I was a hockey player. I played hockey forever. That was my life and my job until I got injured, so I get sports, and I get the sports atmosphere, the feeling around other athletes, but I never played football.

I'm really not an injury-prone player. I just had that one injury that took, like, two years.

I mean, when you grow up in the inner city and you grow up in a single-parent household, that's - those are humbling times, you know?

Bad experience is a school that only fools keep going to.

While you are going through your trial, you can recall your past victories and count the blessings that you do have with a sure hope of greater ones to allow if you are faithful.

Out of defeat can come the best in human nature. As Christians face storms of adversity, they may rise with more beauty. They are like trees that grow on mountain ridges -- battered by winds, yet trees in which we find the strongest wood.

A keen sense of humor helps us to overlook the unbecoming, understand the unconventional, tolerated the unpleasant, overcome the unexpected, and outlast the unbearable.

I have the problems of, I must confess, old age.

Sometimes life touches one person with a bouquet and another with a thorn bush, But the first may find a wasp in the flowers, and the second may discover roses among the thorns.

Suffering in life can uncover untold depths of character and unknown strength for service. People who go through life unscathed by sorrow and untouched by pain tend to be shallow in their perspectives on life. Suffering, on the other hand, tends to plow up the surface of our lives to uncover the depths that provide greater strength of purpose and accomplishment. Only deeply plowed earth can yield bountiful harvests.

Repeated disappointment almost always triggers a series of other reactions: discouragement, anger, frustration, bitterness, resentment, even depression. Unless we learn to deal with disappointment, it will rob us of joy and poison our souls.

Nothing will drive us to our knees quicker than trouble.