Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.-

Corrie ten Boom

Adult: "What did you learn from Zechariah?"

6-yr-old: "How not to talk to an angel."

"But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint." - Edmund Burke

"We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I confess the Cross, because I know of the Resurrection." - St. Cyril of Jersualem

“When the only verse of the Christmas story you identify with is ‘They came with haste,’ it’s time to reevaluate the season.” - Alice N. Daniels

“Fear will always knock on your door. Just don’t invite it in for dinner. And for heaven’s sake, don’t offer it a bed for the night.” - Max Lucado

“There are no rules here. We are trying to accomplish something.” - Thomas Edison

“[The] new phones don’t require punching buttons, which were already too small for my fingers. Now it’s all touch screen technology and hooked up to the Internet….Not only do I need a degree in computer science to work the thing¸ but my fingers haven’t gotten any smaller. The first night I ended up accidentally calling a number of people, including a former high school girlfriend who now lives in Idaho or something, at 11 p.m. The next morning I apparently ‘poked’ another woman on Facebook whom I haven’t seen in 15 years. I never bothered with this poking business on Facebook before, so I don’t understand it. But if you would’ve told me 10 years ago I’d need my phone to tell when or if I poked a woman, I would’ve thrown my pager at you.” - Tony Hicks

“We feel naked if we go to the store and forget to bring our cell phone-camera-Internet browser because maybe there’s a melon in the produce section that looks just like our old wood-shop teacher’s head and we absolutely NEED to immediately send a picture to all 455 people we went to high school with, but haven’t seen in 21 years.” - Tony Hicks

"The beauty of the internet is that you can attribute any quote you want to any famous figure throughout history, link it to a wiki page that you edited, and nobody will ever question its validity." - Thomas Jefferson

"We have a strange prejudice nowadays — perhaps it is really a superstition — that truth is a function of time, i.e., that being later in time and truer are more or less identical, as if the best way to avoid error is to hold off being born as long as possible." - Benjamin Wiker

"We live in an era when the passions of ideology and the passions of religion become joined in certain zealots. Thus we hear intemperate talk, in many communions and denominations, of Christian revolution. Most of the men and women who use such language undoubtedly mean a bloodless, if abrupt, transformation of social institutions. Yet some of them nowadays, as in past times, would not scruple at a fair amount of bloodletting in their sacred cause. Whether bloodless or bloody, an upheaval justified by the immanentizing of Christian symbols of salvation defies the Beatitudes and devours its children. Soon the Christian ideologues (an insane conjunction) find themselves saddled and ridden by some 'great bad man', a Cromwell at best." - Russell Kirk

"Populism is a revolt against the Smart Guys. I am very ready to confess that the present Smart Guys, as represented by the dominant mentality of the Academy and of what the Bergers call the Knowledge Class today, are insufficiently endowed with right reason and moral imagination. But it would not be an improvement to supplant them by persons of thoroughgoing ignorance and incompetence." - Russell Kirk

"I have read the entire Qur'an and can find no guidance in it on how Muslims should live as a minority in a society. I have read the entire New Testament and can find no guidance in it on how Christians should live as a majority." - a Muslim

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." - Cicero

10 Rules for Apologetics

Over the years, I have learned five things about the sort of people who write strangers to ask religious questions: 1) even a question about an apparently trivial matter or a wildly unfair criticism may reflect a real spiritual struggle; 2) most inquirers are looking more for confirmation or consolation than engagement and teaching; 3) many of those who honestly want to be taught do not want to be taught that much, beyond a “yes” or a “no” and a two sentence explanation; 4) many who ask your advice believe they know as much as you even though they have never read more than three pages on the subject; and 5) few will read you closely and will instead often misread what you’ve written as agreement or approval because that is what they really want.

Here are ten rules developed from my experiences writing people I don't know, for those who find them helpful.

They also apply to the kinds of discussions any Christian whose faith is known will get into, with the curious neighbor, the office atheist (usually a relative of the village atheist), the spouse's most annoying uncle, even the skeptic in the next pew on Sunday mornings. You may know almost nothing, and feel hopelessly inadequate, but they asked you and you must give them a reason for the hope that is within you.

First, not all questions need or deserve an answer, but you can only sometimes discern the cases in which a tactful silence, a gentle non-answer, or a rebuke is best. Sometimes rudeness masks a serious search and wide-eyed openness hides a desire only for endless discussion or for trapping you into writing something on which they can leap. One learns to recognize the types with practice, but never with much assurance. (more...)

"It is not for us to imagine that we can prove the truth of Christianity by our own arguments; nobody can prove the truth of Christianity except the Holy Spirit, by his own almighty work of renewing the blinded heart." - J.I. Packer, Knowing God, pg 71.

"Without the Holy Spirit there would be no gospel and no New Testament. When Christ left the world, he committed his cause to his disciples. But what sort of witnesses were they likely to prove? They had never been good pupils; they had consistently failed to understand Christ and missed the point of his teaching throughout his earthly ministry; how could they be expected to do better now that he had gone? Was it not virtually certain that, with the best will in the world, they would soon get the truth of the gospel inextricably mixed up with a mass of well-meant misconceptions, and their witness would rapidly be reduced to a twisting, garbled, hopeless muddle? The answer to this question is no - because Christ sent the Holy Spirit to them, to teach them all truth and so save them from all error, to remind them of what they had been taught already and to reveal to them the rest of what their Lord meant for them to learn." - J.I. Packer, Knowing God, pg 69.