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cspirit66
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Name: Carol
Birthday: 6/24/1986
Gender: Female
Interests: picking out paints. (ooo, alliteration!)
Expertise: hee-hee. finger painting!
Occupation: Student
Industry: Entertainment
Message: message meEmail: email me
Member Since:
1/17/2002
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Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.
proverbs 13:12
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a friendship is an open window to someone's life story, immediately pulling you in, and leaving you at once satisfied by the unique bond created through tears and laughter.
some would say we choose our friends, but i think God chooses our friends for us.
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It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done 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 and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows 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 know neither victory nor defeat. - teddy roosevelt
Courage is not the absence of fear. It is acting in spite of it. - mark twain
Deep within all of us there is a yearning to be brave. - gary haugen
Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. - c.s. lewis
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you see, just at the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. but God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. -romans 5:6-8.
feel loved, dear Reader, for He loves us with a fierce and everlasting love. | | |
| isn't it so hard to love your neighbor sometimes? loving God is a no-brainer for most of us, but loving our neighbor, whew, that's like almost impossible sometimes. a seminary student once said to our pastor, "i love ministry, but i can't stand the people!" how awful! yet we know that is exactly how we feel in our hearts at times. our neighbors can be quite a blessing, though also a real annoyance rather quickly. they can cause us to stumble, to fall in love and to be heartbroken, to rejoice and to grieve with sorrow. our neighbors can be our best friends or the innocent children kidnapped into dirty brothels. so who exactly are our neighbors? anyone in need is our neighbor according to Jesus. it's so hard to love them when they are in need.
not only have i forgotten about loving my neighbors, i just don't know how to love my neighbors adequately.
mika and i are leading a discussion on loving God and loving your neighbor in the context of social justice. i'm wrestling with this a lot due to the painful truth of my sin. if all this time i have not been able to love my neighbor, then i may have never experienced what it's like to love God. and how much harder is it to love a neighbor who is transatlantic, suffering a pain i cannot begin to understand.
i regrettably lost sight of being truly Christ-like. Jesus loved the hard-to-loves. He embraced them and not for a single second did he forget them.
"Anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: whoever loves God must also love his brother." (1 John 4:20-21)
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life is so messy. i think if i died to myself more often i would spend more time loving my neighbor like i ought to. | | |
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