Agency And Gratitude Quotes

Choose truth. Resist not-truth. Think courageously, meaning boldly. Reject the propaganda of the world. Choose truth. You won’t find it in the loudest, most insistent, most demanding voices. Truth is quiet. Very quiet. Truth is found in stillness and privacy. It brings peace. Be still. Choose truth. Believe. Be grateful.

that everything that had ever happened to me had been a loving step in that process of my progression. every person, every circumstance, and every incident was custom created for me. It was as if the entire universe existed for my higher good and development. I felt so loved, so cherished, and so honored. I realized that not only was I being embraced by deity, but also that I myself was divine, and that we all are. I knew that there are no accidents in this life. That everything happens for a reason. yet we always get to choose how we will experience what happens to us here. I could exercise my will in everything, even in how I felt about the wreck and the death of my family members. God didn't want me to hurt and feel put upon as if my son and wife had been taken from me. He was simply there assisting me to decide how I was going to experience it. He was providing me with the opportunity, in perfect love, to exercise my personal agency in this entire situation. I knew my wife and son were gone. They had died months earlier, but time didn't exist where I was at that moment. rather than having them ripped away from me, I was being given the opportunity to actually hand them over to God. To let them go in peace, love, and gratitude. Everything suddenly made sense. Everything had divine order. I could give my son to God and not have him taken away from me. I felt my power as a creator and cocreator with God to literally let go of all that had happened to me. I held my baby son as God himself held me. I experienced the oneness of all of it. Time did not matter. Only love and order existed. Tamara and Griffin had come into my life as perfect teachers. And in leaving me in such a way, they continued as perfect teachers to bring me to that point of remembering who I was. remembering that I was created in God's image and actually came from Him. I was aware now that I could actually walk with God, empowered by what I was learning in my life. I felt the divine energy of the being behind me inviting me to let it all go and give Griffin to Him. In all that peace and knowledge, I hugged my little boy tightly one last time, kissed him on the cheek, and gently laid him back down in the crib. I willingly gave him up. No one would ever take him away from me again. He was mine. We were one, and I was one with God. As soon as I breathed in all that peace, I awoke, back into the pain and darkness of my hospital bed, but with greater perspective. I marveled at what I had just experienced. It was not just a dream. It felt too real. It was real to me, far more real than the pain, the grief, and my hospital bed. Griffin was alive in a place more real than anything here. And Tamara was there with him. I knew it. As the years have passed, I've often wondered how I could have put my son back in the crib the way I did. Maybe I should have held on and never let go. But in that place, it all made sense. I realized that no one ever really dies. We always live on. I had experienced a God as real and tangible as we are. He knows our every heartache, yet allows us to experience and endure them for our growth. His is the highest form of love; He allows us to become what we will. He watches as we create who we are. He allows us to experience life in a way that makes us more like Him, divine creators of our own destiny. My experience showed me purpose and order. I knew there was a master plan far greater than my limited earthly vision. I also learned that my choices were mine alone to make. I got to decide how I felt, and that made all the difference in the universe. even in this tragedy, I got to determine the outcome. I could choose to be a victim of what had happened or create something far greater.

Trump’s willingness to stack the courts and federal agencies with Christian right loyalists, and to give them full authority to transform a secular liberal democracy into a Christian nationalist autocracy, has produced more gratitude for his presidency than for the presidency of any other Republican since the advent of the modern Christian right.

Like our bodies, our minds are also flawed. And, as in the case of the body, the flaws in our minds might also not be imperfections but rather divinely-designed invitations to seek healing through Jesus Christ, who is mighty to save. If this is the case, we must be humbly grateful for these flaws. And we must diligently seek His healing, thereby exercising our agency to receive the restoration that only He can provide. Christ only is the Author and Finisher of our faith.

Search by Intelligence Agencies stay as Spying; conversely, search by journalists become as Investigation. The first circle dresses Confidential dress and other twists appreciably in Public; factually, both faculties abuse privacy and practice the same deed, but one faces the critique, and other receives gratitude; such conduct executes distinction between that, which should be not a context.

Several agencies ensure the safety of what goes in my mouth—the FDA, the U.S. Customs department—but I figure I’ll start locally with the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. I set up a call with Corinne Schiff, the deputy commissioner.

When Ask met Embla he was overcome with joy, allured by her beauty, and filled with gratitude for the marvelous partner he’d been given. He ruled not over her, nor she over him. They were equal in dignity, though distinct in constitution. Together, male and female bore children—thus, they fulfilled their own divine image, becoming makers themselves. Their progeny, in turn, helped to maintain the balance between the garden groves and the skies. “Meanwhile, Taranus, Hu-Esus, and Beli came together and placed an icon amongst men. A great tree, rooted in the ground yet elevating its branches toward the skies. It served as an image of the All Father’s character, a reminder of the role man and woman were to serve by maintaining balance in Abred, the natural realm. By reaching to the Tree, the soul of man and woman together participated in Gwynfydd, a place beyond though not above the natural realm, a place where they could hold together the mysteries of nature. Yet the most prominent of the Great Tree’s progeny, while matching the Great Tree in beauty, differed in character. The Great Tree had always taken from the land no more and no less than it needed. It reached to the sun and absorbed waters from the nearby wellsprings, but never in excess. The Great Tree exemplified balance and harmony in Abred. Insofar as Ask and Embla maintained the balance of things, respected the agency of each element and creature, the Great Tree was a true Tree of Life. It nourished them in kind, channeling Awen into their souls. “The other tree, its progeny, rebelled against its own nature. It sought not balance nor harmony between the elements, but its own magnificence. It took from the land not as the land would freely give, but whatever it might use at the land’s expense. It could take no more light than the sun would offer, but drawing in all moisture from every surrounding wellspring and from the air itself, the temperate sun no longer exhibited a pleasant warmth, but a scorching heat. “But Ask and Embla, blinded by this Wayward Tree’s magnificence, failed to see its true character. Allured by its fruit, they took from it and ate. Thus, Ask and Embla came to resemble the Wayward Tree and forgot the Tree of Life. “Enraged by what he had seen, how his likeness had departed from Awen and the way of the Great Tree of Life, the All Father—Taranus, Hu-Esus, and Beli—dispatched an emissary, the one known as Michael, to Earth to salvage what had been lost.

In gratitude to the Mossos d'Esquadra, the Police of Catalonia, and the Guardia Urbana for saving my life. In gratitude to former President Barack Hussein Obama, former President Donald John Trump, and President Joe Robinette Biden for their unwavering efforts in combating international crime organizations. In gratitude to the United States of America, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for safeguarding my life. I dedicate this book to Roberto Saviano. In Memoriam of Timothy. I dedicate this book to all those who have gone Missing In Action and to all Prisoners Of War. I dedicate this book to the love of my life and her father.

It is so easy to thank people," said Mma Ramotswe, passing the letter over to Mma Makutsi, "and most people don't bother to do it. They don't thank the person who does something for them. They just take it for granted.

The debt he incurred to Dumbledore is an emotional connection: gratitude, a form of love. This gives Dumbledore the closeness to suggest to Snape that he begin a second chance at life. Without that closeness, nothing would have tethered Snape to life once Lily died. Everything Snape does in life after this moment is extra. It’s a gift from Death. Snape is infinitely stronger because he doesn’t fear Death after this. He was willing to meet Death at 21; at Dumbledore’s offer, he goes under an invisibility cloak of sorts, takes on a life of double agency, to see what he can accomplish before he takes off the cloak and meets Death again. The two requests Snape made because of love for Lily are what created enough power to protect Harry Potter

The Prince alighted from his gleaming silver-blue jet, his mind firmly on the task at hand: to persuade his close friend to go to war. Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington, was in Crawford, Texas, in August 2002 to visit the President of the United States, his close friend George W. Bush. At the President’s ranch the two men, comfortable in one another’s company, chatted for an hour. The President was in determined mood. Bandar’s exhortation that he should not back off, that he should complete what his father had failed to do, that he should destroy the regime of Saddam Hussein once and for all, gratified the President. Satisfied by their mutual reinforcement, the dapper enigmatic Prince and the cowboy President took lunch with their wives and seven of Bandar’s eight children. A few weeks later, President Bush met the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, at Camp David. The two leaders declared they had sufficient evidence that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction to justify their acting against Saddam, with or without the support of the United Nations. Prince Bandar’s role in Washington and London was unique: diplomat, peacemaker, bagman for covert CIA operations and arms dealer extraordinaire. He constructed a special relationship between Washington, Riyadh and London, and made himself very, very wealthy in the process. The £75m Airbus, painted in the colours of the Prince’s beloved Dallas Cowboys, was a gift from the British arms company BAE Systems. It was a token of gratitude for the Prince’s role, as son of the country’s Defence Minister, in the biggest arms deal the world has seen. The Al Yamamah – ‘the dove’ – deal signed between the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia in 1985 was worth over £40bn. It was also arguably the most corrupt transaction in trading history. Over £1bn was paid into accounts controlled by Bandar. The Airbus – maintained and operated by BAE at least until 2007 – was a little extra, presented to Bandar on his birthday in 1988. A significant portion of the more than £1bn was paid into personal and Saudi embassy accounts at the venerable Riggs Bank opposite the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC. The bank of choice for Presidents, ambassadors and embassies had close ties to the CIA, with several bank officers holding full agency security clearance. Jonathan Bush, uncle of the President, was a senior executive of the bank at the time. But Riggs and the White House were stunned by the revelation that from 1999 money had inadvertently flowed from the account of Prince Bandar’s wife to two of the fifteen Saudis among the 9/11 hijackers.

The purpose of staying on the lookout for languages like these is to prevent them from becoming uncontested parts of the Christian worldview. Every time I run into one of them hard enough to hurt, I turn around and look in the opposite direction, where there is almost always a counternarrative in scripture just waiting for someone to notice it. When I run into a hard corner of Christian thinking about the subordination of women, I remember that the angel Gabriel did not ask Mary’s father if it would be all right for her to bear a son out of wedlock; Gabriel asked her. When I am walloped by Christian condescension toward those who are not Christian, I remember how many religious strangers played lead roles in Jesus’s life: the Canaanite woman who expanded his sense of agency, the Samaritan leper who showed him what true gratitude looked like, the Roman centurion in whom he saw more faith than he had ever seen in one of his own tribe.