Christ at the center

Jeffrey R. Holland


"Sisters and brothers, through the incessant din and drumbeat of our day, may we strive to see Christ at the center of our lives, of our faith, and of our service."
Jeffrey R. Holland

No matter the configuration,

only Christ is adoration.

Service seems a lesser duty,

and our lives are lacking beauty,

if the Lord no center finds

in our faith and in our minds.

Savior, give me resolution

to serve Thee despite confusion!

Assurance of Hope

Ulisses Soares.

"I want to assure you that there is always hope in God the Father and in His plan of happiness, in Jesus Christ and His atoning sacrifice, and in living Their loving commandments."

Ulisses Soarez

When I place my hope in God

and in his loving Son,

my life is washed away in joy,

my sorrow's on the run.

A loving Father shows the way,

a mighty Son repairs

the folly I have wrought sometimes

amidst sharp worldly cares.

Hope is all a Christian has

when fiendish storms explode.

It steadies my existence

and will keep my head unbowed.

Le karma de l'entrepreneuriat

L'influenceur, auteur et célèbre entrepreneur de YouTube, Sri Akarshana, affirme n'avoir que trois règles simples pour son succès sur YouTube et sur la liste des best-sellers indiens. Le gourou de l'entraide affirme qu'il a d'abord raffiné ces trois lignes directrices lors d'une retraite au Népal, au cours de laquelle il a utilisé le jeûne et la méditation pour acquérir un niveau de conscience plus élevé qui a déchiré le brouillard du mercantilisme et du matérialisme qui l'avait empêché de se sentir épanoui. . Sa première règle est de se concentrer sur la valeur et l'impact, en ignorant les considérations financières et les programmes publicitaires. Akarshana estime que lorsqu'un entrepreneur accorde la priorité à ses clients et résiste à la tentation de se vanter de ses produits et services, il en résulte une inversion karmique de l'état d'esprit traditionnel de la concurrence chien-manger-chien, et les ressources financières nécessaires seront automatiquement disponibles. Sa deuxième règle ne poursuit pas la richesse, laissez-la vous poursuivre. Il respecte cette règle en se débarrassant de tout l'argent et du plastique chaque jour avant de se rendre à son bureau. Il dit que dépenser un tout sans argent est un moyen rafraîchissant d'apprendre à contrôler ses finances, et aussi une bonne leçon pour rester humble. Sa troisième règle est de se mettre au défi chaque jour de faire quelque chose en dehors de sa zone de confort. Cela renforce la confiance, combat les burn-out et force l'intellect à rester ouvert à de nouvelles idées.

Postcards to my President.

The Storyteller.

Oh I am full of stories this evening, children -- stories that end in good things for good people and stories that end with bad things for bad people, and stories that don't end at all but just keep repeating themselves over and over again down through the ages. Which kind of story would you like to hear first, hmmm? 
Bad things for bad people, eh? Very good.

In the very long ago there lived a miser who kept all his money in an iron box with a magic lock on it. The lock could only be opened by repeating very quickly a dozen times the words "toy boat." The miser knew the trick to this -- you had to say the two words very slowly and distinctly, otherwise the words came out as 'toy boy' and the lock would never open. 
One evening a wizened old man, almost bent double with age and gout and other assorted blessings of too many years, hobbled into the miser's courtyard and asked for a crust of bread.
The miser, of course, told the ancient relic to begone -- there were no handouts for lazy slugs like him -- all must work for their bread, or perish! The wizened old man told the miser very well, what work have you for me to do? The miser smiled a mean smile and told the very old man to draw water from the well and wash all the window panes, both downstairs and upstairs, of his house. That might earn him a crust of moldy bread, with some axle grease smeared on it. 
The very old man managed to bring up a bucket of water from the well, then had to rest a while to get his breath back.
The miser yelled at him to hurry up -- no use in dawdling when there was a job to be done. 
At that, the very old man began picking up cobble stones and hurling them through each window pane in the miser's house. The tinkle of glass mixed with the enraged roars of the miser, who tried to catch the wizened old man -- but now that ancient of days dropped his disguise and showed his true self. He was Panukuken, the demi-god of mischief! Oh how that miser tried to catch him! But Panukuken was too fast for him, and soon the miser's house became unlivable with the cold wind whistling through it like a hurricane. 
And what do you suppose became of that magic iron lock box? Nothing, nothing at all. The miser scooped it up and fled to a different city where he bought a brand new house and opened a gravel pit next to the town cemetery. He still lives there, and if you two over in the corner don't stop dropping peanut shells on my carpet I shall have the miser come get you to lock up in his box!

That's better. 

Now not too far away from that miser there lived a calico cat named Dennis. This calico cat was so lazy that it refused to get up and walk over to its bowl of food -- the bowl had to be brought to it. That calico cat finally grew so fat and inert that it couldn't even bother to stand up to eat out of its bowl -- someone had to spoon feed each morsel of cat food into its mouth, and then work its jaws to chew it up!
The mice ran riot around Dennis the calico cat -- using its dirty white belly as a trampoline. Dennis didn't care -- all that jumping helped to digest the food in its stomach and make room for more. 
One day a man dressed in pied jacket and pants and carrying a large blue sack over his shoulders stopped at the house where Dennis the calico cat lived, looking for beetroot wax. When he saw the huge furry lump that Dennis had become he offered the householder a bag of silver pins for the cat. Then he stuffed Dennis into his sack and walked away.
No one ever saw the man in the pied pants and jacket, or Dennis the calico cat, ever again. But the householder set up a stall outside his front door selling silver needles. Soon he had enough money to start selling gold thimbles. And then he managed to open a stall in the village market where he sold glass eyes and brass knuckles. He soon became the richest merchant in town and was taken to the palace, where the king made him Secretary of the Treasury. The king told him that if he didn't fill the treasury with treasure in the next day or two he would be forced to have his head chopped off. This is what is known as the gig economy. 
The poor householder was at his wits end to know what to do. Until he remembered he still had one silver needle left. He used that silver needle to dig a tunnel out of the palace and down to the river, where he commandeered a boat and sailed so far to the East that he came out in the West. And that's where he stayed until Jack Onionhead took him to the Marmalade Fields. If you don't believe me you can ask Oprah.

 Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Little Penny had fallen into the abandoned cistern and couldn't climb out. Her cries and sobs went unheard, and she fell asleep against one of the mildewed walls dreaming of being rescued by a German-speaking duck. When she woke up she found her condition to be unchanged, so she took loose stones out of the cistern wall and piled them up until she could climb out and run back home. Where her parents gave her a bath and a lecture, and then sent her to bed without dental floss.
That very night the Door Knob Man came into her bedroom and offered to take her to Door County Michigan for the Tulip Festival. She wisely turned him down, opting instead to go with a twinkling pixel to the job fair in Silicon Valley. And there she was offered a position with a new startup that laundered bitcoins into starched white pinafores. 
But Little Penny was a bad penny, and began chewing gum at work and leaving orange peels on the table in the break room. She did not prosper at her work and even put rouge on her knees. She only managed to work at that startup for twenty-nine years before she was asked to retire with a full pension. Then she went from bad to worse. She sold bottles of plain tap water as 'hydrogen enhanced oxygen' to unsuspecting customers out of the back of a truck. When the police finally caught up with her she was sent to Paris to work in the croissant mines for the rest of her life.
And that's why you should never trust a duck that speaks German.

Now, which one of you brats undid my back suspenders and snapped them onto the dog?

Measuring Dead Birds.

The birds were probably shrinking long before we began measuring dead ones at the museum.
We did mostly finches and sparrows -- those were the two most common birds that flew headlong into the glass atrium walls and killed themselves. I gathered them up once a day and then measured them before sending them to the NOAA. Don't ask me what the weather people wanted with them -- I have no idea. It was just part of my job description from the get-go.
My assistant Jennifer was the one who suggested we start going back and looking at the records to compare annual size. She was very big on graphs and pie charts, and had to be actively discouraged from producing power point presentations about things like fire blight and wind socks. 
And yes, we discovered that the finches and sparrows were, on average, shrinking by 2 centimeters each year. After we had collected data for ten consecutive years Jennifer and I went before the Chicago Board of Trade to discuss our findings -- but they called us worry warts and refused to validate our parking passes. We next presented our information to various Rotary Clubs around Illinois, to varying responses. Several clubs, especially in the northern half of the state, took our work seriously and donated dozens of pairs of used eye glasses to us. Southern Illinois was another matter altogether. We were arrested several times for jaywalking and given heavy fines. Those folks just did not want to know about abbreviated birds. 
When Jennifer got married and left the museum to become an astronaut I stopped trying to warn people of what was happening. I simply sat back and observed it all. Taking copious notes, of course.
By this time all the birds were noticeably smaller than people remembered them being. Robins were the size of humming birds, and humming birds were the size of bumble bees. Pigeons were affected worst of all. They flocked together inside discarded plastic  cups, like ants. And by the time I retired from the museum I could watch a special on PBS about condors in the Andes that came together at mating season and looked like a cloud of gnats. 
Each presidential administration had its own explanation as to why this was happening:

• The Ukrainians were behind it.
• All the birds had somehow gotten on opioids.
• China was hoarding bird seed.
• Birds were not getting smaller; people were getting bigger.

I'm an old man now, and the birds, the beautiful warbling winging birds, have turned into dust motes. All over the world, children are told of the wondrous pelicans that once filled the skies and the chickens that once gave us delicious fried eggs. Santa Claus has been replaced with Birdy Claus, who flies down the chimney on Christmas Eve bringing bags of millet and sunflower seeds to good little boys and girls. 

The only positive outcome I can think of happened early on, when birds were still visible and kept crashing into glass patio doors and plate glass windows. Laws were passed banning the use of windows in any building larger than a tool shed. Windows were bricked up with a vengeance, until every home and office was pitch black and had to be illuminated with phosphorescent cattails. That was a very good thing, I thought -- mostly because I had invested heavily in phosphorescent cattails when they first came on the market. So I made a killing and am now stinking rich.
Now I hear that men are consistently losing height while women are growing taller and taller. This doesn't bode well for the survival of mankind as we know it. But then again, a bad workman blames his tools. 

The Cuckoo Clock.

That year my Aunt Ellen gave us a large ornate cuckoo clock for Christmas. We'd never even hinted at wanting such a baroque monstrosity, but UPS brought it on the 13th of December, and I spent a feverish evening putting it together and hanging it on the living room wall -- the cast iron pine cones kept falling off their chains and gouging blonde dents in the oak flooring.
In the event, Aunt Ellen died right after the New Year. 
"She's not around anymore, so why don't you take that thing down already?" asked my wife one morning as we were peeling grapefruit for breakfast.
"Yeah, okay" I replied, dodging a squirt of grapefruit juice. "When I get home tonight I'll take it down."
But that night we were both tired and cranky, and went out to eat at Embers, where they have the best onion rings in the universe, and forgot about the cuckoo clock. We had turned off the cuckoo sound the very day I hung it up, and let the cast iron pine cones run down, so it was pretty easy to forget -- if you just didn't look at that particular wall.
Then Susan got pregnant, and ran away with our yoga instructor -- who she told me, in a note, was the father of the child. I never saw her again.
I canceled my membership in that particular yoga studio and took a new job far away in Perth Amboy as team leader of an Animal Rescue unit for the city.
I brought nothing but my clothes with me from the old house. Everything else, including the cuckoo clock, got donated to the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee.
My new job kept me busy, and, what with chasing dogs and stray pot bellied pigs around on foot, kept me physically fit -- each night I came home exhausted and embraced sleep like it was my new lover. I aspired to wholesomeness, and felt it was just around the corner.
Then I ate some bad clams at an Italian restaurant and got food poisoning. There were complications, so I stayed in the hospital for five days. During which my Uncle Wally, Aunt Ellen's husband, came to visit me. He asked how I had liked the cuckoo clock. I lied and told him it was a cherished item that I could never part with.
"Good" he said smugly. "Your Aunt Ellen was crazy, y'know. She made me put a certified check for twenty-thousand dollars in one of the hollow pine cone thingies, which I bet you haven't found yet, have you?"
"No" I said weakly.
"Well, when you get out make sure you retrieve the check and cash it -- they're good for about four years after they're issued and then the bank won't honor them anymore."
"Okay, thanks" was all I could manage in reply.
A little later that day my mother came to see me. She had flown in from Milwaukee and was staying at the Regency Hilton, where, she told me breathlessly, there had been a murder in the alleyway right under her tenth story window the night before. Then she asked if Uncle Wally had been in to see me. I told her he had.
"Has he been going on about that stupid certified check he supposedly left you in the cuckoo clock?" she asked me.
"What do you mean supposedly?" I asked.
"Oh, well, he's gone soft in the head since his wife died and thinks he's left thousands of dollars to people hidden in their sugar bowls and clocks and so forth" she told me. "He hasn't got two nickels to rub together, so just ignore all his malarkey." 
"Yes, I'll do that" I told her.
Just as she was leaving my sister Dorothy came in, but since she was feuding with mom over some trifling matter, they barely nodded at each other. Dorothy wouldn't open her mouth until mom had left. She even got up to check down the hallway to make sure she was really gone, and not hanging around outside snooping on us.
"Why don't you make up with mom?" I asked her. "You two are tearing the whole family apart with this pointless feud."
"She started it" said Dorothy. "Anytime she wants to apologize I'm ready to forgive and forget."
I sighed deeply and asked Dorothy to help prop me up and rearrange my pillows.
"I suppose she told you she was staying at the Hilton Regency, didn't she?" asked Dorothy.
"Well, yeah -- so what?" I said.
"Well, she's not! She's actually in a homeless shelter down on Main and LeClair. She's been there for a month" Dorothy said with malignant satisfaction.
"That's terrible!" I said. "Why didn't anyone tell me?"
"She wanted to keep it a secret" said Dorothy. "She's on the run from her old job at the jewelry store. Over the years she's stolen a million dollars worth of rings and bracelets and hid them all over the place. She even told me she put a small black velvet bag of uncut diamonds inside your old cuckoo clock. Did you ever look inside for 'em?"
"I haven't, no" I said.
"Well, if I were you that's the first thing I'd do when I got out of here" she told me firmly.
I confessed to her I no longer had the cuckoo clock. I had donated it to the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee. 
Dorothy laughed mirthlessly at my revelation.
"Boy, are you screwed!" she told me. "Uncle Wally told me he put a check in that cuckoo clock for twenty thousand -- and you know he's rich, cuz he won the Lottery."
"Please go now" I told Dorothy quietly. "I'm getting very tired. Thanks for the visit."
She left and it got dark outside and the fluorescent lights hummed above me. On a wild hunch I had the nurse look up the phone number of the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee on her smartphone, and then called them on my phone.
"Hello" I said when someone finally answered. "I was just wondering if your club house still has that wonderful old cuckoo clock hanging up in the lounge?"
The woman on the other end said it was still there, but had stopped working so they were going to take it down and let a local vocational shop class look at it.
"But it's not a cuckoo clock, y'know" she told me. "It's a cute little Japanese number shaped like a cat that's waving one of its paws while its eyes move back and forth."
"There's no cuckoo clock there, then?" I asked.
"Used to be -- but it got hit by a basketball and they threw it out. That was months ago" she told me. "Hon, I've got a square dancing class I've got to supervise -- is there anything else I can do for you?"
"No. Thanks for your help" I said. She hung up. The fluorescent lights hissed and blinked -- one of the tubes was going bad. I hoped the maintenance people would get to it soon.

A New Song

And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God . . .
Psalm 40:3

I voice my joy in singing

of the mercies of the Lord.

In sweet accord I carol

of his everlasting word.

New songs are growing in my heart

as each and ev'ry day

the Lord reveals his handiwork

in grand and subtle way.

To praise the great Jehovah

I will lift an anthem sweet,

that all may know his power

and that death has met defeat.

His triumph is ascendant

and his wide compassion shows

that he is our Creator

and the Rock of our repose.

Verses from stories by Ana Swanson, Winnie Hu, Mathew Haag, and Jeffrey Stein.

TRUMP THINKS TARIFFS WILL SOLVE ANYTHING

@AnaSwanson

When Trump invents a bugaboo

he thinks a tariff sure will do.

He makes 'em up in half a tick,

then says they sure will do the trick

to help our farmers back on track

and end the war in poor Iraq.

I'd like to know who taught that lug

to worship that darn tariff bug!

*******************************

THIEVES ARE WAITING TO STEAL YOUR PACKAGES 

FROM YOUR FRONT DOOR

@WinnHu  @matthewhaag

Sticky fingers inundate

the holidays each year;

packages on porches

seem to always disappear.

Santa can't send anything

by UPS or mail;

cuz it just grows some legs

and runs off without fail.

So I think that this season

I will have my stuff all sent

off to someplace distant

like the fabled Orient.

I know I'll never get it

but at least those lousy crooks

will be left with empty hands

while on their tenterhooks.

*****************************

LOBBYISTS GHOST WRITE FOR LEGISLATORS

@JStein_WaPo

Independent thinking ain't 

a strength for office holders;

they don't have a blessed thing

above their padded shoulders.

So some good samaritans

write op-eds for them all --

lobbyists whose job it is

to lie and cheat and stall.

This does not surprise me, since

the lawmakers I know

only write to endorse checks

that gives their PACs more dough.

The Journey.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf.


"The Savior invites us, each day, to set aside our comforts and securities and join Him on the journey of discipleship."
Dieter F. Uchtdorf

I'm invited ev'ry day

to travel on the Savior's way;

to cast aside my fears and doubts,

to hike along new trails and routes.

Some days I hold back, too afraid

to see what greatness has been made

available to me ahead;

I'm shackled by a faithless dread.

But other days I do succeed

in bypassing my narrow creed;

then it is my soul takes flight --

with eagles I can scale each height.

And so each day my prayer remains

for help in finding new domains.