One of my duties as church secretary is to answer the phone and refer calls. The telephone rang one day with an urgent caller on the other end. He needed to talk to the senior pastor.
I quietly opened his office door to find him praying. I returned to the phone and politely told the caller,
"I'm sorry. He's in conference long distance."
Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to outpatients at the clinic.
One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see a truly awful looking man. "Why, he's hardly taller than my eight-year-old," I thought as I stared at the stooped, shriveled body. But the appalling thing was his face, lopsided from swelling, red and raw. Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, "Good evening. I've come to see if you've a room for just one night. I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there's no bus 'til morning."
The priest said to the poor farmer, "If you had a horse, would you give it to the Lord?"
"Yes."
"And if you had a cow?"
"Absolutely."
"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it."
- unknown, although it has often been sourced to the Talmud, and refers to Micah 6:8
"Weep deeply over the life you hoped would be. Grieve the losses. Then wash your face. Trust God. And embrace the life you have."
- John Piper
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Our collection of inspiring quotes.
A discussion about Truth and Reconciliation with two members of the Wiikwemkoong First Nation, and a member and Chief of the Aundeck Omni Kaning First Nation.
To find and watch other parts of this video series, visit the playlist at:
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