The story is told of a student taking an exam, who had studied hard and knew all the material, so he breezed through the first nine questions. When he got to the last question, however, he was stuck. It read, “What is the first name of the woman who cleans this school?”
He figured it was some kind
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Episcopal/Anglican
In the 44th chapter of his book, My Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis responds to Christ’s admonition to turn our focus away from the things of this world with the following prayer:
“To what have we come, Lord? Behold, we bewail a temporal loss. We labor and fret for a small gain, while loss of
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Episcopal/Anglican
Henry Ford’s mansion, “Fairlane,” still stands in Dearborn, Michigan, as a master example of mankind’s inventiveness.
Ford chose the beauty of the sloping banks of the River Rouge as the site for his new building. The mansion has 55 rooms on three floors, with eight fireplaces, including one made
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Episcopal/Anglican
Just imagine you’d spent days and days doing a 1000 piece jigsaw and just when you thought you would finally finish it, you found there was a piece missing. How would you feel?
It wouldn’t matter that 999 pieces were perfectly in place, you’d still notice the piece that was
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Episcopal/Anglican
Joseph Valachi was a gangster who worked for various crime bosses in the Mafia during the mid-20th Century. He handled mostly low-level criminal activity such as numbers rackets and gambling.
Valachi was eventually arrested for dealing heroin, along with his crime boss at the time, Vito Genovese.
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Episcopal/Anglican
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Naval aviation training includes an indoctrination session in what looks like a ride from some amusement park. The device takes up an entire huge room, and has individual containers attached to a larger wheel, allowing the person inside to be spun in multiple directions as the main wheel spins
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Episcopal/Anglican
Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch Christian who was sent with her family to a Nazi prison camp for hiding Jews during World War II. Her family had been fairly well off before the war, but when the Nazis imprisoned her, she lost everything, including her sister.
She later said, “I’ve learned that we
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Denomination:
Episcopal/Anglican
We can’t be a servant if we think we’re in charge. There’s an old blues song by B.B. King called, “Paying the Cost to Be the Boss.” Jesus is calling us to something different when we carry the cross and follow him. We’re “paying the cost to not be the boss.” Being a
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Episcopal/Anglican
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Do we have that fire in the belly to carry our cross when things get tough?
The other day (Thursday), I met a Marine Sergeant who is recuperating from wounds he received about 14 months ago. The explosion damaged multiple vertebrae, his left hip, and parts of his legs. His entire left side
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Episcopal/Anglican
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A Baptist was visiting Rome and decided to tour the Vatican while he was there. Standing outside St. Peter’s Basilica, he noticed a long line of people stretching from the courtyard into the church doors. So he asked on of them what the line was for.
A woman in line told him they were waiting to
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Episcopal/Anglican
Walker Percy, in his book Lost in the Cosmos, describes a scenario that can help us be a little more introspective. Imagine you’re bringing your garbage can out one evening. You roll it down your driveway, out to the street and you see your neighbor, John.
You say hi, and he says hi.
Then he
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Episcopal/Anglican
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We think that God wants us to try something on our own first, and then come to him in prayer for help only after we’ve worked at it and can’t figure it out. We hear the saying, “God helps those who help themselves” and think it’s true. Many people even believe it’s in the Bible. It’s not. It
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Episcopal/Anglican
A Roman historian named Tertullian, who lived in the late second to early third centuries (AD 155-220), wrote that even those who opposed Christianity knew that the mutual love of those who followed Christ was unique.
“Our care for the derelict and our active love have become our distinctive sign
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Episcopal/Anglican
The official acceptance of Christianity enacted by Constantine in AD 313, led to nearly a half-century of tolerance under Roman rule until Julian the Apostate, a Roman emperor who reigned from AD 361-363, tried to destroy Christianity by persecuting Christians.
Even he admitted that “the godless
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Denomination:
Episcopal/Anglican
In William Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice (Act 1, Scene 3), one of the characters (Antonio) says:
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling
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Episcopal/Anglican
I remember a few years ago, when I was stationed at Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, some of the students had designed and created a satellite that was launched during one of the space shuttle missions. I wrote an article about it, and while interviewing the professor in charge of
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Episcopal/Anglican
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Many people claim that their faith is a personal matter, not public. So it’s OK to tear down the symbols of our faith, like a cross on Mt. Soledad, or removing a small cross from the official seal of Los Angeles, while leaving a large image of the goddess Pomona intact — a pagan image of the Roman
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Episcopal/Anglican
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In 1863 President Lincoln designated April 30th as a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer. Let me read a portion of his proclamation on that occasion:
"It is the duty of nations, as well as of men, who owe their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and
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Episcopal/Anglican
The second richest man in Rockefeller’s time was Andrew Carnegie (car-NEGG-ee). He spent the first 66 years of his life accumulating wealth, and then spent the last 18 giving as much of it away as he could. He said, “I resolved to stop accumulating and begin the infinitely more serious and
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Denomination:
Episcopal/Anglican