Messages

  • How simple it sounds; how difficult it is

    “If we are getting older it will be harder to acknowledge that we have not been called to spectacular service, that we are unlikely now to make a stir in the world, that our former dreams of doing some great healing work had a great deal of personal ambition in them.

    A great many men and women have had to learn this unpalatable lesson – and then have discovered that magnificent opportunities lay all around them. We need not go to the ends of the earth to find them; we need not be young, clever, fit, beautiful, talented, trained, eloquent or very wise. We shall find them among our neighbours as well as among strangers, in our own families as well as in unfamiliar circles – magnificent opportunities to be kind and patient and understanding.”

  • Stop talking about “passing the baton”

    “Every spring, commencement speakers take the stage across the country to tell the graduates, ‘Our hopes for the future are in your hands.’ I have an urgent message for these speakers: in the name of God, don’t do it! It’s unfair to lay all responsibility for the future on the younger generation. After all, the problems they face are partly due to the fact that we, their elders, screwed up. Worse still, it’s not true that the young alone are in charge of what comes next. We—young and old together—hold the future in our hands.”

  • Dying is the way to everlasting fruitfulness

    “Dying becomes the way to everlasting fruitfulness. Here is the most hope-giving aspect of death. Our death may be the end of our success, our productivity, our fame, or our importance among people, but it is not the end of our fruitfulness. In fact, the opposite is true: the fruitfulness of our lives shows itself in its fullness only after we have died. We ourselves seldom see or experience our own fruitfulness. Often we remain preoccupied with our accomplishments and have no eye for the fruitfulness of what we live. But the beauty of life is that it bears fruit long after life itself has come to an end. Jesus said, “In all truth I tell you, unless a wheat grain falls into the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies it yields a rich harvest” (John 12:24).”

  • How to be wise

    “We are wise when we see beyond certainty to the underlying, all encompassing, ever unfolding Mystery of life. Not only does this lighten our ideological burden and open us to each Other and to Change, but it allows us to befriend the ultimately unknowable Whole. Once we see through the illusion of certainty, humility is natural, humor is natural, and paradox, ambiguity and change become furry friends and teachers on our Journey though life. In the midst of wonder, we encounter each situation with the curiosity and sense of adventure befitting wise and joyful spirits — and our wisdom expands through the learning we do as we marvel at the nuance and vastness we encounter at each bend in the road.”

  • The spirit shall order them to teach

    “In the general service of the church of God, the aged men, and aged women in the truth, are to be teachers of good things, as the Lord shall order them with his spirit, to teach and instruct, exhort, admonish, reprove, rebuke, with the holy spirit; for the least member hath an office, and every believer in the light, (which is the life in Christ,) is a member of Christ’s church, and grafted into him; and so he is the holy head of the church, and they are heirs of his order, and of his government, of the increase of which there is no end, in his eternal power and spirit.”

  • I expect to pass through this world but once

    “I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

  • Even to gray hairs will I carry you

    “‘I have made, and I will bear, and even to gray hairs will I carry you.’

    Precious promise! Forever trust in it. Dismiss all anxious fears, all quailings of the fleshly mind in contemplating your transit to another state. He who gave you your being, and appointed your place and condition in this life, will not fail to be near you when you pass through the valley of the shadow of death.”

  • How to overcome death

    “We must overcome death by finding God in it. And by the same token, we shall find the divine established in our innermost hearts, in the last stronghold which might have seemed able to withstand him.”

  • What I most regretted were my silences

    “In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?” 

  • Penn: Turning from time to eternity

    “The truest end of life is to know the life that never ends. He that makes this his care, will find it his crown at last. And he that lives to live ever, never fears dying: nor can the means be terrible to him that heartily believes the end.

    For though death be a dark passage, it leads to immortality, and that’s recompense enough for suffering of it. And yet faith lights us, even through the grave, being the evidence of things not seen.

    And this is the comfort of the good, that the grave cannot hold them, and that they live as soon as they die. For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity. Death, then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live, if we cannot bear to die.”

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