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Today's
quotation:
Join the great company of those who make
the barren places of life
fruitful with kindness. Carry a
vision of heaven in your hearts, and
you shall make your
name, your college, the world, correspond to
that vision. Your success and happiness lie within you.
External
conditions are the accidents of life,
its outer wrappings. The great,
enduring realities are love and service. Joy
is the holy fire that
keeps our purpose warm and our
intelligence aglow. Resolve to
keep happy, and your joy
and you shall form
an invincible
host against difficulty.
Helen Keller
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Today's
Meditation:
Helen
Keller tells me that it's all within my control.
That what I do and the way I approach the world determine
whether or not I'm happy, whether or not I'm
successful. My life and my happiness are not a
result of the "accidents of life," but a result
of the "vision of heaven" that I carry in my
heart.
I'll
be the first to admit that I'm not all that good at
consistently carrying such a vision. I am quite good
at seeing things in a somewhat negative way, at being
judgmental and jumping to conclusions. I miss many
opportunities to serve others, mostly because my mind and
self are caught up in something else, and I completely
miss the chances that so often come my way.
But
when I read passages such as this one, I'm reminded that
the world I live in corresponds to what I put into
it. It's a mirror, and if I face it with darkness
and want, then that's what it gives back to me. If I
bring to it kindness and thoughts of success and love and
service and joy, guess what the world gives back to
me? Sometimes it takes a while, because the world
gives back in its own time, but it does come. God's
the same way--he does things in his time, because he knows
when the best time for us has truly arrived.
If
I face the world with an attitude of want and boredom and
criticism, then guess what the world gives back? On
Christmas and birthdays, we don't give crappy presents to
the people we love, so why would we give a gift of a
crappy attitude to this life that has given us so
much? Especially when we know that if we give a
crappy attitude, that's what life is going to reflect
right back at us?
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