Morning Prayer

O, Holy Spirit, beloved of my soul, I adore You. Enlighten me, guide me, strengthen me, console me. Tell me what I should do. Give me your orders. I promise to submit myself to all that You desire of me and to accept all that you permit to happen to me. Let me only know Your will.

Lincoln's Pockets

“The date was February 12, 1976. A strange but significant announcement was made public. For the first time, the world was told the contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets on the night he was assassinated... At the risk of sounding cheesy, Abe Lincoln still speaks to us from his pockets. Inside the famous President’s pockets were two pairs of glasses, an ivory pocketknife, and a large white Irish linen handkerchief, slightly used, with ‘A. Lincoln’ embroidered in red. But one other significant thing was found carefully tucked in his pocket that night. It was a newspaper article on his presidency written by a guy named John Bright. The article had obviously been carefully cut and folded, as though Lincoln had taken precise measures to make sure he would be able to refer to it often.

So what’s so unusual about that article? First, you need to know something about the political tenor at that time to understand. During the period surrounding Lincoln’s assassination, the press had become relentlessly negative and brutal on the President and his leadership. Newspaper after newspaper talked about the poor job he was doing, his lack of leadership skill, and the negative impact of his administration. But, oddly enough, Lincoln was smart enough not to keep any of those newspaper articles in his pockets for frequent review. The article by John Bright was one of the few highly favorable newspaper articles published about Lincoln during this entire time period. Yet, wisely enough, this one was the only article Lincoln chose to keep close to him. I bet when things got tough, he pulled it out of his pocket and secretly glanced at the positive words again.

What kind of newspaper articles are you carrying in the pockets of your mind?”

-Jeanne Mayo

A Note on Baptism

“Believe me, no man can enter into the Kingdom of God unless birth comes to him from water and from the Holy Spirit. What is born by natural birth is a thing of nature, what is born by spiritual birth is a thing of the Spirit. Do not be surprised, then at My telling thee you must be born anew."                                         John 3:5-7

“When a man issues from the womb of his mother he is only a creature of God, as a table is the creation, in a lesser degree, of the carpenter. No man in the natural order can call God “Father”; to do this man would have to become something he is not. He must by a Divine gift share in the nature of God, as he presently shares in the nature of his parents. Man makes that which is unlike him; but he begets that which is like him. An artist paints a picture, but it is unlike the artist in nature; a mother begets a child and the child is like her in nature. Our Lord here suggests that over and above the order of making or creation, is the order of begetting, regeneration, and rebirth by which God becomes our Father."

-Fulton J. Sheen
Life of Christ

The Power of Compound Interest

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
"Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have lived today."

-Horace

Give Me A Break

A physical worker can do more work if he takes more time out for rest. Frederick Taylor demonstrated that while working as a scientific management engineer with the Bethlehem Steel Company. He observed that laboring men were loading approximately 12.5 tons of pig iron per man each day on freight cars and that they were exhausted at noon. He made a scientific study of all the fatigue factors involved, and declared that these men should be loading not 12.5 tons of pig iron per day, but 47 tons per day! He figured that they ought to do almost four times as much as they were doing, and not be exhausted. But prove it!


Taylor selected a Mr. Schmidt who was required to work by the stopwatch. Schmidt was told by the man who stood over him with a watch, “Now pick up a ‘pig’ and walk…Now sit down and rest…Now walk…Now rest.”

What happened? Schmidt carried 47 tons of pig iron each day while the other men carried only 12.5 tons per man. And he practically never failed to work at this pace during the three years that Frederick Taylor was at Bethlehem. Schmidt was able to do this because he rested before he got tired. He rested more that he worked – yet he did almost four times as much work as the others!

Time Management

If you've got a free hour you should watch this video. It's good!

Randy Pausch - Time Management Lecture