One of my Cloud Couplets showed up on Daily Wisdom's page of Famous quotations and favorite quotes. My rhyme must fit in the latter category.

What? Which one is it? Go see for yourself! Oh, it's the next-to-last quote, as of today.

Friday I travel down south to Porto Alegre to teach the seminar "Total Transformation." I hope to be back Sunday. Francisco works at the Rio-Sul airline and gave me a hefty discount on the airfare. Took the people here a while to get it all figured out though.

The second edition of the 36-page handout is at the copier. Should be ready tonight. Perhaps after I've done several of these seminars (this will be the second one), I can catch all the errors, do the revisions for a final format, and print up the handout for all future events.

With all that, you probably won't hear much out of me until Monday.

See if this little quote strikes your fancy:

"I would give nothing for the simplicity which lies this side of complexity. But for the simplicity which lies on the far side of complexity, for this I would give my life!"*
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*Quoted in William A. Charland, Jr., Decide to Live (Westminster, 1979), p. 103. Charland says it's anonymous.

by, yes, me again

You only have two ways to live:
to doubt that miracles exist,
or see the whole of life as kissed
by one divine affirmative.

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On a discussion forum today, the moderator posted this quote by Albert Einstein:

     "There are only two ways to live your life.
     One as though nothing is a miracle. The other
     is as though everything is a miracle."

While neither the German genius nor my humble quatrain above use the world "miracle" in the strict biblical sense, we may use it in the popular sense of that which God wonderfully performs.

You know the right thing to do. You want to do it. But when it comes right down to it, you do something different, inferior, unsavory, unsatisfying. Paul recognized the same problem. "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want but I do the very thing I hate" (Romans 7.15, NRSV).

Why?

There is, of course, that old problem of sin.

But even for the Christian, of whom Paul also says that God is at work in him, enabling him "both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Philippians 2.13), the difficulty still arises.

Seems I keep coming back to one thing: the will. Deciding to do it and sticking by my decision.

When the will bumps into the "wanter," it often crumbles in a sniveling heap.

The key, then, is to weaken the wanter (starve it!) and strengthen the will (feed it!).

Then we may find that, where there's a will, there indeed is a way. The way.