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10 Inspiring Hump Day Quotes

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I don’t know how your week is going, but I am feeling some pressure while being out of town. When my stress goes up, quotes tend to recenter and refocus me. I love when wisdom is powerfully dispelled in smallish chunks that I can remember and ruminate on. Here are some quotes that spoke to my soul tonight!

  1. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. ~Maya Angelou
  2. Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence. ~Vince Lombardi
  3. Do or do not. There is no try. ~Yoda
  4. I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. ~Michael Jordan
  5. Change your thoughts and you change your world. ~Norman Vincent Peale
  6. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck. ~ Dalai Lama
  7. I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear. ~Rosa Parks
  8. If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else. ~Booker T. Washington
  9. “Always be a first-rate version of yourself instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.” ~Judy Garland
  10.  Ask and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you. ~Jesus
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He Who Laughs…

Laughter can lift the crushed soul and help dissipate the darkness of sadness. Laughter is a powerful prayer, because it defies the thought that pain and sadness always win. Some of my deepest laughs have found birth in the dark night of the soul, which was both a surprise and a blessing. But for too long, Christianity has been the “laugh-less” religion. Jesus has been seen as a “serious,” deity with furrowed brows etching caverns of displeasure across His face. Or perhaps He has been viewed as a “humorless,” deity that tut-tuts the lighter side of life and has no time for levity. Look at all the early paintings and images of Christ and He does not look like He is enjoying life. Unfortunately, this has seeped into the DNA of a movement and needs to come to light in order to unleash the joy that Jesus died for. But in truth, the converse is reality…Jesus was full of life, love, levity and laughter.

Can you imagine the creative agency that fashioned the earth and imagined the platypus never cracked a smile?

Can you imagine that Jesus’ cultural tattoo of “a friend of sinners and a glutton” could have been earned by someone who did not engage in the fun of the people he was branded with?

Can you sense the hilarity behind the translation when Jesus said, “Hey before you judge other people, consider their sin as a sliver you are trying to remove while at the same time admitting the sin in your own life is like a log in your eye!”

It has been stated many times that Jesus’ humor gets lost in translation, and this is true. The Hebraisms and the out right funny sayings of Jesus lose their edge when we translate from Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew to English. I am thankful for translators that unearth His linguistically sharp humor, and allow Jesus to show some of His hilarity.

In Genesis, when Abraham and Sarah find out that they are going to have a baby in their advanced years, Sarah laughs…and then the baby is named Isaac which means “he laughs.”

Have you ever noticed that when you smile, you have a bio-chemical reaction that changes the way you feel? Try it right now, no one is looking…take a full, deep breath and smile from your liver to the creases in your eyes.

We need to laugh more…

We need to smile from our soul…

We need to breathe in the pleasure, beauty and grace of God while we exhale anything that robs us of the joy and freedom Christ offers.

Here are some great quotes I have on laughing, or laughter…read them, smile and find something to laugh at, you’ll live longer and find more beauty in the midst of a biting reality.

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“Laughter is America’s most important export.”  ~ Walt Disney Company

“If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.”  ~Robert Frost

“I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t laugh.”  ~Maya Angelou

“The earth laughs in flowers.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”  ~ Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.”  ~ Mark Twain

“If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don’t bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man.”  ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Laughter is carbonated holiness.”  ~ Anne Lamott

“A strange thing happened to me in my dream. I was rapt into the Seventh Heaven. There sat all the gods assembled. As a special dispensation I was granted the favor to have one wish. “Do you wish for youth,” said Mercury, “or for beauty, or power, or a long life; or do you wish for the most beautiful woman, or any other of the many fine things we have in our treasure trove? Choose, but only one thing!” For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed the gods in this wise: “Most honorable contemporaries, I choose one thing — that I may always have the laughs on my side.” Not one god made answer, but all began to laugh. From this I concluded that my wish had been granted and thought that the gods knew how to express themselves with good taste: for it would surely have been inappropriate to answer gravely: your wish has been granted.”  ~Søren Kierkegaard

“As soap is to the body, so laughter is to the soul.”  ~ Jewish Proverb

“He that is of a merry heart has a continual feast.” ~ Proverbs 15:15

“Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.”  ~ Victor Hugo

“Laughter is the foundation of reconciliation.” ~ St. Francis de Sales

“Laughter connects you with people. It’s almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you’re just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.” ~ John Cleese

“On average, an infant laughs nearly two hundred times a day; an adult, only twelve. Maybe they are laughing so much because they are looking at us. To be able to preserve joyousness of heart and yet to be concerned in thought: in this way we can determine good fortune and misfortune on earth, and bring to perfection everything on earth.” ~ I Ching

“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.”  ~Robert Fulghum

“Laughter is an instant vacation.”  ~Milton Berle

“Laughter gives us distance. It allows us to step back from an event, deal with it and then move on.”  ~Bob Newhart

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Laughter has health benefits too, for example: (from help-guide)

  • Laughter relaxes the whole body. A good, hearty laugh relieves physical tension and stress, leaving your muscles relaxed for up to 45 minutes after.
  • Laughter boosts the immune system. Laughter decreases stress hormones and increases immune cells and infection-fighting antibodies, thus improving your resistance to disease.
  • Laughter triggers the release of endorphins, the body’s natural feel-good chemicals. Endorphins promote an overall sense of well-being and can even temporarily relieve pain.
  • Laughter protects the heart. Laughter improves the function of blood vessels and increases blood flow, which can help protect you against a heart attack and other cardiovascular problems.
  • Laughter dissolves distressing emotions. You can’t feel anxious, angry, or sad when you’re laughing.
  • Laughter helps you relax and recharge. It reduces stress and increases energy, enabling you to stay focused and accomplish more.
  • Humor shifts perspective, allowing you to see situations in a more realistic, less threatening light. A humorous perspective creates psychological distance, which can help you avoid feeling overwhelmed.

Authors Melinda Smith M.A and Jeanne Segal Ph.D note the following tips to help bring more laughter to your daily life:

  • Smile. Smiling is the beginning of laughter. Like laughter, it’s contagious. Pioneers in “laugh therapy,” find it’s possible to laugh without even experiencing a funny event. The same holds for smiling. When you look at someone or see something even mildly pleasing, practice smiling.
  • Count your blessings. Literally make a list. The simple act of considering the good things in your life will distance you from negative thoughts that are a barrier to humor and laughter. When you’re in a state of sadness, you have further to travel to get to humor and laughter.
  • When you hear laughter, move toward it. Sometimes humor and laughter are private, a shared joke among a small group, but usually not. More often, people are very happy to share something funny because it gives them an opportunity to laugh again and feed off the humor you find in it. When you hear laughter, seek it out and ask, “What’s funny?”
  • Spend time with fun, playful people. These are people who laugh easily–both at themselves and at life’s absurdities–and who routinely find the humor in everyday events. Their playful point of view and laughter are contagious.
  • Bring humor into conversations. Ask people, “What’s the funniest thing that happened to you today? This week? In your life?”

So, laugh until your belly hurts and then just a little bit more!

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God Thoughts

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Sometimes my mind simply stops to dwell on, or ruminate upon the reality of God. There are times when God seems obvious and there are times when God seems manufactured. I imagine a world with God and wonder why He doesn’t move differently, or to be more precise, why He doesn’t seem to do things the way I think He should do them. Then, I imagine a world without the grace of God, and I can only imagine what kind of existence we would have if God’s common grace were not suppressing the darkness that it is. Since we don’t truly know how much intervention is already going on, we can’t really imagine what chaos wound ensue if that sovereign hand were removed completely…hmmm, things to ponder.

So tonight I began to look back through some of my collected thoughts and quotes about God. Maybe I was looking through these words to remind myself that God is still moving. Maybe I simply needed a good grid-shift in the midst of some trying circumstances. Whatever the subconscious reason, I invite you to ruminate with me, and just maybe, we all will experience a greater capacity to trust, love and live in a God-reality.

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you. ~C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

I would rather walk with God in the dark than go alone in the light.  ~Mary Gardiner Brainard

Some people always sigh in thanking God.  ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Surely your longings and feelings arise from the God who created you. They were created in order to be filled, not crushed. Surely we shall find peace not by eliminating desire, but by finding its fulfillment and satisfaction in the One who created it. ~Sundar Singh

I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.  ~Voltaire

You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. ~Anne Lamott

Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion. ~Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child

Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message. ~Malcolm Muggeridge

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “All right, then, have it your way.”  ~C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 1943

God is not a cosmic bellboy for whom we can press a button to get things done.  ~Harry Emerson Fosdick

A man with God is always in the majority.  ~John Knox

Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God. ~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Your faith will not fail while God sustains it; you are not strong enough to fall away while God is resolved to hold you. ~ J.I. Packer, Knowing God

Any fool can count the seeds in an apple.  Only God can count all the apples in one seed.  ~Robert H. Schuller

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.  ~ C.S. Lewis

God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas but for scars. ~Elbert Hubbard

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell. ~C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

I sought to hear the voice of God and climbed the topmost steeple, but God declared: “Go down again – I dwell among the people. ~John Henry Newman

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. ~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Sometimes God allows what he hates to accomplish what he loves. ~Joni Eareckson Tada, The God I Love

The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!”
~Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Because God has made us for Himself, our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. ~Augustine of Hippo

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? ~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

God made the world for the delight of human beings– if we could see His goodness everywhere, His concern for us, His awareness of our needs: the phone call we’ve waited for, the ride we are offered, the letter in the mail, just the little things He does for us throughout the day. As we remember and notice His love for us, we just begin to fall in love with Him because He is so busy with us — you just can’t resist Him. I believe there’s no such thing as luck in life, it’s God’s love, it’s His. ~Mother Teresa, A Simple Path: Mother Teresa

The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. ~Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. ~A.W. Tozer

In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there’s no danger that we will confuse God’s work with our own, or God’s glory with our own. ~Madeleine L’Engle

There is a deep and natural craving in the human heart that can be satisfied nowhere except in God. Our being in this world is a test, a preparation for the deepest state of spiritual communion. But most of us, suppressing our deepest longings and disdaining God, seek satisfaction from this world. Such a path can lead only to despair. ~Sundar Singh

God moves in a mysterious wayHis wonders to perform;He plants his footsteps in the sea,And rides upon the storm. ~William Cowper, Olney Hymns

We are but a point, a single comma, and God is the literature of eternity. ~Henry Ward Beecher, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit

Earth’s crammed with heaven,And every common bush afire with God;But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,And daub their natural faces unaware. ~Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be. ~Anne Frank

God will not permit any troubles to come upon us, unless He has a specific plan by which great blessing can come out of the difficulty. ~Peter Marshall

God has given us two hands, one to receive with and the other to give with. ~Billy Graham
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Sunday Night Quotes 4/1/2012-Love


The focus for tonight’s list of quotes is “Love.” In so many ways, our culture has lessened, or cheapened the concept/definition of love. We easily say we love pizza and our kids in the same sentence, yet the depth and reality of what we mean is very different. So tonight, pause, think, and ponder. What is love?

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. ~Lao Tzu

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love. ~Mother Teresa

If you could only love enough, you could be the most powerful person in
the world. ~Emmet Fox

Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says ‘I need you because I love you.’ ~Erich Fromm

Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit. ~Khalil Gibran

Love is always bestowed as a gift – freely, willingly and without expectation. We don’t love to be loved; we love to love. ~Leo Buscaglia

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. ~Aristotle

“I’ve told you these things for a purpose: that my joy might be your joy, and your joy wholly mature. This is my command: Love one another the way I loved you. This is the very best way to love. Put your life on the line for your friends.”       ~Matthew 15:11-12 (Message)

1 Corinthians 13:1-10 (Message)

1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. 2If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. 3-7If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have.
Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head,
Doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,”
Doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn’t revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

8-10Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.