THESE THINGS I hold to be worth sharing as a gift to you

by Terry 6 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Terry

  1. Intellectual Honesty:
  Willingness to be wrong when confronted with error. Courage to take the blow of our errors and move forward.

  2. Skeptical optimism:
  Embracing an idea new to your mind; trying it to see if it works. There is more failure in those who never try.

  3. Refusal to deny reality:
  Never hide anything from yourself you feel you aren't emotionally ready to accept. Look facts right in the eye. Stand silent in the chamber of liars and shout loudest when your ears hear a lie.

  4. Refuse to divide others into camps:
  US vs THEM, GOOD vs BAD, SMART vs STUPID. Every group thinks it is right. Those who would conquer us with evil must first divide us with fear.

  5. What we Hate, we Become:
  Do we see enemies or do we see people just like us who have lost their way? Will we wound them as they have wounded us, or will we seek healing and reconciliation. Can we take their blow and rise above it or will we become the thing we have learned to hate?

  6. Defeat bad ideas with BETTER ones:
  Saying someone is wrong means nothing. Insults mean nothing. Pointing to the better path, the higher ideal, the workable plan makes us a beacon and not a whimper. Living a better life than those who accuse us repudiates them one and all.

  7. A Better Life means World Repair:
  Grasp the smallest opportunities for praise, encouragement; help and commonality. Stoop to help someone smaller than yourself. Find the kind word and speak it; you might lift a heart when that lift means everything. You and I leave this world a better place than we found it while the empty-headed ones abandon ship only to drown in their own fears.

  8. Ask yourself each day, "Am I the poison or the antidote?":
  Commitments beat complaints like Aces beat a deuce. Be the hand that builds and not the fist that bruises. The smile that encourages and not the scream that deafens. Hope is a rough sketch, but a life well-lived is a thing of great beauty.

  9. Yesterday is the starting gate and never the finish line.
• 

  prologos

  good thoughts for moving along upward. thank you.
• 

  cha ching

  Awesome! My faves:

  There is more failure in those who never try.

  Find the kind word and speak it; you might lift a heart when that lift means everything.
• 

  Terry

  I've seen it happen in my own life. Somebody said exactly the thing which ended up turning it all around for me.

  It costs nothing to make somebody's day better. It just takes seeing the opportunity.
• 

  SAHS

  That is certainly good general counsel for everyone. Sometimes, as with growing up in an organization like the Watchtower Society, one must independently and fearlessly begin taking stock of long-held beliefs and attachments using the process of elimination – which means putting all the chips on the table and shining a bright, white light on them. However, as you are alluding to, Terry, we should nevertheless be open and willing to keep our side of the street clean. We all have the right to seek our own road, but there is nothing like taking the high road regardless of our circumstances – that is the road to spiritual serenity.
• 

  rip van winkle

  marking
• 

  Vidiot

  You're getting downright poetic with your posts, lately.

  WTF???