WOUNDS
We are all wounded. But wounds are necessary for his healing light to enter into our beings. Without wounds and failure and frustrations and defeats, there will be no opening for his brilliance to tickle in and invade our lives. Failures in life are courses with very high tuition fees, so I don’t cut classes and miss my lessons: on humility, on patience, on hope, on asking others for help, on listening to God, on trying again and again and again.
- You Have the Power to Create Love, Bo Sanchez