Contemplation ::.

con·tem·pla·tion –noun

full or deep consideration; reflection

These are things I've been contemplating for the past few weeks. Thought I'd share.

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Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Matthew 5.4


Matthew, in recording Christ's teaching, chose the strongest Greek term in all his vocabulary when he wrote mourn. It is a heavy word - a passionate lament for one who was loved with profound devotion. It conveys the sorrow of a broken heart, the ache of soul, the anguished mind.
Charles Swindoll, Improving Your Serve, pg. 103


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First and foremost in the life of an authentic servant is a deep, abiding dependency on the living Lord. On the basis of that attitude, the kingdom of heaven is promised.
Charles Swindoll, Improving Your Serve, pg. 103


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Boundaries don't keep others out, they fence you in.
Grey's Anatomy

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Fear has in interest to subdue and domesticate.
idea derived from Maxime Rodinson

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Wounds from a sincere friend
are better than many kisses from
an enemy.
Proverbs 27.6

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[Many practices and ideas were the same. An entity of this type, bringing together individuals and peoples who have in common a substantial bundle of cultural traits, can be called a civilization. This civilization deserves the name of Muslim by virtue of the fact that the basic cement of its unity, the ideology that imbued these individuals and peoples, was Islam.

But it must be understood that all the common elements of this culture did not simply devolve, as the naive religious idealists would have us believe, from the dogmas of the Muslim religion professed by the majority of the people inhabiting this zone. Of course the Muslim ideologists, with the support of the political establishment, made enormous efforts to truly 'Islamize' these peoples and their culture. They sought to reach and to impregnate every facet of life with the values of their religion, down to the most trivial aspects of everyday conduct.]

But they were not much more successful in this than the Christian ideologists of the Middle Ages, who, in a comparable effort, tried to make all Christian societies practice Christ's message of love and goodness.
Maxime Rodinson, Muhammad, pg. xxxv