Quotation Saturday ~ War, Peace

Dallas, Texas

Dealey Plaza

Pss. 28:3  “Draw me not away with the wicked, and with the workers of iniquity, which speak peace to their neighbours, but mischief is in their hearts.”

 DIVISION

“When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.” 
― Winston S. Churchill

“We need to eliminate the concept of division by class, skills, race, income, religion, and nationality. Every human requires food and water to survive and every human has a heart that bleeds, loves, and grieves.” 
― Suzy Kassem

“Faults are thick where love is thin.” 
― English Proverb

“Americans claimed to be following a higher law, even when this higher law only turned out to be a personal preference.” 
― Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

HATE

“If you want to forget something or someone, never hate it, or never hate him/her. Everything and everyone that you hate is engraved upon your heart; if you want to let go of something, if you want to forget, you cannot hate.” 
― C. JoyBell C.

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” 
― James Baldwin

“Hate hurts the hater more'n the hated.” 
― Madeleine L'Engle

“To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.” 
― Robert G. Ingersolln 

RACE

“When you hate a person because of their race or religion, it is then you realize in the depths of yourself, you really hate YOU.”
~ Joni Zipp

“We are all equal in the fact that we are all different. We are all the same in the fact that we will never be the same. We are united by the reality that all colours and all cultures are distinct & individual. We are harmonious in the reality that we are all held to this earth by the same gravity. We don't share blood, but we share the air that keeps us alive. I will not blind myself and say that my black brother is not different from me. I will not blind myself and say that my brown sister is not different from me. But my black brother is he as much as I am me. But my brown sister is she as much as I am me.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.” 
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“It is when we think we can act like God, that all respect is lost, and I think this is the downfall of peace. We lie if we say we do not see color and culture and difference. We fool ourselves and cheat ourselves when we say that all of us are the same. We should not want to be the same as others and we should not want others to be the same as us. Rather, we ought to glory and shine in all of our differences, flaunting them fabulously for all to see! It is never a conformity that we need! We need not to conform! What we need is to burst out into all these beautiful colors!” 
― C. JoyBell C.

WAR

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.” 
― Plato

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” 
― Ernest Hemingway

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.” 
― John Steinbeck

“There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.” 
― Neil Gaiman

PEACE

“Let the first act of every morning be to make the following resolve for the day:

- I shall not fear anyone on Earth. 
- I shall fear only God. 
- I shall not bear ill will toward anyone. 
- I shall not submit to injustice from anyone. 
- I shall conquer untruth by truth. And in resisting untruth, I shall put up with all suffering.” 
― Mahatma Gandhi

“If man thinks war is a means to peace, that man is delusional.”
~ Joni Zipp

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.” 
― Chuck Palahniuk

“Dad, how do soldiers killing each other solve the world's problems?” 
― Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995: An Exhibition Catalogue

Pss. 29:11 “The LORD will give strength unto his people; the LORD will bless his people with peace.”

Fort McHenry

Baltimore, Maryland

Quotation Saturday ~ Memorial Day

Fort McHenry

Baltimore, Maryland

WAR

“We the people, in order to form a unified world must stop to fact check before posting lies to diversify. We the people are the victims of a ‘click-bait-share’ system. Anger, rage and misunderstanding are all the causes of internal wars. You, my friends, are the ones so eager to share the lies without seeking out facts thus causing and feeding into the war of the races. You are the ones who start the wars.”
~ Joni Zipp

“Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched."
[My Uncle Sosthenes]” 
~ Guy de Maupassant

“In war, the first casualty is truth.” 
~ Terry Hayes

“Wars today seem to occur at a more precise point in time but deep down they are permanent.” 
~ Bernardo Carvalho

MISUNDERSTANDING

“We're all born with selfish desires, so we can all relate to those feelings in others. But kindness is something made individually by each person...so it's easy to misunderstand when others are trying to be kind to you.” 
~ Natsuki Takaya

“They have the unique ability to listen to one story and understand another.” 
~ Pandora Poikilos

“The common man prays, 'I want a cookie right now!' And God responds, 'If you'd listen to what I say, tomorrow it will bring you 100 cookies.” 
~ Criss Jami

SEGREGATION

“All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We
And every one else is They:
But if you cross over the sea,
Instead of over the way,
You may end by (think of it!) looking on We
As only a sort of They!” 
~ Rudyard Kipling

“To become a true global citizen, one must abandon all notions of 'otherness' and instead embrace 'togetherness'. The world is no longer white, black, yellow and brown. Through love, tribes have been intermixing colors to reveal a new rainbow world. And as more time passes, this racial and cultural blending will make it harder for humans to side with one race, nation or religion over another. Therefore, practical wisdom should be used to abandon any cultural, social, religious, tribal, and national beliefs of alterity altogether. This is the only way mankind will truly evolve. Segregation is a word of the past. Unity is the key to a peaceful future.” 
~ Suzy Kassem

“Ignoring the evils of our history will only cause them to reoccur.” 
~ R.M. Donaldson

“Having the liberty to have freedom of choice is the greatest thing that each and every one of us has because that makes us who we are. Do not however, use this as an excuse to discriminate, segregate and stereotype mass amounts of people on the basis of a small group of individuals who have either the power or the spotlight to do bad things” 
~ Calum Alexander Logan

MEMORIAL DAY

“The atrocities of war are only overshadowed by the heroism of their dead.” 
~ Todd Stocker

“As individuals die every moment, how insensitive and fabricated a love it is to set aside a day from selfish routine in prideful, patriotic commemoration of tragedy. Just as God is provoked by those who tithe simply because they feel that they must tithe, I am provoked by those who commemorate simply because they feel that they must commemorate.” 
~ Criss Jami

“We'd like to think that it is not our fault that great men and women died fighting for the security of our nation and safety of our communities. But we know this not to be true. They committed their lives for us in instances where either we were too afraid to do it ourselves or failed to find alternate solutions on our own. We enjoy the fruits of their ultimate sacrifice and owe their families a heartfelt thanks and apology every day.” 
~ D'Andre Lampkin

“You are silent now who once stood on battlefields ravaged by destruction unimaginable, holding in those desperate places the line of freedom for others you would never know, and who would never know you. And being one of those you never knew, I would give all I have to clasp your hand one single time, look into eyes that witnessed the bloodied carnage that results when freedom refuses to bow to chains of any kind, and simply say 'thank you.” 
~ Craig D. Lounsbrough


Have a safe and blessed Memorial Day weekend remembering this:

“-We need more love, to supersede hatred,
-We need more strength, 
to resist our weaknesses, 
-We need more inspiration, 
to lighten up our inner mind. 
-We need more learning, 
to erase our ignorance, 
-We need more wisdom, 
to live longer and happier, 
-We need more truths, to suppress deceptions, 
-We need more health, 
to enjoy our wealth, 
-We need more peace, to stay in harmony with our brethren 
-We need more smiles, 
to brighten up our day, 
-We need more hero's, and not zero's, 
-We need more change of ourselves, to change the lives of others, 
-We need more understanding, 
to tackle our misunderstanding, 
-We need more sympathy, 
not apathy, 
-We need more forgiveness, 
not vengeance, 
-We need more humility to be lifted up, 
-We need more patience and not undue eagerness, 
-We need more focus, to avoid distraction, 
-We need more optimism, 
not pessimism 
-We need more justice, 
not injustice, 
-We need more facts, not fiction,
-We need more education, 
to curb illiteracy, 
-We need more skills, not incompetence, 
-We need more challenges, 
to make attempts, 
-We need more talents, 
to create the extraordinary, 
-We need more helping hands, 
not stingy folks, 
-We need more efforts, 
not laziness, 
-We need more jokes, to forget our worries, 
-We need more spirituality, 
not mean religion, 
-We need more freedom, 
not enslavement, 
-We need more peacemakers, 
not revolutionaries...with these, we create a heaven on earth.” 
~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Middle of Nowhere

Pss. 147:4  “He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.”

Middle of Nowhere

It hit me and it hit me hard when I realized I’m out in the middle of nowhere, especially when the urgency to get back home became some kind of fantasy trip never to be had. I suddenly felt alone, alone and wandering like the couple in the Children of the Corn movie, where every road that they turned down basically led to nowhere.

I remember being back in Dallas when the panic call came that my mother had a stroke, my dad wanted me home and he’d pay for everything just to see me back there consoling my mother. In less than 24 hours we boarded a plane and landed at BWI airport. It took us 20 minutes to get to the airport where we’d board a three-hour flight bound for the east coast. Easy peasy!

When the call came in that my father had passed, I wrestled with what had to be done. I thought another easy flight plan was in store for my near future but no, it just wasn’t meant to be. The cheapest airline tickets ranged from $337 – $557 round trip. That is not including hotel and car rental and of course the food we’d need to eat. We’re talking close to $2000 - $3000 trip for the three of us to get back to my hometown. That doesn’t include the gas that we’d need to make a three-four hour trip to Omaha to catch the plane.

It’s not like people have money just lying around waiting to help a poor soul, they have lives and needs themselves. My dilemma is my dilemma and as it would be, it just isn’t meant for me to go back and see my family during one of the hardest times in their lives.

When my brother looked at the google earth map he realized something and exclaimed, “You live out in the middle of nowhere! Literally!” Tell me something I DON’T know! I look at the map and it looks like a simple straight line from Nebraska to Baltimore but there is more than meets the eyes there!

We have an airport 3-4 hours away. We don’t have bus stations or trains that could just whisk me away on a trip to Baltimore as easy as it was when we lived in Dallas. We literally live out in the middle of nowhere! We don’t even have a place to call to deliver food out here, that’s how far away we are from the main town.

My only connection at this time is facebook via computer and my phone. I don’t have one of those ‘Smart  Phones’ that everybody uses to surf the worldwide web; I don’t have the luxury of ‘facetime’, whatever that is, and no one back home has a way to allow me to SEE the family I long to be with at this time.

I have to sit here out in the middle of nowhere and grieve in my own way. It’s hard but I’m muddling through, writing every day whether it’s something to post or not to post. I clean, I rake, I do whatever my back will allow. I know my limits.

I call my mother just to hear her voice in the morning and at night to make sure she takes her medicine. That is what my dad did and she tells me that sometimes if I hadn’t called, she would have surely forgotten to take her meds. She sounded really good last night as opposed to the other tearful three weeks; she laughed and I know I heard her smile right through the phone. She sounded as if one-thousand pounds of stress had been lifted off her shoulders. Yes she’s grieving but she is also accepting that this is what was meant to be.

I walked out the back door and looked up at the billions of stars in the sky out in the middle of nowhere and said to my father, “Dad, she’s going to be all right.”

Just at that moment a shooting star danced across the sky. I whispered, “You show off.”

1 Cor. 15:41 “There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory.”

Baltimore Riots?

Mark 13:8 "For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows."

I grew up in the city of Baltimore. A very house-to-house packed on the row-home filled streets. We lived in a white community surrounded to the west and east of South Baltimore by the black communities.

We didn’t venture there because we were taught that it was just a bad community. Granted I had a couple of black friends who ventured into our area, they said the same thing, they moved because the areas in the outer limits were pretty bad.

I lived about five blocks from the Inner Harbor that later became a Mecca of diversity with shops of different cultures lining the water’s edge. Fort McHenry, Federal Hill, and the Inner Harbor were just a couple of my hangouts while growing up. I was in the center of the city and all that city living entailed.

Believe it or not I didn’t turn out to be prejudice, ie: unreasonable feelings, opinions, or attitudes, especially of a hostile nature, regarding an ethnic, racial, social, or religious group, or a racist ie: the doctrine that one's own racial group is superior or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others, even though both were in full sight all around me.

When I moved to Texas quite a few years ago, we lived in a predominantly black apartment complex. I’d say it was a 70/30 ratio, us being the minority. I didn’t feel out of place because it was basically the same community I had grown up in, diverse. I welcomed and was welcomed into the community.

My son learned racism quite quickly in Texas as he was called names he had never heard before such as nigger, cracker and white trash. Yes, he learned the ‘N’ word from a black kid who had called him a nigger and he came home asking me what it meant. I explained that it meant an ignorant person which is exactly what the child who called him that was being raised to be. The kids even teased him when he told them we were moving to Nebraska!

“That’s white man’s country.”

We soon understood what they meant when we got here and were hard pressed to see a black person anywhere. Maybe 1 in a 100? Yeah, this is white man’s country here in Nebraska. It is also an extremely conservative state meaning don’t declare yourself an independent because that is seen immediately as a liberal, or libtard as so many conservatives in their hate spew. Anyone who doesn’t agree with their hate is a liberal and they themselves become the ignorant, hateful, violators.

With all the rioting going on in different states it is pretty hard not to become prejudice. Not against a color per se, but against criminal thugs, period! To destroy, burn and loot your own neighborhoods you are destroying humanity and thugs see only themselves as the ‘misunderstood’ people of society. They are the fatherless, druggy criminals raised by the same. Nothing more, nothing less.

Human beings are human beings and as such we should ACT as such, not the vile animals that these rioters seem to be. Maybe I don’t understand and maybe I do. I’m trying hard not to spew hateful words as to offend anyone but the state of our country saddens me and all I know to do is pray. Pray for the lost souls who may have never been prayed for before. It is what Jesus calls me to do and I will honor Him.

So while people are filled with vile anger, souls churn inside with hatred, blind eyes are everywhere to every atrocity surrounding them and they cling only to the negative portion of understanding. They, to me, are no different than the criminal thugs wanting justice.

A friend told me, “This is not our world.” I know this and understand it more than you know.

When 4,000 people are killed in an earthquake and all that people can talk about are politics and agenda’s, or the soup of the day, it isn’t just the criminal minds that are at fault here, it is the human race living as if they are cancer-stricken with no cure!

Baltimore will rise from the ashes; Nepal will rise from the rubble, maybe just not on this side of cosmos, but one day. I pray.

May God be with you all.

Luke 21:11 “And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.”

 

 

Quotation Saturday

                                    Baltimore's Inner Harbor...
                                                  ...HOME!

GIVE THANKS~
 
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.
~Melody Beattie

For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread. The sun, the earth, love, friends, our very breath are parts of the banquet.... Shall we think of the day as a chance to come nearer to our Host, and to find out something of Him who has fed us so long?
~Rebecca Harding Davis

Thanksgiving is nothing if not a glad and reverent lifting of the heart to God in honor and praise for His goodness.
~Robert Casper Lintner

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice.
~Meister Eckhart

Got no check books, got no banks. Still I'd like to express my thanks - I got the sun in the morning and the moon at night. ~Irving Berlin
 
We can always find something to be thankful for, and there may be reasons why we ought to be thankful for even those dispensations which appear dark and frowning.
~Albert Barnes

It is delightfully easy to thank God for the grace we ourselves have received, but it requires great grace to thank God always for the grace given to others.
~James Smith

For hearts that are kindly, with virtue and peace, and not seeking blindly a hoard to increase; for those who are grieving o'er life's sordid plan; for souls still believing in heaven and man; for homes that are lowly with love at the board; for things that are holy, I thank thee, O Lord!
~Walt Mason
 
God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say "thank you?"
~William A. Ward
 
Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.
~William Arthur Ward
 
And though I ebb in worth, I'll flow in thanks.
 ~John Taylor
 
Perhaps it takes a purer faith to praise God for unrealized blessings than for those we once enjoyed or those we enjoy now. 
~A.W. Tozer

I have strong doubts that the first Thanksgiving even remotely resembled the "history" I was told in second grade. But considering that (when it comes to holidays) mainstream America's traditions tend to be over-eating, shopping, or getting drunk, I suppose it's a miracle that the concept of giving thanks even surfaces at all.
~Ellen Orleans
 
A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all the other virtues.
~Cicero

~ FAMILY ~
 
To us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there.
~Barbara Bush

Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family. Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted.
~Paul Pearshall