If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
- Lilla Watson,
Aboriginal elder, educator, and activist
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
if You're up there and You can hear me, show me the way
In one of motion pictures' most moving pertayals Jimmy Stewart wasn't really acting; those tears were real.
In this 1977 article that Stewart wrote forGuideposts, the actor recalls that George "is unaware that most of the people in town are arduously praying for him. In this scene, at the lowest point in George Bailey's life, Frank Capra was shooting a long shot of me slumped in despair. In agony I raise my eyes and following the script, plead, 'God...God...dear Father in heaven, I'm not a praying man, but if You're up there and You can hear me, show me the way, I'm at the end of my rope. Show me the way, God...'
"As I said those words, I felt the loneliness and hopelessness of people who had nowhere to turn, and my eyes filled with tears. I broke down sobbing. This was not planned at all, but the power of that prayer, the realization that our Father in heaven is there to help the hopeless had reduced me to tears."
Damn the Torpedoes
The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.
- Abraham Lincoln
If we confront injustice only when we can be sure that we will succeed, we will likely never advance the Kingdom.
Of course we can and should count the cost and weigh options to determine what action will most effectively improve the situation but once the course is known we need to 'damn the torpedoes and go full steam ahead'.
The life and death of Jesus and so many of his followers is a lesson in how to change a world of power and abuse to one of love and justice. The desired results have not fully come but like leaven in the loaf the sacrifice will have its effect and the Kingdom will arise.
LH
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
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