Never quitting

This applies to so many aspects of life:

One of the biggest challenges in this or any age is to stick with the necessary changes we need to make and hold fast to the end. As important as beginnings are, the real test is in reaching the finish line, which requires perseverance for the long haul. Because we tend to turn things over to others--experts--we lose the opportunity to develop true self-sufficiency. [...] Going forward, we have to be willing to get past the idea stage and individually sweat the details, adjusting to unforeseen difficulties, and, above all, never quitting.

Jules Dervaes

Labels: Inspiration

posted by JBB at 5:08 PM  |  

Sakeji Ice Cream

My friend Linda posted a recipe for ice cream, which was a magnificent treat for Sunday lunch at boarding school.

Labels: Recipes, Websites of worth

posted by JBB at 8:05 PM  |  

Why I am here

As quoted on Magistra Mater:

[After opinion is asked--and received--about their orders, a subordinate asks Major Whittlesey]

"Why are you here?"

"Life would be a lot simpler if we could choose our duties and obligations. But we can't. We shouldn't. That's why I am here."

~ Major Charles Whittlesey in the DVD Lost Battalion

Labels: Inspiration

posted by JBB at 11:28 AM  |  

Website recommendation

I've enjoyed reading Magistra Mater's weblog on occasion over the past few months. Carol writes well, relishes interesting books and the beauty of nature, and displays a sense of wisdom in her entries. I've appreciated her recent posts of excerpts from letters written by her mother to her father.

When I first came across her site, Carol had just written an entry about her Plymouth Brethren roots, which caught my attention, having been raised at a PB boarding school.

Labels: Websites of worth

posted by JBB at 8:11 PM  |  

The ever-improving path

Sometimes the coincidence of conversations and seemingly random Web or book browsing is just too, well, coincidental. A quote from A Circle of Quiet:

Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path... But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.

*Winston Churchill*

"Ever-improving"—either the path itself or the effects of the path on the person climbing it.

Labels: Inspiration, Websites of worth

posted by JBB at 9:23 PM  |  

Path to Freedom in the news

For all three readers who still might stop by here occasionally, check out ABC Nightline tonight to see a story about Path to Freedom.

Edit 5/16/08: The story may now be viewed online.

Labels: Path to Freedom

posted by JBB at 5:16 PM  |  

Approved Unto God

"Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." 2 Timothy 2:15

If you cannot express yourself on any subject, struggle until you can. If you do not, someone will be the poorer all the days of his life. Struggle to re-express some truth of God to yourself, and God will use that expression to someone else. Go through the winepress of God where the grapes are crushed. You must struggle to get expression experimentally, then there will come a time when that expression will become the very wine of strengthening to someone else; but if you say lazily - "I am not going to struggle to express this thing for myself, I will borrow what I say," the expression will not only be of no use to you, but of no use to anyone. Try to state to yourself what you feel implicitly to be God's truth, and you give God a chance to pass it on to someone else through you.

Always make a practice of provoking your own mind to think out what it accepts easily. Our position is not ours until we make it ours by suffering. The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, December 15.

Labels: Inspiration

posted by JBB at 9:20 PM  |