Showing Off

Jesus opened a five-gallon can of worms the day He preached His Sermon on the Mount. There wasn’t a Pharisee within gunshot range who wouldn’t have given his last denarius to have seen Him strung up by sundown. They hated Him because He refused to let them get away with their phony religious drool!

Tightwads

Mrs. Bertha Adams, 71 years old, died alone in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Easter Sunday. The coroner’s report read: “Cause of death . . . malnutrition.” She had wasted away to fifty pounds.

Releasing Impossibilities

When you face an impossibility, leave it in the hands of the Specialist! Refuse to calculate. Refuse to doubt. Refuse to work it out by yourself. Refuse to worry or encourage others to worry. Stand against that.

Praying to Your Friend

Francois Fenelon, a seventeenth-century Roman Catholic Frenchman, said this about prayer: Tell God all that is in your heart, as one unloads one’s heart, its pleasures and its pain, to a dear friend. Tell Him your troubles, that He may comfort you; tell Him your joys, that He may sober them; tell Him your longings, that He may purify them; tell Him your dislikes, that He may help you to conquer them; talk to Him of your temptations, that He may shield you from them; show Him the wounds of your heart, that He may . . .

Physicians

Of all the professions, that of the physician has to be the most paradoxical. Brilliant and quick-thinking . . . yet unable to write so that anybody (except a pharmacist) can decipher the words. Decisive and disciplined . . . yet more preoccupied than an overworked inventor on the edge of a discovery. He’s the only guy I know who can have both hands in your mouth while asking you three questions back to back as he stares up your nose and has his mind on his golf game. Honest and principled . . . yet lies through his teeth every time he says, “This won’t hurt a bit . . . you’ll hardly feel it.”

The Ultimate Class Act

Class Action is a class act. It’s a film about two lawyers who go head-to-head, both in court and in life. They are father and daughter . . . on opposite sides of a complicated case charged with the full spectrum of emotions.

Staying in Step

Better than any other word I can think of, change describes our world. Vast, sweeping changes, especially in the last 150 years. Simply to survive requires adjusting, and to make any kind of significant dent calls for a willingness to shift in style and to modify methods. Consider two of the more pronounced changes in our world.

Restoring Compassion

As one understanding soul expressed it: “Compassion is not a snob gone slumming. It’s a real trip down inside the broken heart of a friend. It’s feeling the sob of the soul. It’s sitting down and silently weeping with your soul-crushed neighbor.”

Nostalgic Musings

For over an hour the other day I strolled down Nostalgia Lane with a September 4, 1939, copy of Time magazine. What a journey! Pickups sold for $465 and best-selling books cost $2. Big news in the music world was Bing Crosby, whose records sold for 35 cents a platter. What was most intriguing, however, was the international scene, as presented by the staff writers. The threat of war was a slumbering giant, and Adolf Hitler’s name appeared on almost every page of the Foreign News section.

Forgotten Side of Success

We are a success-saturated society. The telltale signs are everywhere. Each year dozens of books and magazines, scores of audiotapes and videotapes, and hundreds of seminars offer ideas, motivation, techniques, and promises of prosperity.