“You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.”
– Rabindranath Tagore
Category Archives: Food for Thought
Ideas, stories, quotes, and short essays or selections from books that stimulate thoughtful consideration of a topic or spiritual principle.
Joining Church
For more than a year a little old cleaning woman, who lived on the wrong side of the tracks, had been trying to join a fashionable downtown church. The pastor was not eager to have a seedy looking person in faded, out-of-style clothes sitting in a pew next to his rich members. When she called for the fifth time to discuss membership, he put her off for the fifth time.
“I tell you what,” said the pastor, “you just go home tonight and have a talk with God about it. Later you can tell me what He said.”
The poor woman went her way. Weeks moved into months, and the preacher saw no more of her and his conscience did hurt a little. Then one day he encountered her scrubbing floors in an office building, and felt impelled to inquire, “did you have your little talk with God, Mrs. Washington?” he asked.
“Oh, my yes,” she said, “I talked with God as you suggested.”
“Ah, and what answer did He give you?” asked the pastor.
“Well, Preacher,” she said as she pushed back a wisp of stringy hair with a sudsy hand, “God said for me not to get discouraged, but to keep trying. He said that He Himself had been trying to get into your church for 20 years, with no more success than I have had.”
Source: Unknown
Don’t Look So Good
A rich man was trying to find his daughter a birthday gift when he saw a poor man with a beautiful white horse. He told the man that he would give him $500 for the horse. The poor man replied, “I don’t know mister, it don’t look so good,” and walked away.
The next day the rich man came back and offered the poor man $1000 for the horse. The poor man said, “I don’t know mister, it don’t look so good.”
On the third day the rich man offered the poor man $2000 for the horse, and said he wouldn’t take no for an answer. The poor man agreed, and the rich man took the horse home.
The rich man’s daughter loved her present. She climbed onto the horse, then galloped right into a tree.
The rich man rushed back over to the poor man’s house, demanding an explanation for the horse’s blindness. The poor man replied, “I told you it don’t look so good.”
Optional Application
Often times as Christians we also don’t look so Good. We have trouble seeing God in the events of our lives. We often look at things through a worldly personal perspective, through eyes of flesh rather that trying to see things as God sees them. When we fail to see things through God’s eyes the results can often be worse than running into a tree, yet we still insist.
Vision
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” Carl Gustav Jung
Source: Charissa Ee – theorangechalk.blogspot.com
She has a wonderfully insightful Blog. Check it out.
On the Lord’s Day
“The summer time is the one season when Satan is the most successful in getting God’s people to do everything else but what they should be doing on the Lord’s Day.”
How to have Revival
If all the sleeping folk will wake up,
If all the lukewarm folk will fire up,
If all the dishonest folk will confess up,
If all the disgruntled folk will cheer up,
If all the depressed folk will cheer up,
If all the estranged folk will make up,
If all the gossipers will shut up,
If all true soldiers will stand up,
If all the dry bones will shake up,
If all the church members will pray up…
Then we can have a revival!
–R. G. Lee
Grasping the Universe
The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. It is like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books…a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.
Albert Einstein
Fallen Man
Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement. He is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realizing that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor – that is the only way out of a hole. This process of surrender – this movement full speed astern – is repentance.
– C. S. Lewis
Every Earthly Hope
It is precisely when every earthly hope has been explored and found wanting, when every possibility of help from earthly sources has been sought and is not forthcoming, when every recourse this world offers, moral as well as material, has been drawn on and expended with no effect, when in the shivering cold every stick of wood has been thrown on the fire, and in the gathering darkness every glimmer of light has finally flickered out—it is then that Christ’s hand reaches out, sure and firm, that Christ’s words bring their inexpressible comfort, that his light shines brightest, abolishing the darkness for ever.
– Malcolm Muggeridge
The Line Separating Good and Evil
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil. It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Source: The Gulag Archipelago