Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

The Greatest Secret in the World by Og Mandino

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The Greatest Secret in the World
by Og Mandino
I greeted this day with love in my heart.
I praised my enemies.
I thought “I love you” silently to all I met today and I loved myself enough to protect my body from overindulgence and my mind from evil and despair.
I kept myself away from those whose weeping and complaining are contagious.
I avoided negative thoughts or words.
I tried to complete one more task when it was time to journey home and I did not allow the day to end in failure.
I refrained from all self-praise.
I learned at least one new thing about my profession today.
I concentrated on making each project better than the last.
I kept the market place and home separate from each other in my thoughts.
I greeted this morning with gratitude for the gift of another day.
I mourned not yesterday’s mistakes and defeats.
I wasted none of my precious time on foolishness.
I treated everyone with tenderness as if I would see them no more, and I truly lived this day as if it were my last.
I avoided all negative thoughts of failure and despair by making my actions control my thoughts.
I smile often.
I moved swiftly.
I raised my voice to strengthen my confindence.
I made allowances for the moods of others and I refused to allow any setback or problem to discolor my day.
I laughed at the world and at myself today.
I refuse to take too seriously my petty understandings.
I laughed at my problems, my heartaches, my failures, even my successes.
I maintained my perspective by telling myself throughout the day, “This too shall pass.”
I put off no distasteful chore for another time.
I moved swiftly from task to task to avoid diversion and temptation.
I overcame my fears through action.
I prayed today. I repeated a familiar prayer but I also spoke a few words of my own asking for guidance and thanking my Creator for giving me the privilege of making something of this day, and my life.
* * *I looked up this book after reading this review. It sounds intriguing.
David Cooke writes “I was intrigued by Mandino when the author of a book I found helpful said he has read this over a 100 times and it was the most life-changing book he had ever read. It is a very profound little read and I read it in one sitting. There is a nugget or two that could really make a difference to the way you do life. The book contains twelve ‘habits’ that you are encouraged to get into your thinking  over a period of 45 days. He promises you will end up earning more money at the end of reading it!! The idea was born as a book to help salesman become more effective but has since been extended as a life manual. Now, of course we already have a life manual don’t we (well done, class) but this book is not without considerable merit. Reading this might change your life and Mandino certainly wrote it for you hoping so.”

 

 

Christ, who is Sovereign over all, cries: ‘Mine!’

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“What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects – with their Christianity latent.”
C. S.Lewis


Interestingly, that is the calling I have been hearing of late–“little books!”,


Abraham Kuyper, Dutch theologian and politician writes, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which, Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’ ”


Bono, ““If the truth sets us free and it does … Why aren’t Christian singers allowed to ring true?”


“We need more stories and songs that “tell the truth,” as Walker Percy wrote in Signposts in a Strange Land, especially about the human condition. True stories that transform lives and societies. More Uncle Tom’s Cabins and less “little books about Christianity.”


Read the whole of the thought-provoking post from which these thoughts were excerpted.




http://claphamgroup.com/featured/bono-asks-can-christian-artists-ring-true/  

Possible Answers to Prayer

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Possible Answers to Prayer
Your petitions – though they continue to bear
just the one signature – have been duly recorded.
Your anxieties – despite their constant,
relatively narrow scope and inadvertent
entertainment value – nonetheless serve
to bring your person vividly to mind.
Your repentance – all but obscured beneath
a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more
concspicuous resentment – is sufficient.
Your intermittent concern for the sick,
the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes
recognizable to me, if not to them.
Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly
righteous indignation toward the many
whose habits and sympathies offend you –
these must burn away before you’ll apprehend
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passion.
Scott Cairns, Compass of Affection (Brewster Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2006), p. 91.



Read more: http://theconnexion.net/wp/?p=9324#ixzz1FpLaOtVL 
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Time and Money

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A very pink Irene and I hiking in the Everglades National Park, Florida



  

“Time” and “Money.” Titles of two very successful US magazines. And two of most people’s biggest preoccupations.


And that’s not a bad thing, necessarily. I know people who have one –or even both–of these preoccupations removed from their lives–and they are NOT happier for it.


I have friends and relatives who have plenty of money, and so do not work. But are left with a lot of restless, undirected energy.


And worse, and almost unthinkable to me, I have acquaintances and relatives for whom time hangs heavy–who do not have anything pressing, compelling or interesting to do with their time. And who are consequently sad and lethargic. 


Not having as much as we might wish of either time or money adds the adrenalin and slight stress to our days which makes them more interesting.
                                               * * *

I really hate the axiom, “Time is money.” Not that I deny it. It’s true in the way the E.M. Forster says, “Yes, oh dear, yes, the novel tells a story.”

And time is partly for taking our five talents and making them ten, as in the Parable of the Talents.

Though the idea that “time is money” adds an element of stress and poison to it. Because time is for so much more than making or saving money. It is for us to love God. To love people. To enjoy nature. To enjoy ourselves. To be happy.
                                           * * * 

 I discovered the time-money connection again today. Or maybe organization=money.
Somehow, in one of these sexist bastions that persist even in families who pride themselves in thinking for themselves– unconventionally when necessary–the assumption was made that the mother was genetically best suited for mending.

And so, when we moved in to our home almost 5 years ago, and Roy and the girls brought me shirts which needed buttons, or uniform which needed hemming, I pointed to the shower in our bedroom, in which there was a plastic crate, and said “Toss it there.” And so over 5 years, people have kept tossing clothes which needed seams or hems reinforced or buttons sown. As the pile grew and grew, it looked more and more daunting,  like more than an hour’s work.  I guess I procrastinated stopping everything to make that hour.
                                     * * * 
Yesterday, on our weekly home loving and odd job day, Friday I decide to deal with it.
I can say one thing in favour of massive procrastination: It immensely reduces your work load.
Irene was six when she started tossing things into the boxes in the shower. I find all sorts of cute girlie pink dresses. She is now a cool teen, who lives in her Gap skinny jeans, and Zara tops. 
Okay, the dresses go into the Oxfam bag. Ethereal little Laura Ashley creations. Her once favourite dresses from Monsoon which have a trailing hem. Lots of bits of school uniform. We evidently had forgotten that they lived in the shower, and had bought more expensive school uniform. Ouch!
5 shirts of Roy’s. “Roy,” I say firmly, “Let’s sort this out once and for all. Women do not have a gene for sewing buttons. It’s not like child-rearing or breast-feeding. Your fingers are as competent as mine.”

“Don’t be mean,” he says plaintively. “You know I hate mending. I have so many more interesting things to do.” “Ditto. Ditto,” I say, firmly. And so he sews his own buttons on, and now has 5 additional shirts.

Wow!
And I, I discover at the bottom, clothes I had forgotten I ever owned. Three pairs of favourite cords which lost buttons at the period of stress/comfort eating/weight gain when we moved in here. They are mended, and fit me!! I also now own a refound cloth carry bag, a sweater, and a pj top.  However, I had replaced them, forgetting they were in the shower, and now my drawers are bulgy again But that’s tomorrow’s problem, when I might again need to cut off my nose to make more room on my face, in Irene’s phrase.

So, we ask the cleaner to clean out the shower. “Does it work? ” he asks surprised. “Of course, it works,” we say. “We started chucking clothes to mend in there five years ago, and so have never used it. The expression on his face makes us laugh, and he laughs too.
                                              * * *

 Last time and money thought, and I think our lives would have been happier if had sorted this out earlier.  Time is always more precious than money, because money spent can be earned again, and money earned can be used to buy time (by farming out whatever work can be farmed out, cleaning, housekeeping chores, gardening, business admin).

And I think the best use of time is to ask God what he wants you to do with it–and then go do that.  

Is God in Everything? Hannah Whitall Smith. Quote for the Day

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Hannah Whitall Smith’s “The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life.”


Chapter Twelve: “Is God in Everything?”

“All things work together for the good of them that love the Lord.”

I learned this lesson practically and experimentally long years before I knew the scriptural truth concerning it. I was attending a prayer-meeting, when a strange lady rose to speak, and I looked at her, wondering who she could be, little thinking she was to bring a message to my soul which would teach me a grand practical lesson. She said she had great difficulty in living the life of faith, on account of the second causes that seemed to her to control nearly everything that concerned her. Her perplexity became so great that at last she began to ask God to teach her the truth about it, whether He really was in everything or not.

 After praying this for a few days, she had what she described as a vision. She thought she was in a perfectly dark place, and that there advanced toward her, from a distance, a body of light which gradually surrounded and enveloped her and everything around her. As it approached, a voice seemed to say, “This is the presence of God! This is the presence of God!” While surrounded with this presence, all the great and awful things in life seemed to pass before her—fighting armies, wicked men, raging beasts, storms and pestilences, sin and suffering of every kind. She shrank back at first in terror; but she soon saw that the presence of God so surrounded and enveloped herself and each one of these things that not a lion could reach out its paw, nor a bullet fly through the air, except as the presence of God moved out of the way to permit it. And she saw that if there were ever so thin a film, as it were, of this glorious Presence between herself and the most terrible violence, not a hair of her head could be ruffled, nor anything touch her, except as the Presence divided to let the evil through. Then all the small and annoying things of life passed before her; and equally she saw that there also she was so enveloped in this presence of God that not a cross look, nor a harsh word, nor petty trial of any kind could affect her, unless God’s encircling presence moved out of the way to let it.

 Her difficulty vanished. Her question was answered forever. God was in everything; and to her henceforth there were no second causes. She saw that her life came to her, day by day and hour by hour, directly from the hand of God, let the agencies which should seem to control it be what they might. And never again had she found any difficulty in an abiding consent to His will and an unwavering trust in His care. 

Holy Love Wins

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The love that wins is a holy love.
The love that won on the cross and wins the world is a love that is driven, determined, and defined by holiness.
It is a love that flows out of the heart of a God who is transcendent, majestic, infinite in righteousness, who loves justice as much as he does mercy; who hates wickedness as much as he loves goodness; who blazes with a fiery, passionate love for himself above all things.
He is Creator, Sustainer, Beginning and End.
He is robed in a splendor and eternal purity that is blinding.
He rules, he reigns, he rages and roars, then bends down to whisper love songs to his creatures.
His love is vast and irresistible.
It is also terrifying, and it will spare no expense to give everything away in order to free us from the bondage of sin, purifying for himself a people who are devoted to his glory, a people who have “no ambition except to do good”.
So he crushes his precious Son in order to rescue and restore mankind along with his entire creation.
He unleashes perfect judgment on the perfectly obedient sacrifice and then pulls him up out of the grave in a smashing and utter victory.
He is a God who triumphs . . .
He is a burning cyclone of passionate love.
Holy love wins.

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Listen to the Real “King’s Speech.” I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year

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“I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year, 
‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’
 And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness,
 and put your hand into the Hand of God. 
That shall be better than light, 
and safer than a known way.'”


Listen to George VI’s famous Christmas 1939 address. You can hear evidences of a conquered stutter, can’t you?
http://archives.cbc.ca/on_this_day/12/25/ 


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