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Father, I anticipate the good things You have prepared for me today. Bring complete order to my day as I seek You first and make Your will my priority. I rejoice in the new day You have given me. I praise You for making it fruitful and productive. Thank You for teaching me ways to increase my effectiveness— to work smarter. I work according to Your agenda and perform for an audience of one—the Lord Jesus Christ. In Jesus’s name, amen.
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Cindy Trimm (Commanding Your Morning Daily Devotional: Unleash God's Power in Your Life--Every Day of the Year)
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It's the silliness--the profligacy, and the silliness--that's so dizzying: a seven-year-old will run downstairs, kiss you hard, and then run back upstairs again, all in less than 30 seconds. It's as urgent an item on their daily agenda as eating or singing. It's like being mugged by Cupid.
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Caitlin Moran (How to Be a Woman)
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It has nothing to do with whether you like God’s rules. It’s not your kingdom. If you want to operate by your own rules, then you need to go out and create your own world. But as long as you are in God’s world, where God has set the rules, you must abide by His rules or you become a rebel against His kingdom government.
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Tony Evans (The Life Under God: The Kingdom Agenda 365 Daily Devotional Readings)
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Narcissists gaslight you so you begin to gaslight yourself into thinking what you are feeling, hearing, seeing and experiencing isn’t true. A narcissistic partner can manipulate you into thinking that perhaps that hurtful comment really was just a joke and that their infidelity was just a one-time thing. Many of these partners engage in pathological lying and rewrite reality on a daily basis to suit their needs and to conceal their manipulative agenda.
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Shahida Arabi (Becoming the Narcissist’s Nightmare: How to Devalue and Discard the Narcissist While Supplying Yourself)
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When you accomplish something that you once believed was impossible, it makes you a new person. It changes the way you see yourself and the world.
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John C. Maxwell (Make Today Count: The Secret of Your Success Is Determined by Your Daily Agenda (Successful People))
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The secret of your success is determined by your daily agenda.
"The only adequate preparation for tomorrow is the right use of today.
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John C. Maxwell (Today Matters: 12 Daily Practices to Guarantee Tomorrow's Success)
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You will ever depress the devil if you always love those who spit hatred into your face. The devil loves vengeance and anything contrary to this is an agenda to bring down his temporal kingdom!
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Israelmore Ayivor (Daily Drive 365)
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Think, Act, Talk, and Conduct Yourself Like the Person You Want to Become
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John C. Maxwell (Make Today Count: The Secret of Your Success Is Determined by Your Daily Agenda)
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The first item on a spiritual agenda is that I am not what I do, that I am what I am, and therefore I am a walking miracle, on a daily basis.
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Malachy McCourt (Singing My Him Song)
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The problem with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
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John C. Maxwell (Make Today Count: The Secret of Your Success Is Determined by Your Daily Agenda (Successful People))
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The secret of your success is determined by your daily agenda.
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John C. Maxwell (Intentional Living: Choosing a Life That Matters)
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I am going to keep a positive attitude and use it to influence others.
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John C. Maxwell (Make Today Count: The Secret of Your Success Is Determined by Your Daily Agenda (Successful People))
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What do I really want in life: the success of God’s agenda of grace or the fulfillment of my catalog of desires?
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Paul David Tripp (New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional)
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Every day is a chance to get closer to your dreams. Create a powerful daily agenda and take consistent steps towards your goals. Your success is within reach!
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Ahmed Zakaria Mami
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Small steps lead to big achievements. Your success relies on your daily agenda and the commitment to move forward, one step at a time.
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Ahmed Zakaria Mami
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The answer lies in the fact that the secret of your success is determined by your daily agenda.
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John C. Maxwell (Make Today Count: The Secret of Your Success Is Determined by Your Daily Agenda (Successful People))
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Don't underestimate the power of your daily agenda. Every choice you make, every step you take, is shaping your path to success. Embrace the process and keep moving forward, one step at a time.
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Ahmed Zakaria Mami
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For Eric, Columbine was a performance. Homicidal art. He actually referred to his audience in his journal: “the majority of the audience wont even understand my motives,” he complained. He scripted Columbine as made-for-TV murder, and his chief concern was that we would be too stupid to see the point. Fear was Eric’s ultimate weapon. He wanted to maximize the terror. He didn’t want kids to fear isolated events like a sporting event or a dance; he wanted them to fear their daily lives. It worked. Parents across the country were afraid to send their kids to school. Eric didn’t have the political agenda of a terrorist, but he had adopted terrorist tactics. Sociology professor Mark Juergensmeyer identified the central characteristic of terrorism as “performance violence.” Terrorists design events “to be spectacular in their viciousness and awesome in their destructive power. Such instances of exaggerated violence are constructed events: they are mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater.” The audience—for Timothy McVeigh, Eric Harris, or the Palestine Liberation Organization—was always miles away, watching on TV. Terrorists rarely settle for just shooting; that limits the damage to individuals. They prefer to blow up things—buildings, usually, and the smart ones choose carefully. “During that brief dramatic moment when a terrorist act levels a building or damages some entity that a society regards as central to its existence, the perpetrators of the act assert that they—and not the secular government—have ultimate control over that entity and its centrality,” Juergensmeyer wrote. He pointed out that during the same day as the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, a deadlier attack was leveled against a coffee shop in Cairo. The attacks were presumably coordinated by the same group. The body count was worse in Egypt, yet the explosion was barely reported outside that country. “A coffeehouse is not the World Trade Center,” he explained. Most terrorists target symbols of the system they abhor—generally, iconic government buildings. Eric followed the same logic. He understood that the cornerstone of his plan was the explosives. When all his bombs fizzled, everything about his attack was misread. He didn’t just fail to top Timothy McVeigh’s record—he wasn’t even recognized for trying. He was never categorized with his peer group. We lumped him in with the pathetic loners who shot people.
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Dave Cullen (Columbine)
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This framing accents the importance of building a tidier system, one that incorporates the array of existing child care centers, then pushes to make their classrooms more uniform, with a socialization agenda "aligned" with the curricular content that first or second graders are expected to know. Like the common school movement, uniform indicators of quality, centralized regulation, more highly credientialed teachers are to ensure that instruction--rather than creating engaging activities for children to explore--will be delivered in more uniform ways. And the state signals to parents that this is now the appropriate way to raise one's three- or four-year-old. Modern child rearing is equated with systems building in the eyes of universal pre-kindergarten advocates--and parents hear this discourse through upbeat articles in daily newspapers, public service annoucement, and from school authorities.
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Bruce Fuller (Standardized Childhood: The Political and Cultural Struggle over Early Education)
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The whole ideological assembly line that Richard Fink and Charles Koch had envisioned decades earlier, including the entire conservative media sphere, was enlisted in the fight. Fox Television and conservative talk radio hosts gave saturation coverage to the issue, portraying climate scientists as swindlers pushing a radical, partisan, and anti-American agenda. Allied think tanks pumped out books and position papers, whose authors testified in Congress and appeared on a whirlwind tour of talk shows. “Climate denial got disseminated deliberately and rapidly from think tank tomes to the daily media fare of about thirty to forty percent of the U.S. populace,” Skocpol estimates.
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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If you realized that the nurtured spiritual part of yourself would accompany you on your eternal journey and that everything else you have labored so hard to accumulate would vanish the instant you depart this world, would it alter your daily agenda?
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Walter Cooper (Shards: Restoring the Shattered Spirit)
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Awareness In most of our daily activities we choose the agenda and develop a strategy to achieve the goal at hand. We create the program. Awareness moves differently. The program is happening around us. The world is the doer and we are the witness. We have little or no control over the content. The gift of awareness allows us to notice what’s going on around and inside ourselves in the present moment. And to do so without attachment or involvement. We may observe bodily sensations, passing thoughts and feelings, sounds or visual cues, smells and tastes. Through detached noticing, awareness allows an observed flower to reveal more of itself without our intervention. This is true of all things. Awareness is not a state you force. There is little effort involved, though persistence is key. It’s something you actively allow to happen. It is a presence with, and acceptance of, what is happening in the eternal now. As soon as you label an aspect of Source, you’re no longer noticing, you’re studying. This holds true of any thought that takes you out of presence with the object of your awareness, whether analysis or simply becoming aware that you’re aware. Analysis is a secondary function. The awareness happens first as a pure connection with the object of your attention. If something strikes me as interesting or beautiful, first I live that experience. Only afterward might I attempt to understand it. Though we can’t change what it is that we are noticing, we can change our ability to notice. We can expand our awareness and narrow it, experience it with our eyes open or closed. We can quiet our inside so we can perceive more on the outside, or quiet the outside so we can notice more of what’s happening inside. We can zoom in on something so closely it loses the features that make it what it appears to be, or zoom so far out it seems like something entirely new. The universe is only as large as our perception of it. When we cultivate our awareness, we are expanding the universe. This expands the scope, not just of the material at our disposal to create from, but of the life we get to live.
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Rick Rubin (The Creative Act: A Way of Being)
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Real, biblical, self-sacrificing, God-honoring love never compromises what God says is right and true. Truth and love are inextricably bound together. Love that compromises truth simply isn’t love. Truth without love ceases to be truth because it gets bent and twisted by other human agendas.
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Paul David Tripp (New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional)
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COMMUNITY WAS HELD IN A LONG ROOM with tall barred windows that overlooked a redbrick wall. The smell of coffee was in the air, mingled with traces of Yuri’s aftershave. About thirty people were sitting in a circle. Most were clutching paper cups of tea or coffee, yawning and doing their best to wake up. Some, having drunk their coffees, were fidgeting with the empty cups, crumpling, flattening them, or tearing them to shreds. Community met once or twice daily; it was something between an administrative meeting and a group therapy session. Items relating to the running of the unit or the patients’ care were put on the agenda to be discussed
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Alex Michaelides (The Silent Patient)
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Don’t Catch the Ball Throughout your life, you’re going to cross paths with a lot of people eager to goad you into conflict or confrontation. There will be times when, despite your best efforts, you may find yourself getting baited into an argument, pulled into a game, or sucked into an agenda. And since we can’t always avoid these hot zones, we need to have strategies in place to handle them. This section is about managing those specific situations; the daily annoyances and problems that arise at work, school, or with our family and friends. Despite Newton’s theory, not every action needs a reaction. Just because someone is demanding your attention doesn’t mean you
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Evy Poumpouras (Becoming Bulletproof: Protect Yourself, Read People, Influence Situations, and Live Fearlessly)
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these glaring disparities, about how those with the most access within the movement set the agenda, contribute to the skewed media portrait, and overwhelmingly fail at funneling resources to those most marginalized. My awakening pushed me to be more vocal about these issues, prompting uncomfortable but necessary conversations about the movement privileging middle- and upper-class cis gay and lesbian rights over the daily access issues plaguing low-income queer and trans youth and LGBT people of color, communities that carry interlocking identities that are not mutually exclusive, that make them all the more vulnerable to poverty, homelessness, unemployment, HIV/AIDs, hyper-criminalization, violence, and so much more.
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Janet Mock (Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More)
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While her moment-to-moment experiences may have been torturous, Gladys was still able to complete tasks. For instance, she could show up for work on time, go grocery shopping, and remember to water the plants. Therefore, if someone’s life could be judged solely by her daily agenda, Gladys Baker would have appeared quite unspectacular. Yet it was how she experienced and reacted to the string of events that made her different.
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J. Randy Taraborrelli (The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe)
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When you glorify Christ and He is seen in and through you, your behavior will radically change. Remember, this is not a self-help program. This is not where you grit your teeth and say, “I’m going to do better.” Flesh doesn’t get better. But when you come and say, “I can’t do better,” and you are willing to die to your own will and your own agenda and you are willing to surrender yourself to Christ, then your behavior will be markedly different.
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Wayne Barber (Living Daily in God’s Grace)
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The best lifestyle can be described in a single phrase: waking up. Or, in other words, to be aware of everything around you. To wake up means devoting yourself to going beyond the everyday routines that people live by, the secondhand beliefs and opinions we have all adopted, the expectations we cling to, and the agenda of the ego. Waking up is about higher consciousness, or, in other words, a deeper awareness. Waking up is not a faraway goal—it can be your daily reality, starting here and now.
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Deepak Chopra (Total Meditation: Practices in Living the Awakened Life)
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Fear is a powerful motivator and is one of the many emotions that guides our choices in our daily life. One of the bonuses of critical thinking is making choices based on rationale and facts, not just emotion. Science does not say God does not exist, it says that it is not yet proven. This can be frustrating for people who have a more emotional approach to life and a static understanding of the world, but critical thinking challenges us to keep questioning so that our world view stays dynamic.
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Ian Tuhovsky (Critical Thinking: Think Clearly in a World of Agendas, Bad Science, and Information Overload)
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A colleague told me that he thinks of his life as an orchestra. Reclaiming his integrity reminds him of that moment before the concert when the concertmaster asks the oboist to sound an A. 'At first there is chaos and noise as all parts of the orchestra try to align themselves with that note. But as each instrument moves closer and closer to it, the noise diminishes and when they all finally sound it together, there is a moment of rest, of homecoming.'
'That is how it feels to me,' he told me. 'I am always tuning my orchestra. Somewhere deep inside there is a sound that is mine alone, and I struggle daily to hear it and tune my life to it. Sometimes there are people and situations that help me to hear my note more clearly; other times, people and situations make it harder for me to hear. A lot depends on my commitment to listening and my intention to stay coherent with this note. It is only when my life is tuned to my note that I can play life's mysterious and holy music without tainting it with my own discordance, my own bitterness, resentment, agenda, and fears.'
Deep inside, our integrity sings to us whether we are listening or not. It is a note that only we can hear.
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Rachel Naomi Remen (My Grandfather's Blessings : Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging)
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The love of God. The mercy of God. The judgment of God. You take the shoes off your feet and stand as you would before a mountain or at the edge of the sea. But the friendship of God? It is not something God does. It is something Abraham and God, or Moses and God, do together. Not even God can be a friend all by himself apparently. You see Abraham, say, not standing at all but sitting down, loosening his prayer shawl, trimming the end off his cigar. He is not being Creature for the moment, and God is not being Creator. There is no agenda. They are simply being together, the two of them, and being themselves.
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Frederick Buechner (Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechne)
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Again, we are daily forced to choose between depression and anxiety. Depression results from the wounding of the individuation imperative; anxiety results from moving forward into the unknown. That path of anxiety is necessary because therein lies the hope of the person to more nearly become an individual. My analyst once said to me, "You must make your fears your agenda." When we do take on that agenda, for all the anxiety engendered, we feel better because we know we are living in 'bonne foi' [good faith] with ourselves. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the perception that some things are more important to us than what we fear.
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James Hollis (Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts, 73))
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Powerful forces have a vested interest in our believing the myth (and it is a myth) that we are following no one at all. Many of the cultural liturgies that indoctrinate us daily - "Be true to yourself," - can be traced back to sources with a nefarious agenda. If "they" (whether multinational corporations, politicians, anti-democratic government agents, marketing departments, influencers who just want more followers, etc., etc.) can make us believe that each person is a blank slate, just following the inner compass of our "authentic self" in an upward march to happiness, then they can keep us blind to all the ways we've been "discipled" - formed and manipulated - by their desires.
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John Mark Comer (Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become Like Him, Do As He Did)
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I DO NOT BELIEVE that such groups as these which I found my way to not long after returning from Wheaton, or Alcoholics Anonymous, which is the group they all grew out of, are perfect any more than anything human is perfect, but I believe that the Church has an enormous amount to learn from them. I also believe that what goes on in them is far closer to what Christ meant his Church to be, and what it originally was, than much of what goes on in most churches I know. These groups have no buildings or official leadership or money. They have no rummage sales, no altar guilds, no every-member canvases. They have no preachers, no choirs, no liturgy, no real estate. They have no creeds. They have no program. They make you wonder if the best thing that could happen to many a church might not be to have its building burn down and to lose all its money. Then all that the people would have left would be God and each other. The church often bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the dysfunctional family. There is the authoritarian presence of the minister—the professional who knows all of the answers and calls most of the shots—whom few ever challenge either because they don’t dare to or because they feel it would do no good if they did. There is the outward camaraderie and inward loneliness of the congregation. There are the unspoken rules and hidden agendas, the doubts and disagreements that for propriety’s sake are kept more or less under cover. There are people with all sorts of enthusiasms and creativities which are not often enough made use of or even recognized because the tendency is not to rock the boat but to keep on doing things the way they have always been done.
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Frederick Buechner (Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechne)
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Every so often, the gods stop laughing long enough to do something terrible. There are few facts that are not brutal. The bitter, insufficient truth is that God recovered, but fun is dead.
Alcohol: the antidote to civilization. Alcoholism is a fatal disease. But then I am not a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, because I don't want to be cured. Alcoholism is suicide with training wheels. I watch myself sinking, an inch at a time, and I spit into the eye of fate, like Doc Holliday, who died too weak to lift a playing card. My traitorous and degenerate attitude is sort of my book review of the world we live in. I resign from the human race. I declare myself null and void; folded, spindled, and mutilated.
. . .This bar is an oasis for the night people, the street people, the invisible tribe, the people who simply do not exist in the orderly world we see in Time - the weekly science fiction magazine published by the Pentagon - an orderly world which is a sanitized Emerald City populated by contented Munchkins who pay taxes to buy tanks, nerve gas, and bombers and not a world which is a bus-station toilet where the air is a chemical cocktail of cancer-causing agents, children are starving, and the daily agenda is kill or be killed.
When the world demands that you be larger than life, and you are finding it hard enough just being life-size, you can come here, in the messy hemorrhaging of reality, let your hair down, take your girdle off, and not be embarrassed by your wounds and deformities. Here among the terminally disenchanted you are graded not by the size of the car on display in your driveway but by the size of your courage in the face of nameless things.
. . .Half of these people look like they just came back from the moon, and all of them are sworn witnesses for the prosecution on the charge that Earth serves as Hell for some other planet.
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Gustav Hasford (A Gypsy Good Time)
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A consistent theme of the New Testament is that we have been bought. Paul tells it to the Corinthians twice, in two different contexts (1 Corinthians 6:20 and 7:23). Paul calls himself a servant, a bondservant, or a slave of Christ in nearly every epistle that he wrote. Both Peter and Paul tell us that the church and individual believers are a possession of God (Titus 2:14 and 1 Peter 2:9). Regardless of whether the context is personal freedom, sexual morality, life in the fellowship of believers, or anything else, we are not our own. We belong to Another. When that really sinks into a believer’s heart, it is a profound revelation. A living sacrifice—in other words, a true worshiper—does not claim his own rights. He does not complain about slights and grievances, because he knows that his Master has ordained them and may even be using them for marvelous purposes. He bypasses the world and its desires. He throws his own personal agenda in the trash, no matter how many goals and dreams and preferences are on it. He does not make out his own schedule, he does not consider any possession his own, he does not make decisions from human reasoning, and he does not maintain any self-interest in his relationships with other people. He disregards the cultural warnings that too much selflessness is unhealthy, because his health is not the issue. God alone is the issue. His will, His character, His plans, and His providence are paramount. IN DEED We know better than to assume any of us have lived up to that ideal. But it’s still the goal, isn’t it? A heart that truly worships another is a heart that has completely abandoned itself. Most of the stresses of life come from threats to our self-interest. But if we have no self-interest, where is the stress? The heart that has abandoned itself to God is at rest. It has learned to love the eternal over the world. It lives in peace forever.
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Chris Tiegreen (The One Year Worship the King Devotional: 365 Daily Bible Readings to Inspire Praise)
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A daunting example of the impact that the loose talk and heavy rhetoric of the Sixties had on policy can be seen in the way the black family—a time-bomb ticking ominously, and exploding with daily detonations—got pushed off the political agenda. While Carmichael, Huey Newton and others were launching a revolutionary front against the system, the Johnson administration was contemplating a commitment to use the power of the federal government to end the economic and social inequalities that still plagued American blacks. A presidential task force under Daniel Patrick Moynihan was given a mandate to identify the obstacles preventing blacks from seizing opportunities that had been grasped by other minority groups in the previous 50 years of American history. At about the same time as the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Moynihan published findings that emphasized the central importance of family in shaping an individual life and noted with alarm that 21 percent of black families were headed by single women. “[The] one unmistakable lesson in American history,” he warned, is that a country that allows “a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future—that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder—most particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure—that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.” Moynihan proposed that the government confront this problem as a priority; but his conclusions were bitterly attacked by black radicals and white liberals, who joined in an alliance of anger and self-flagellation and quickly closed the window of opportunity Moynihan had opened. They condemned his report as racist not only in its conclusions but also in its conception; e.g., it had failed to stress the evils of the “capitalistic system.” This rejectionist coalition did not want a program for social change so much as a confession of guilt. For them the only “non-racist” gesture the president could make would be acceptance of their demand for $400 million in “reparations” for 400 years of slavery. The White House retreated before this onslaught and took the black family off the agenda.
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David Horowitz (The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz (My Life and Times 1))
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Know Your Father’s Heart Today’s Scripture Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 1 JOHN 4:10 KJV Today, I want you to reread the parable of the father of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32). As you read, keep in mind that this son utterly rejected and completely humiliated and dishonored his father, then only returned home when he remembered that even his father’s hired servants had more food than he did! It was not the son’s love for his father that made him journey home; it was his stomach. In his own self-absorbed pride, he wanted to earn his own keep as a hired servant rather than to receive his father’s provision by grace or unmerited favor. God wants us to know that even when our motivations are wrong, even when we have a hidden (usually self-centered) agenda and our intentions are not completely pure, He still runs to us in our time of need and showers His unmerited, undeserved, and unearned favor upon us. Oh, how unsearchable are the depths of His love and grace toward us! It will never be about our love for God. It will always be about His magnificent love for us. The Bible makes this clear: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10 KJV). Some people think that fellowship with God can only be restored when you are perfectly contrite and have perfectly confessed all your sins. Yet we see in this parable that it was the father who was the initiator, it was the father who had missed his son, who was already looking out for him, and who had already forgiven him. Before the son could utter a single word of his rehearsed apology, the father had already run to him, embraced him, and welcomed him home. Can you see how it’s all about our Father’s heart of grace, forgiveness, and love? Our Father God swallows up all our imperfections, and true repentance comes because of His goodness. Do I say “sorry” to God and confess my sins when I have fallen short and failed? Of course I do. But I do it not to be forgiven because I know that I am already forgiven through Jesus’ finished work. The confession is out of the overflow of my heart because I have experienced His goodness and grace and because I know that as His son, I am forever righteous through Jesus’ blood. It springs from being righteousness-conscious, not sin-conscious; from being forgiveness-conscious, not judgment-conscious. There is a massive difference. If you understand this and begin practicing this, you will begin experiencing new dimensions in your love walk with the Father. You will realize that your Daddy God is all about relationship and not religious protocol. He just loves being with you. Under grace, He doesn’t demand perfection from you; He supplies perfection to you through the finished work of His Son, Jesus Christ. So no matter how many mistakes you have made, don’t be afraid of Him. He loves you. Your Father is running toward you to embrace you! Today’s Thought My Father God runs to me in my time of need and showers His unmerited, undeserved, and unearned favor upon me. Today’s Prayer Father, thank You that I can experience Your love even when I have failed. No matter how many mistakes I may have made, I don’t have to be afraid to come to You. I am still Your beloved child, and I always have fellowship with You because of the finished work of Jesus. I thank You that You don’t demand perfection from me, but You supply perfection to me through the cross. It blesses my heart to know that You just love being with me. Thank You for running to embrace me. Amen.
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Joseph Prince (100 Days of Right Believing: Daily Readings from The Power of Right Believing)
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God wants to make us people who are more interested in what he wants for us than what we want for ourselves. He will not relent until we are free from our slavery to an agenda of personal happiness. And he calls us to speak in a way that has this reconciliation agenda in view.
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CCEF (Heart of the Matter: Daily Reflections for Changing Hearts and Lives)
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Believing in Jesus didn’t get the Christians hung or tossed to the lions for sport. Believing in Jesus as the rightful ruler and lord did. There’s a difference.
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Tony Evans (The Life Under God: The Kingdom Agenda 365 Daily Devotional Readings)
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BECAUSE OF PENTECOST, Heaven and earth would be able to enjoy increased collision. Jesus was one Man anointed. There was only so much Heaven that even Jesus, God Himself, could bring to earth as one man indwelt by the Presence of God. Even though in a moment Jesus could have chosen to flood every dimension of space with His manifest glory, He had another plan in mind. To bring two worlds together, He was going to use humanity. Those He had created in His image and likeness to extend the borders of Eden would be responsible, once again, for extending borders. DAILY SCRIPTURE READING ACTS 2:14-21 PRAYER Holy Spirit, You have come to bring two worlds together. As I host Your Presence, I am fulfilling what was written in the prophet Joel. Your Spirit is being poured out upon all flesh. Use me to participate in this great outpouring, that every eye would see and every heart would know that You are at work in the earth.
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Bill Johnson (Hosting the Presence Every Day: 365 Days to Unveiling Heaven's Agenda for Your Life)
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Sadly, prayer for many of us has been shrunk to an agenda that is little bigger than asking God for stuff. It has become that spiritual place where we ask God to sign our personal wish lists. For many, it is little more than a repeated cycle of requesting, followed by waiting to see if God, in fact, comes through. If he does, we celebrate his faithfulness and love; but if he doesn’t, we not only wonder if he cares, we are also tempted to wonder if he’s there. In this way, prayer often amounts to shopping at the Trinitarian department store for things that you have told yourself you need with the hope that they will be free.
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Paul David Tripp (New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional)
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Your calling is the customized life purpose God has ordained and equipped you to accomplish in order to bring Him the greatest glory and achieve the maximum expansion of His kingdom.
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Tony Evans (The Life Under God: The Kingdom Agenda 365 Daily Devotional Readings)
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Sadly, prayer for many of us has been shrunk to an agenda that is little bigger than asking God for stuff.
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Paul David Tripp (New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional)
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God is not working to deliver to you your personal definition of happiness. If you’re on that agenda page, you are going to be disappointed with God and you are going to wonder if he loves you. God is after something better—your holiness, that is, the final completion of his redemptive work in you.
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Paul David Tripp (New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional)
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Our agenda, our definition of what a good God should give us, is a life that is comfortable, pleasurable, and predictable; one in which there’s lots of human affirmation and an absence of suffering. But consider God’s agenda,
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Paul David Tripp (New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional)
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April 3 There is an obvious progression in the revelation of God for His people and an increase in His manifest Presence and glory. GOD MEANT IT when He said, “Of the increase of His government and of peace there will be no end” (Isa. 9:7). There has only been increase since those words were spoken. More and more, on earth as it is in Heaven is becoming a reality in our midst. We have to adjust how we think and see to not only realize it but cooperate with what God is doing. His Kingdom is one of increase and expansion. This work will continue until Numbers 14:21 comes to pass: “all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord.” Again Scripture says of us, “But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, that shines brighter and brighter until the full day” (Prov. 4:18 NASB). We should and must expect progress. After all, we are citizens of an unshakeable Kingdom that has no end. Our very purpose in life is intertwined with the in-breaking of God’s Kingdom and the unveiling of God’s glory. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, you have a vital role in being one who participates in the increase of His government. DAILY SCRIPTURE READING ISAIAH 9:1-7 PRAYER Father, thank You for the commission to be part of increasing Your Kingdom on the earth. Show me what this looks like in my life today and how I can spread Your goodness, love, joy, peace, healing, and justice in my sphere of influence.
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Bill Johnson (Hosting the Presence Every Day: 365 Days to Unveiling Heaven's Agenda for Your Life)
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April 4 Too many things get swept under the carpet called the Sovereignty of God. IN A FALSE understanding of sovereignty, God gets blamed for whatever happens in life. People often assume everything that happens must be His will because He is God. This perspective does not consider the exchange that took place in Eden, nor does it bring to mind Jesus’ own words to the devil during His temptation. There is an enemy with an agenda of his own. He is not all-powerful, but he is certainly cunning. He is ever looking for an inroad of agreement. He talks and talks until we actually buy in to his deception. Much of what we mistakenly brand as the sovereignty of God is actually the world operating under demonic influence. From disease to disaster, we must reconsider how we approach everything that steals, kills, and destroys. The problem is when we identify these things as God’s sovereign will. That simply isn’t true. God is “not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). Is anyone perishing? Yes. Is it God’s will? No. Because of that, I tend to emphasize the role that we play in the outcome of things. From the outset, God formed man to collaborate with. This tells me that we play a vital role in the unfolding of Heaven’s agenda on earth. God is not powerless, waiting for man to dictate His next move. This is the other side of imbalance. By sovereign decision, God Almighty has set up a system where man, indwelt by His Presence, has been restored to a position of authority on the earth. It is time for us to step into this identity even more to bring about God’s restorative solutions into a world marred by the consequences of sin. DAILY SCRIPTURE READING 2 PETER 3:8-9 PRAYER Lord, teach me what things I can actually change for the better by praying or declaring or by taking action. As I step out to play a part in bringing Heaven to earth, thank You for encouraging me through testimonies and answered prayers. These continue to strengthen my faith and cause me to keep taking risks.
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Bill Johnson (Hosting the Presence Every Day: 365 Days to Unveiling Heaven's Agenda for Your Life)
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We have everything we need to live in godly ways. There is no need to be seduced by deceptive and hollow promises of change that lead us away from Christ. These promises will prove to be forms of bondage that enslave us to ourselves and our self-sufficiency. They “protect” us from giving up control and wind up enslaving us to our own agendas.
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Nancy B. Winters (Heart of the Matter: Daily Reflections for Changing Hearts and Lives)
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GRACE FOR GLORY My grace is sufficient for you. (2 CORINTHIANS 12:9) God’s grace is not given to make us feel better but to glorify Him. Modern society’s subtle, underlying agenda is good feelings. We want the pain to go away. We want to feel better in difficult situations. But God wants us to glorify Him in those circumstances. Good feelings may or may not come, but that’s not the issue. The issue is whether we honor God by the way we respond to our circumstances. God’s grace — the enabling power of the Holy Spirit — is given to help us respond in such a way. God’s grace is sufficient. The Greek verb for is sufficient in 2 Corinthians 12:9 is translated “will be content” in 1 Timothy 6:8: “If we have food and clothing, with these we will be content” (NIV). This helps us understand what sufficient means. Food and clothing refer to life’s necessities, not luxuries. If we have the necessities, we’re to be content, realizing they’re sufficient. So it is with God’s grace in the spiritual realm. God always gives us what we need, perhaps sometimes more, but never less. The spiritual equivalent of food and clothing is simply the strength to endure in a way that honors God. Receiving that strength, we’re to be content. We would like the “luxury” of having our particular thorn removed, but God often says, “Be content with the strength to endure that thorn.” We can be confident He always gives that. John Blanchard said, “So he [God] supplies perfectly measured grace to meet the needs of the godly. For daily needs there is daily grace; for sudden needs, sudden grace; for overwhelming need, overwhelming grace. God’s grace is given wonderfully, but not wastefully; freely but not foolishly; bountifully but not blindly.”77 Transforming Grace
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Jerry Bridges (Holiness Day by Day: Transformational Thoughts for Your Spiritual Journey)
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Getting into God’s kingdom comes by way of the process known as conversion, but getting God’s kingdom to visibly manifest itself in the daily abundant life comes through your commitment.
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Tony Evans (The Life Under God: The Kingdom Agenda 365 Daily Devotional Readings)
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I’ll be on my best behavior.” What would that be, I wonder? For a man whose daily agenda includes murder, extortion, racketeering, and god only knows what else, what would good behavior look like?
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J.T. Geissinger (Cruel Paradise (Beautifully Cruel, #2))
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[...] The revolution was left unfinished. The feminists of the sixties and seventies challenged the rigid division of labour between men and women; they wanted women to have access to the workplace, and men to rediscover their role at home. The psychotherapist Susie Orbach reflects on the thinking of the seventies: 'We wanted to challenge the whole distribution of work we wanted to put at the centre of everything the reproduction of daily life, but feminism got seduced by the work ethic. My generation wanted to change the values of the workplace so that it accepted family life.'
This radical agenda for the reorganisation of work and home was abandoned in Britain. Instead we took on the American model of feminism, influenced by the rise of neo-liberalism and individualism. Feminism acquired shoulderpads and an appetite for power; it celebrated individual achievement rather than working out how to transform the separation between work and family, and the social processes of how we care for dependants and raise children. Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt remembers a turning point in the debate in the UK when she was at the National Council for Civil Liberties: 'The key moment was when we organised a major conference in the seventies with a lot of American speakers who were terrific feminists. When they arrived we were astonished that they were totally uninterested in an agenda around better maternity leave, etc. They argued that we couldn't claim special treatment in the workplace; women would simply prove they were equals. You couldn't make claims on the workplace. We thought it was appalling.
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Madeleine Bunting (Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives)
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Rather than seeking to be safe and in control, we become capable of living life on life’s terms. Instead of striving for perfection, we find rest in the reality that we will be, for the rest of our days, a constant work in progress, perennially unfinished, perpetually imperfect—always becoming in the experience of daily living. When we begin to accept that clumsy is the best we get—like giraffes on ice—we can begin to offer what our children really need from us: heartfelt relationship. This encompasses empathy, sensitivity, grief and celebration, perseverance, authenticity, understanding, boundaries, and reduced demands while still having high expectations, gratitude for others, gratitude for gifts they have, acceptance of others and self, understandable anger and frustration about life, and hope as what holds it all together. This sounds like a lot—and it is. These noble things cannot be achieved through knowing more but only through gaining and surrendering to the heart experience of living. The good-enough, clumsy parent is a wise-hearted person—someone who lives from a place rooted deeply in their authentic emotional and spiritual core and who has struggled truthfully to accept this clear edict: it takes a lifetime to learn how to live. Living the way we are made to live means acknowledging our feelings and asking for help and confessing that we are human. Living fully requires the ability to struggle daily with this truth: if we are going to experience the joy of life, we cannot escape the pain of love. If we don’t stay sensitive to life, then we revert to perfectionism—insisting that life and our children and other people behave according to our preset agendas.
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Stephen James (Parenting with Heart: How Imperfect Parents Can Raise Resilient, Loving, and Wise-Hearted Kids)
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What does it mean to think about the things of heaven? It means knowing heaven’s agenda: God’s purposes and His ways. It means seeking visions of Him and His plans. It means living with heaven’s values: a Kingdom culture of integrity, honor, purity, peace, generosity, and blessing.
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Chris Tiegreen (The One Year Experiencing God's Presence Devotional: 365 Daily Encounters to Bring You Closer to Him)
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But, in reality, Raab would run the country by committee as part of a so-called quad of senior ministers that also included Hancock, Sunak and Gove. Each day they would hold daily meetings at 9.15 a.m., either on Zoom or in person. They had competing agendas and egos, and none had the true authority of a prime minister. At one point Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, is understood to have read them the riot act, insisting that they pull together for the good of the country.
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Jonathan Calvert (Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus)
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The message is consistent throughout all of these passages. God is not working to deliver to you your personal definition of happiness. If you’re on that agenda page, you are going to be disappointed with God and you are going to wonder if he loves you. God is after something better—your holiness, that is, the final completion of his redemptive work in you. The difficulties you face are not in the way of God’s plan, they do not show the failure of God’s plan, and they are not signs he has turned his back on you. No, those tough moments are a sure sign of the zeal of his redemptive love.
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Paul David Tripp (New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional)
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Our problem is that we tend to be unfaithful to his holy agenda and get kidnapped by our plans for us and our dreams for our lives. The trials in our lives exist not because he has forgotten us, but because he remembers us and is changing us by his grace. When you remember that, you can have joy in the middle of what is uncomfortable.
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Paul David Tripp (New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional)
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Many people are like her. I mentioned that there are things in your life you cannot choose, such as your parents, where you were born, or your race. But your attitude is something you can change. And just about everybody has at least a few areas in their thinking that could use some help. If you want to have a better day, then you need to go after those areas.
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John C. Maxwell (Make Today Count: The Secret of Your Success Is Determined by Your Daily Agenda (Successful People))
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The secret to success can be found in our daily agenda.
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John C. Maxwell (The Self-Aware Leader: Play to Your Strengths, Unleash Your Team)
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I had learned that people don’t reach their potential by accident. The secret to success can be found in our daily agenda. If we do something intentional to grow every day, we move closer to reaching our potential. If we don’t, our potential slowly slips away over the course of our lifetime.
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John C. Maxwell (The Self-Aware Leader: Play to Your Strengths, Unleash Your Team)
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Powerful forces have a vested interest in our believing the myth (and it is a myth) that we are following no one at all. Many of the cultural liturgies that indoctrinate us daily—“ Be true to yourself,” “You do you,” “Speak your truth”—can be traced back to sources with a nefarious agenda. If “they” (whether multinational corporations, politicians, anti-democratic government agents, marketing departments, influencers who just want more followers, etc., etc.) can make us believe that each person is a blank slate, just following the inner compass of our “authentic self” in an upward march to happiness, then they can keep us blind to all the ways we’ve been “discipled”—formed and manipulated—by their desires.
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John Mark Comer (Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become Like Him, Do As He Did)
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Daily Habits Daily gratitude: Get up in the morning and give thanks. Show up for work, and stop opening your email first. Stay on your agenda. Write two personal notes each day. Focus on your hot list daily. Focus on your warm list daily.
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Larry Kendall (Ninja Selling: Subtle Skills. Big Results.)
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Power, after all, is frequently held and wielded not by elected officials and politicians, but by well-positioned lobbying groups, on the one hand, and the media, on the other. They will say in their defense that their mandate—sometimes given theoretical justification, more often just quietly assumed—is to hold the elected officials to account (the media) and to remind them of the real needs and interests of their constituents (the lobbyists). There is no doubt a grain of truth in that, but it is almost completely hidden under a ton of unscrutinized agendas. Official oppositions sometimes provide genuine critique, but often they don’t. Journalists sometimes do, but often simply reflect their own equally distorted agendas. We should not assume that our systems are automatically the best we could possibly have. This is where those who believe in the victory of the cross have something to say—quite literally. As Christians, our role in society is not to wring our hands at the corruption of power or simply to pick a candidate that supports one or another supposedly Christian policy. The Christian role, as part of naming the name of the crucified and risen Jesus on territory presently occupied by idols, is to speak the truth to power and especially to speak up for those with no power at all. —The Day the Revolution Began 400
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N.T. Wright (On Earth as in Heaven: Daily Wisdom for Twenty-First Century Christians)
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A life that constricts meaning wounds the soul. How often I have sat with couples who profess good intentions toward each other, but whose archaic agendas continue to impose themselves on each other. When I ask them, “How much do you want to live with a depressed, angry, reluctant partner?” each quickly responds that they desire the contrary. Yet their own actions, driven from hidden sources, create precisely that fractious, reluctant partner they dread. Relationships that are supposed to make both partners larger so often diminish both. The soul of each is constricted, and expresses itself through the familiar pathologies of daily discord.
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James Hollis (Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up)
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We Person-Centred Approach people are as human as anyone else after all, and, as does everyone, must daily face the difference between our aspirations and stated values, and our actual choices and behaviours, and the resulting outcomes. However, we keep giving ourselves a chance to change, again and again, thus more closely approximating our hopes for how we can be together
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Gay Barfield (Politicizing the Person-Centred Approach: An Agenda for Social Change)
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How easy it is to forget that my time is not my own. God gave it to me. I can start each day with my own agenda and look at every interruption as an inconvenience. Or I can start each day acknowledging that the hours belong to God. How would He like me to use them?
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Guideposts (Daily Guideposts 2017: A Spirit-Lifting Devotional)
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Islam means “submission.”1 The faith teaches that Muslims must submit to the will of Allah2 and prepare themselves for the final judgment in order to be able to enter paradise.3 Muslims believe that Allah revealed his will through Sharia, which literally means “path” but is generally translated as “Islamic law.”4 Unlike the traditional Western legal system, which is limited to basic civil and criminal elements, Sharia covers everything from religious rituals and private hygiene to principles of conducting business, criminal punishments, and more. Sharia prescribes, for example, how many times a Muslim must pray, how husbands should treat their wives, and what punishments are to be given for different crimes. It mandates flogging for consuming alcohol,5 stoning adulterers to death,6 cutting off a thief’s limbs,7 and executing apostates and blasphemers.8 Many Muslims around the world do not adhere to the jihadist ideology of terrorists. Most Muslims are moderate, peaceful people who, while following their religious traditions and rituals—attending mosques for worship, fasting, witnessing to others—reasonably coexist with followers of other religions. They do not impose their beliefs on others. They have non-Muslim friends, neighbors, and coworkers with whom they socialize on a daily basis. To these Muslims, Islam is a religion of peace. A small but increasingly significant segment of Muslims (some estimate its size as between 10 and 20 percent),9 however, believe in the supremacy of Islam and Sharia law over any other religion or law and feel obligated to force such beliefs on everybody. This
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Jay Sekulow (Unholy Alliance: The Agenda Iran, Russia, and Jihadists Share for Conquering the World)
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My prayer regimen is a small act of surrender, a practical way to deliberately pull my gaze from myself to my Savior—a lesson I learned years earlier on long car rides to news assignments but have now begun to put into daily practice. Eyes cannot look in two different directions. I want mine on Jesus—not on yesterday’s failures or successes, not on today’s agenda, and definitely not on the world’s scorecards.
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Jennifer Dukes Lee (Love Idol: Letting Go of Your Need for Approval - and Seeing Yourself through God's Eyes)
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Priorities—there are a handful of rules, some of which don’t change much like the core values of the firm and the long-term Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) and others that change every quarter and every week, what I call the Top 5 and Top 1 of 5. It’s the balance of short term and long term. 2. Data—in order to know if you’re acting consistent to your priorities you need feedback in terms of real time data. There are key metrics within the business that you want to measure over an extended period of time, called Smart Numbers; and there are metrics that provide a short-term laser focus on an aspect of the business or someone’s job called a Critical Number. It’s the balance of short term and long term. 3. Rhythm—until your people are “mocking” you, you’ve not repeated your message enough. A well-organized set of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual meetings keep everyone aligned and accountable. And the agendas for each provide the necessary balance between the short term and long term.
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Verne Harnish (Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm)
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Court was well aware that the dog’s daily agenda was more organized than his own.
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Mark Greaney (Ballistic (Gray Man, #3))
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Their approach is almost always to relativize Jesus, diminish his significance, or allow him to stand as part of the background noise while they direct the attention of believers to their own agenda—legalism, perhaps, or endless self-help, or sentimentalized therapy, or a Jesus who is no more than one of many options. Thus by their teaching they disown the Jesus whose death potentially embraced all, not least these false teachers who nominally submit to him but who in reality domesticate him or reinvent him.
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D.A. Carson (For the Love of God: A Daily Companion for Discovering the Riches of God's Word)
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So-called end-time speculation, which is the daily bread of many in the American religious right, is not unconnected to the agenda of some of America’s leading politicians.
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N.T. Wright (Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church)
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When did we revert back to sticks and shields,
Uniform uniforms, stylized agenda reveals,
Hiding behind glass with nods to our reflection,
Blocking out the light that sparked the deception?
Who do we see staring across the isle,
A path once for feet now stretched into miles,
Removed from our view to a place unseen,
Forcing poisonous venom through a flickering screen?
Where should we gather outside of the homes,
But a place for the masses to manifest from their phones,
The hatred and evil broadcasting the waves,
Telling you daily, “Elvis lives and Jesus saves”?
What could restart a flawed mental state,
Built on cause and guilt for an unfulfilled faith
In policy, redemption, a nation self aware,
Our values compressed and trapped in despair?
How can we rise with the odds in their favor,
Sedated once more, still waiting for a Savior
Willing to spare from thoughts profound?
Stand tall, my friends, when the fool comes around.
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Ross Caligiuri
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UNITED GHANA AGENDA
Bill Gate assisted in discovering Microsoft a window that connects the world to an interactive SocialMedia Networking to sell,market and trade their uniqueness to the world for profits .
Though MicroHard has being discovered,it seems Micro-Hard still plays same technological duties,Chief-Icons has discovered the Micro - Tough(trademark from Micro-Hard)
Micro-Tough(M-H) will connect the world both offline and online on a unified interactive SocialMedia Networking to live in complete peace and unity with each other to make even huger profits and be granted the complete comfort to live ,enjoy and be Happy .
Business Friendship when applied to our daily lives will reborn TRUST for greater things. United Ghana(Roadmap to Successful Globalization) is target but beyond the skies is the limit .
Written and Endorsed,
Icons-Gates Network,
Chief-Icons
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Chief-Icons Rashid Bawah
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The apostle Paul urges us to become living sacrifices in response to all Jesus has done for us. Living sacrifices have died to their own interests and agendas. Their focus is on what God wants to do through them. To be a living sacrifice is to be set apart by God for His service.
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Ava Pennington (Daily Reflections on the Names of God: A Devotional)
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During his first month in office, Trump excluded some prominent reporters from a press briefing. Almost immediately, the government of Cambodia threatened to kick a contingent of American journalists out of its country. Spokesmen in Phnom Penh said they perceived a “clear message” from Trump that “news broadcast by those media outlets does not reflect the truth,” adding that “Freedom of expression . . . must respect the state’s power.” Cambodia’s was the first of many governments—others include those of Hungary, Libya, Poland, Russia, Somalia, and Thailand—to insist that negative stories about them are false for no reason except that the press cannot be trusted. According to the People’s Daily, the house organ of the Chinese Communist Party: “If the president of the United States claims that his nation’s media outlets are a stain on America, then negative stories about China should be taken with a grain of salt, since it is likely that the bias and political agenda are distorting the real picture.” The ability of a free and independent press to hold political leaders accountable is what makes open government possible—it is the heartbeat of democracy. Trump is intent on stilling, or slowing down, that heartbeat. This is a gift to dictators, and coming from a chief executive of the United States, cause for shame.
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Madeleine K. Albright (Fascism: A Warning)
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The call is to do theology in loving community with other people. Truth not spoken in love ceases to be true because it’s bent and twisted by other human agendas.
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Paul David Tripp (New Morning Mercies: A Daily Gospel Devotional)