I wanted to write it on paper and fold it up in a box to remind myself, the next time I couldn't see anything but mountains ahead, that where there's a mountain, there's always a river flowing nearby. Ultimately the river is the more powerful of the two.

Ultimately, it's not so much what life deals you as what you choose to own that matters, a spiritually searching law clerk had once said to

What we cannot change, we must endure without bitterness.

The storms come and it's water and wind as far as the eye can see for a bit. But winds calm and the waters drain. We find our feet again, and the ground under us sprouts a new crop of seed. That is always the way of it. I don't suppose this storm will be any different.

There is a moth in a cocoon outside the window... [It] has labored for hours... Inside the darkness, does it know why it must struggle? Somewhere in the mass of cells and neurons that make up its tiny body, is it aware that the struggle is God's way of pumping fluid into its wings? If not for the struggle, it would come into the world with a swollen body and flightless wings. It would be a creature without strength, unable to fulfill its purpose.

Don't waste your time crying over what you're not given. When you have tears in your eyes, you can't see all the beautiful things around you.

Most of the time when we got a tough row to plow, the Good Lord makes us fall a little short and puts another mule in the pasture. You don't never know whether you're the blind mule or the deaf mule, but you're always one or the other.

Tough times make good people and bad people.

Along our journey, people and events flow into us, and we are created of everywhere and everyone we have passed. Each event, each person, changes us in some way. Even in times of drought we are still moving and growing, but it is during seasons of rain that we expand the most-when water flows from all directions, sweeping at terrifying speed, chasing against rocks, spilling over boundaries. These are painful times, but they enable us to carry burdens we could never have thought possible.

The thing about mistakes is, they become valuable when you learn from them. I

It was all right for life not to be perfect. If you let it, if you didn't close yourself off from the chance for it, life could still be good. Better than good.

In my multifold years of life, I have learned that most people get along as best they can. They don't intend to hurt anyone. It is merely a terrible by-product of surviving