Morning Briefings

God is great, but sometimes life ain’t good, and when I pray it doesn’t always turn out like it should, but I do it anyway. I do it anyway.

– Martina McBride, Anyway from
Wake Up Laughing

Above all we need, particularly as children, the reassuring presence of a visible community, an intimate group that enfolds us with understanding and love.

– Lewis Mumford from Dwight Currie’s
How We Behave at the Feast

By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures.

– Proverbs 24:3-4

According to the Journal of the Continental Congress, our flag calls us to a moral character marked by heartiness and valor (red), purity and innocence (white), perseverance, vigilance and justice (blue). Its stripes remind us of the courage of our Founding Patriots who refused to be silent in regard to their just claims to liberty at the Boston Liberty Tree. This is because the flag of the Sons of Liberty was one of the first to use stripes to represent our states. In essence they lived out the verse that is on our Liberty Bell, ‘Proclaim liberty throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.’ (Lev 25:10)

–
providenceforum.net

I pray because I want to live life deeply and deliberately. In high school, these words of Thoreau became engraved in my heart: ‘I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to put to rout all that is not life and not when I had come to die discover that I had not lived.’

– Matthew Kelly
Rediscover Catholicism

In a world that applauds accomplishments and celebrity, it is easy to assume that God values us more highly when our ambitions and goals have been fulfilled. Thus, when we fail or are unsuccessful, we not only disappoint ourselves, but we may fear we have disappointed God.

– Karen Westerfield Tucker from
Strength for Service to God and Country

I try to live my life in such a way that when I die and my Maker asks, ‘Did you live the life I gave you?’ I can honestly answer yes.

– from Marcus Buckingham’s and Donald O. Clifton’s
Now, Discover Your Strengths

You know, Lord. You knew yesterday who I would be today, and you know today who I’ll be tomorrow. Maybe I don’t need to know myself as well as I thought.

– Maribeth Walker
A Moment With God for Graduates: Prayers for Every Graduate

Life is difficult. In the hasty confusion of our days, we easily lose sight of basic truths. When we manage to make real contact with a basic truth, sometimes we are inspired to act upon it, and thus may change our lives radically and permanently.

– P.M. Forni
Choosing Civility: The Twenty-five Rules of Considerate Conduct

Prayer is a communication between God and mankind, not a scientific formula in which everything is certain. Nor is prayer an ‘open sesame’ guarantee to open the doors of the universe to give you anything you want. Prayer is not magic. It is more than that.

– Don A. Aycock
How to Have a Conversation with God