You can't stand around and wait to be asked to dance.
I'm fairly convinced that the Kingdom of God is for the broken-hearted. You write of 'powerlessness. ' Join the club, we are not in control. God is.
Try your best to make goodness attractive. That's one of the toughest assignments you'll ever be given.
Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning. . . They have to play with what they know to be true in order to find out more, and then they can use what they learn in new forms of play.
Real strength has to do with helping others.
When I say it's you I like, I'm talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.
What's been important in my understanding of myself and others is the fact that each one of us is so much more than any one thing. A sick child is much more than his or her sickness. A person with a disability is much, much more than a handicap. A pediatrician is more than a medical doctor. You're MUCH more than your job description or your age or your income or your output.
Some of the strongest resistance to necessary change is the result of what Jim O'Toole has so aptly characterized as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom. "
The first thing Islam does is to destroy the self image of the believers. It convinces them that without Islam they are worthless creatures only fit for hellfire. It tells them that their culture is jahelyyah (ignorance) and their ancestral religion was taaghoti (satanic). They are made to despise their identity and selfhood and seek their glory in their submission to Islam and slavery to its deity who was Muhammad's own alter ego.
The hardest thing is to endure the applause of fools, and patiently suffer the booing, while with the bravissimo of the foolish one would rather strike them between the ears.
I love being the age I am, because if there's enough pain or grief, I have enough experience now to realize that there's joy coming around the corner.