Month: August 2008

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The Meaning of Life…

The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. 

That meaning may come from work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage (exhibited during difficult times). 

 Things beyond your control can take away everything you have except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to a situation. 

 Life has meaning under any condition, even miserable ones. 

 Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. 

 Success is like happiness, it cannot be pursued; it must come afterward and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as a by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. 

 Happiness and success must happen by not caring about them. 

 Do what your conscience commands you to do and then do it to the best of your knowledge. Then in the long run, success will follow you because you have forgotten to think about it. 

 Pleasure is a by-product and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree it is made the goal itself. 

 We as humans must have the dynamic tension that is created by the never-ending quest to be more than we are. 

 We must never arrive at the destination we desire, for then life will have no further purpose for us. 

 When we stop growing, we die.

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Frozen Dinner Christianity

In the Bible, Jesus spoke in parables to highlight a message that we could understand and apply to our lives. I believe He still is doing that today. 

 Being a new Christian, I am hungry for knowledge of how He wants me to live and act and think. When I read the Bible, it is almost like food. It fills me in ways unlike anything else I have ever experienced. It’s so simple…all one has to do is read the directions…just like a TV dinner. 

Look at the package of a TV Dinner. 

  1.  It’s an image of perfection. Everything is in its compartment – in perfect order. 
  2. It tells you how good it is for you. 
  3. It gives you rules or directions to make it as the maker intended. 
  4. It has been inspected – so you know you can trust that it is safe. 
  5. It gives you details of everything that went into making it. 
  6. It tells you how long it is good for. 
  7. It tells you what to do if you have questions.

 Pretty exciting huh! Now let’s open the box and see how perfect we look! 

The first thing we notice is the transparency layer that separates the food from the box. 

You must wonder why the maker wanted us to see how ugly the food was! 

The reality is… 

  1. It’s cold and hard. 
  2. It looks nothing like the perfect package did! 
  3. Things aren’t in order like the photo 
  4. It’s not appealing at all 
  5. It almost looks sinful – it’s hardly what the photo looks like. 

Our first response is… “I want the package! I want to be like that!”  

If I saw this frozen lump in the market, would I have bought it? Probably not… I needed the box to show me what it COULD look like if I follow the directions. 

I needed the box, I needed the directions. 

If I just leave it alone to thaw out will it taste good? Probably not… I need the HEAT! 

The directions tell us to first vent the transparency layer. In some cases, it requires us to remove the transparency layer completely! Won’t it burn? 

The makers know that when the heat is applied to the cold, pressure builds because the steam that previously kept the food frozen must escape. As more heat is applied to the dinner, it slowly becomes more and more like the photo. 

The promises that were made on the package have been kept. However… is it as perfect looking as the photo? 

No – but it still gives us the nutrition that it promised and it fills us like we needed. 

And even after it has served to fill our stomachs – it provides a sweet dessert for us to enjoy! 

How sweet THAT is!