Immense Blessings Quotes

And when your soul, the flame, the spark, meets with the divine fuel that is so pure and so strong, it results in immense enlightenment: the enlightenment of God. Light upon light, Noorun Alaa Noor.

It is important for a husband to understand that his words have tremendous power in his wife’s life. He needs to bless her with words. She’s given her life to love and care for him, to partner with him, to create a family together, to nurture his children. If he is always finding fault in something she’s doing, always putting her down, he will reap horrendous problems in his marriage and in his life. Moreover, many women today are depressed and feel emotionally abused because their husbands do not bless them with their words. One of the leading causes of emotional breakdowns among married women is the fact that women do not feel valued. One of the main reasons for that deficiency is because husbands are willfully or unwittingly withholding the words of approval women so desperately desire. If you want to see God do wonders in your marriage, start praising your spouse. Start appreciating and encouraging her. Every single day, a husband should tell his wife, “I love you. I appreciate you. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” A wife should do the same for her husband. Your relationship would improve immensely if you’d simply start speaking kind, positive words, blessing your spouse instead of cursing him or her.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflexion, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come --

There must be a glowing light above such houses. The joy they contain must escape in light through the stones of the walls and shine dimly into the darkness. It is impossible that this sacred festival of destiny should not send a celestial radiation to the infinite. Love is the sublime crucible in which is consummated the fusion of man and woman; the one being, the triple being, the final being-- the human trinity springs from it. This birth of two souls into one space must be an emotion for space. The lover is priest; the apprehensive maiden submits. Something of this joy goes to God. Where there really is marriage, that is to say, where there is love, the ideal is mingled with it. A nuptial bed makes a halo in the darkness. Were it given to the eye of the flesh to perceive the fearful and enchanting sights of the superior life, it is likely that we should see the forms of night, the winged stranger, the blue travelers of the invisible, bending, a throng of shadowy heads, over the luminous house, pleased, blessing, showing to one another the sweetly startled maiden bride and wearing the reflection of the human felicity on their divine countenances. If at that supreme hour, the wedded pair, bewildered with pleasure, and believing themselves alone, were to listen, they would hear in their room a rustling of confused wings. Perfect happiness implies the solidarity of the angels. That obscure little alcove has for its ceiling the whole heavens. When two mouths, made sacred by love, draw near to each other to create, it is impossible, that above that ineffable kiss there should not be a thrill in the immense mystery of the stars.

I made sure I let go of my past, accepting the fact that that part of my life was only a small fraction of my life. I knew the black hole was out there, waiting to suck me in and forever control my destiny--but only if I let it. I took positive control over my life. I'm so blessed. The challenges of the past made me immensely strong inside.

I think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge. To understand the molecular nature of cancer for the first time, to diagnose and prevent Alzheimer’s disease, to discover the secrets of human history, to reconstruct the organisms that populated the pre-Cambrian seas – these seem to me to be immense blessings.

What beyond the sunrise and set, beyond body and mind? What then when body and mind have left me, and I am but dust and ash molten with Earth? What then when all that has been left are my words, like this, now, and you are not you, yet another, reading? What immense wonder we are blessed with. Grasp my hand, do not let go. This flight is simply fantastic." - Susan Marie

Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflexion, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come --

The old man continued, “You have been a real blessing to me. Today, I understand something I didn’t see before: every blessing ignored becomes a curse. I don’t want anything else in life. But you are forcing me to look at wealth and at horizons I have never known. Now that I have seen them, and now that I see how immense my possibilities are, I’m going to feel worse than I did before you arrived. Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don’t want to do so.

But whoever seriously considers the immense extent of territory comprehended within the limits of the United States, together with the variety of its climates, productions, and commerce, the difference of extent, and number of inhabitants in all; the dissimilitude of interest, morals, and politics, in almost every one, will receive it as an intuitive truth, that a consolidated republican form of government therein, can never form a perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to you and your posterity, for to these objects it must be directed. This unkindred legislature therefore, composed of interests opposite and dissimilar in their nature, will in its exercise, emphatically be like a house divided against itself.

She [88yo Mrs Fitzgerald] crossed herself and patted my arm. "And you're after coming all the way from England to find out who done it? Aren't you great? God bless you, young fella." "The old heretic," I said, when we got outside. Mrs. Fitzgerald had cheered up my day immensely. "I hope I have that much zip when I'm eighty-eight

My arms are wide open to all of the blessings that are coming my way. I fully accept them with immense gratitude.

That is truly one of the rudest things I’ve ever heard, but eureka! What rich fertilizer! Thank you! God bless you.

When we act as if we don’t notice God’s blessings, it’s not humility. It’s ingratitude.

The Creator wished to bless the home of the Iroquois and he placed his immense hand upon the earth, and the impression it left was the Finger Lakes” Myths, Legends and Lore Central New York and the Finger Lakes

Nature was the great ecclesiastical room. It held the power of divine spirit—the wind, the fragrance, the desire, the relief, the majesty of blessed existence. Shadow was merely an accolade within Nature’s immense room.

Seventy is the natural life span for human beings. And if things move in this natural course then one dies with tremendous joy, with great ecstasy, feeling immensely blessed that life has not been meaningless, that at least one has found his home. And because of this richness, this fulfillment, one is capable of blessing the whole of existence. Just to be near such a person at the time of death is a great opportunity. You will feel, as the person leaves the body, as if some invisible flowers are falling upon you. Although you cannot see them, you can feel them. It is sheer joy, so pure that even to have a little taste of it is enough to transform your whole life.

You. Man at the machine and man in the workshop. If tomorrow they tell you you are to make no more water-pipes and saucepans but are to make steel helmets and machine-guns, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Woman at the counter and woman in the office. If tomorrow they tell you you are to fill shells and assemble telescopic sights for snipers' rifles, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Research worker in the laboratory. If tomorrow they tell you you are to invent a new death for the old life, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Priest in the pulpit. If tomorrow they tell you you are to bless murder and declare war holy, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Pilot in your aeroplane. If tomorrow they tell you you are to carry bombs over the cities, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Man of the village and man of the town. If tomorrow they come and give you your call-up papers, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! You. Mother in Normandy and mother in the Ukraine, mother in Vancouver and in London, you on the Hwangho and on the Mississippi, you in Naples and Hamburg and Cairo and Oslo - mothers in all parts of the earth, mothers of the world, if tomorrow they tell you you are to bear new soldiers for new battles, then there's only one thing to do: Say NO! For if you do not say NO - if YOU do not say no - mothers, then: then! In the bustling hazy harbour towns the big ships will fall silent as corpses against the dead deserted quay walls, their once shimmering bodies overgrown with seaweed and barnacles, smelling of graveyards and rotten fish. The trams will lie like senseless glass-eyed cages beside the twisted steel skeleton of wires and track. The sunny juicy vine will rot on decaying hillsides, rice will dry in the withered earth, potatoes will freeze in the unploughed land and cows will stick their death-still legs into the air like overturned chairs. In the fields beside rusted ploughs the corn will be flattened like a beaten army. Then the last human creature, with mangled entrails and infected lungs, will wander around, unanswered and lonely, under the poisonous glowing sun, among the immense mass graves and devastated cities. The last human creature, withered, mad, cursing, accusing - and the terrible accusation: WHY? will die unheard on the plains, drift through the ruins, seep into the rubble of churches, fall into pools of blood, unheard, unanswered, the last animal scream of the last human animal - All this will happen tomorrow, tomorrow, perhaps, perhaps even tonight, perhaps tonight, if - if - You do not say NO.

All the seeds of Christianity -- of superstition, were sown in my mind and cultivated with great diligence and care. All that time I knew nothing of any science -- nothing about the other side -- nothing of the objections that had been urged against the blessed Scriptures, or against the perfect Congregational creed. Of course I had heard the ministers speak of blasphemers, of infidel wretches, of scoffers who laughed at holy things. They did not answer their arguments, but they tore their characters into shreds and demonstrated by the fury of assertion that they had done the Devil's work. And yet in spite of all I heard -- of all I read. I could not quite believe. My brain and heart said No. For a time I left the dreams, the insanities, the illusions and delusions, the nightmares of theology. I studied astronomy, just a little -- I examined maps of the heavens -- learned the names of some of the constellations -- of some of the stars -- found something of their size and the velocity with which they wheeled in their orbits -- obtained a faint conception of astronomical spaces -- found that some of the known stars were so far away in the depths of space that their light, traveling at the rate of nearly two hundred thousand miles a second, required many years to reach this little world -- found that, compared with the great stars, our earth was but a grain of sand -- an atom – found that the old belief that all the hosts of heaven had been created for the benefit of man, was infinitely absurd.

You can fight the feelings of depression by reminding yourself of blessings in your life. You can listen to music or sing. Even getting your mind off yourself by doing something kind for someone else will help immensely. Don't forget that our moods are connected to our thoughts; therefore, I urge you to take notice of what you're thinking about when you feel depressed. You may find the source of your problem.

Today, I understand something I didn’t see before: every blessing ignored becomes a curse. I don’t want anything else in life. But you are forcing me to look at wealth and at horizons I have never known. Now that I have seen them, and now that I see how immense my possibilities are, I’m going to feel worse than I did before you arrived. Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don’t want to do so.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

One of W.A.'s descendants described the mixed blessing of inherited wealth: "I think having such wealth can lead some people to have a lack of self-worth because of not having developed a lucrative career of their own or even having investigated their own potential. Having an overabundance of wealth can make people insecure around others who have far less than they do, since the former might wonder if potential partners or even friends are 'only' after them for their money. Well-meaning people of excessive wealth can feel anxious about the lack of perfection of charities they support, and about the fact that even as willing patrons they are powerless to obliterate suffering--all the while knowing that any small amount of money that they might spend on themselves is still enough to change or even save some lives. Wealth can lead to guilt over the unfairness of people working endlessly for them who have never been included fully into the family. In sum, having immense wealth can lead one to feel isolated and to have a false sense of being special.

Much of modern preaching is anaemic, with the life-blood of God's nature absent from the message. Evangelists centre their message upon the man. Man has sinned and missed a great blessing. If man wants to retrieve his immense loss he must act thus and so. But the Gospel of Christ is very different. It begins with God and His glory. It tells men that they have offended a holy God, who will by no means pass by sin. It reminds sinners that the only hope of salvation is to be found in the grace and power of this same God. Christ's Gospel sends men to beg pardon of the Holy One.

Christianity invented or blessed the invention of the technological Machine. The bulk of people in the Third World today have experienced Christianity not as separate from technology but almost as a part of it. Throngs of people went to school to learn to be modern — that is, to be Christian. Many ended up serving the administrative machinery of Christianity, hoping for a taste of greater modernism. It was a team of Christians who came into my village over twelve years ago to ask those who went to church on Sunday to grow cotton so that they could buy it from them. The naive villagers saw in it an immense opportunity to become modern — that is, to acquire bicycles, short-wave radios and clothes. What they did not see was that these white Christians had their own separate agenda. Because they were in control, they laid out what they wanted the villagers to do. It included using fertilizer and pesticides that were banned in France. No one had the money, but everyone bought on credit. They were barely able to pay their debts out of their sales. With bitterness, the villagers returned to their traditional farming, but the land was angry. Tortured by foreign chemicals, it “went into a coma.” Technology

How can I further encourage you to go about the business of life? Young women, I would say, and please attend, for the peroration is beginning, you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse? It is all very blessings of civilisation. What is you excuse? it is all very well for you to say, pointing to the streets and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black and white and coffee-coloured inhabitants, all busily engaged in traffic and enterprise and love-making, we have had other work on our hands. Without our doing, those seas would be unsailed and those fertile lands a desert. We have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that, allowing that some had help, takes time. There is truth in what you say—I will not deny it. But at the same time may I remind you that there have been at least two colleges for women in existence in England since the year 1886; that after the year 1880 a married woman was allowed by the law to possess her own property; and that in 1919—which is a whole nine years ago—she was given a vote? May I also remind you that most of the professions have been open to you for close to ten years now? When you reflect upon these immense privileges and the length of time during which they have been enjoyed, and the fact that there must be at this moment some two thousand women capable of earning over five hundred a year in one way or another, you will agree that the excuse of lack of opportunity, training, encouragement, leisure and money no longer holds good. Moreover, the economists are telling us that Mrs. Seton has had too many children. You must, of course, go on bearing children, but, so they say, in twos and threes, not in tens and twelves. Thus, with some time on your hands and with some book learning in your brains—you have had enough of the other kind, and are sent to college partly, I suspect, to be uneducated—surely you should embark upon another stage of your very long, very laborious and highly obscure career. A thousand pens are ready to suggest what you should do and what effect you will have. My own suggestion is a little fantastic, I admit; I prefer, therefore, to put it in the form of fiction.

You look terrible,” was Ron’s greeting as he entered the room to wake Harry. “Not for long,” said Harry, yawning. They found Hermione downstairs in the kitchen. She was being served coffee and hot rolls by Kreacher and wearing the slightly manic expression that Harry associated with exam review. “Robes,” she said under her breath, acknowledging their presence with a nervous nod and continuing to poke around in her beaded bag, “Polyjuice Potion . . . Invisbility Cloak . . . Decoy Detonators . . . You should each take a couple just in case. . . . Puking Pastilles, Nosebleed Nougat, Extendable Ears . . .” They gulped down their breakfast, then set off upstairs, Kreacher bowing them out and promising to have a steak-and-kidney pie ready for them when they returned. “Bless him,” said Ron fondly, “and when you think I used to fantasize about cutting off his head and sticking it on the wall.” They made their way onto the front step with immense caution: They could see a couple of puffy-eyed Death Eaters watching the house from across the misty square. Hermione Disapparated with Ron first, then came back for Harry. After the usual brief spell of darkness and near suffocation, Harry found himself in the tiny alleyway where the first phase of their plan was scheduled to take place. It was as yet deserted, except for a couple of large bins; the first Ministry workers did not usually appear here until at least eight o’clock. “Right then,” said Hermione, checking her watch. “She ought to be here in about five minutes. When I’ve Stunned her—” “Hermione, we know,” said Ron sternly. “And I thought we were supposed to open the door before she got here?” Hermione squealed. “I nearly forgot! Stand back—” She pointed her wand at the padlocked and heavily graffitied fire door beside them, which burst open with a crash. The dark corridor behind it led, as they knew from their careful scouting trips, into an empty theater. Hermione pulled the door back toward her, to make it look as though it was still closed. “And now,” she said, turning back to face the other two in the alleyway, “we put on the Cloak again—” “—and we wait,” Ron finished, throwing it over Hermione’s head like a blanket over a birdcage and rolling his eyes at Harry.

At the outset I must confess that I am no longer very good at telling the difference between good things and bad things. Of course there are many events in human history that can only be labeled as evil, but from the standpoint of inner individual experience the distinction has become blurred for me. Some things start out looking great but wind up terribly, while other things seem bad in the beginning but turn out to be blessings in disguise. I was diagnosed with cancer in 1995, which I thought was a bad thing. But the experience brought me closer to God and to my loved ones than I'd ever been, and that was wonderfully good. The chemotherapy felt awful, but it resulted in a complete cure, which I decided was good. I later found out it may also have caused the heart disease that now has me waiting for a heart transplant. At some point I gave up trying to decide what's ultimately good or bad. I truly do not know....Although not knowing may itself seem like a bad thing, I am convinced it is one of the great gifts of the dark night of the soul. To be immersed in mystery can be very distressing at first, but over time I have found immense relief in it. It takes the pressure off. I no longer have to worry myself to death about what I did right or wrong to cause a good or bad experience-because there really is no way of knowing. I don't have to look for spiritual lessons in every trouble that comes along. There have been many spiritual lessons to be sure, but they've given to me in the course of life; I haven't had to figure out a single one.

If I owe a person money, and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself, and pay it for me. But if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed. Moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty even if the innocent would offer itself. To suppose justice to do this, is to destroy the principles of its existence, which is the thing itself. It is then no longer justice. It is indiscriminate revenge. This single reflection will show that the doctrine of redemption is founded on a mere pecuniary idea corresponding to that of a debt which another person might pay; and as this pecuniary idea corresponds again with the system of second redemptions, obtained through the means of money given to the church for pardons, the probability is that the same persons fabricated both the one and the other of those theories; and that, in truth, there is no such thing as redemption; that it is fabulous; and that man stands in the same relative condition with his Maker he ever did stand, since man existed; and that it is his greatest consolation to think so. Let him believe this, and he will live more consistently and morally, than by any other system. It is by his being taught to contemplate himself as an out-law, as an out-cast, as a beggar, as a mumper, as one thrown as it were on a dunghill, at an immense distance from his Creator, and who must make his approaches by creeping, and cringing to intermediate beings, that he conceives either a contemptuous disregard for everything under the name of religion, or becomes indifferent, or turns what he calls devout. In the latter case, he consumes his life in grief, or the affection of it. His prayers are reproaches. His humility is ingratitude. He calls himself a worm, and the fertile earth a dunghill; and all the blessings of life by the thankless name of vanities. He despises the choicest gift of God to man, the GIFT OF REASON; and having endeavored to force upon himself the belief of a system against which reason revolts, he ungratefully calls it human reason, as if man could give reason to himself. Yet, with all this strange appearance of humility, and this contempt for human reason, he ventures into the boldest presumptions. He finds fault with everything. His selfishness is never satisfied; his ingratitude is never at an end. He takes on himself to direct the Almighty what to do, even in the government of the universe. He prays dictatorially. When it is sunshine, he prays for rain, and when it is rain, he prays for sunshine. He follows the same idea in everything that he prays for; for what is the amount of all his prayers, but an attempt to make the Almighty change his mind, and act otherwise than he does? It is as if he were to say - thou knowest not so well as I.

Boy Lost Picture a sunset in a small port town by the sea. Two teenaged boys sitting on the docks watching the ships as they fly across the water. One reaches out and takes the other’s hand. In this brush of skin for skin, a thousand unspoken promises erupt between them, and both are determined to keep them. This is what youth is. The sheer belief that you will be able to keep every promise you made to someone else. That you will be able to love someone into a forever when you do not even understand what forever means. An evening spent in the headiness of love, they go back to their respective homes. One boy helps his mother with cooking and cleaning and looking after his little sister. His father is a good man, a sailor who brings home with him meagre wages, but a heart full of love and a quicksilver tongue that tells stories of faraway lands to enthral them all. But this boy, despite his blessings, is not happy. He may have been blessed with a loving family, but that faraway look is made of unrest and wanderlust, something about him says fae, changeling, wearing the skin of a boy who was always destined to fly, to leave.   The other boy returns home to a father who drinks and a mother who works so hard that she is never there. He is the unwanted creature in this home, a beating waiting for him at every corner. His father’s temper is a beast so powerful that a boy made of paper bones barely held together cannot fight him. He hides in his room. He lives for a boy at sunset, hope made into a human being. Now picture this. This boy of paper bones alone at the docks the next sunset. And this boy alone on the docks again on a rainy day. And this boy alone on the docks every day after, waiting for someone who promised him forevers he never intended to keep. This boy becoming a man, a heart wounded so young in youth that it never quite healed right. Imagine him becoming a sailor, searching land after land for a boy he once loved, thinking he was hurt, or stolen, just needing to know what happened to him. Now see him finally finding out that the boy he loved in his boyhood ran away to a magical land where he never grew up. That without a second glance, he just forgot every promise of forever. Imagine his rage, that ancient pain turning to a terrible anger and escaping from the forgotten attic of his mangled heart. Think of what happens when immense love turns into immense hate. An anger so intense it cannot be controlled. What he would give up to avenge the boy he once was, paper-boned, standing on the docks, broken without a single person to love him, simply all alone. A hand is a small price to pay for a magical ship that will take him to Neverland, a place that lives on a star. Becoming a villain called Captain Hook is a small exchange to show Peter Pan that you cannot throw away love and think you will get away unscarred.

Blessed Man” is a tribute to Updike’s tenacious maternal grandmother, Katherine Hoyer, who died in 1955. Inspired by an heirloom, a silver thimble engraved with her initials, a keepsake Katherine gave to John and Mary as a wedding present (their best present, he told his mother), the story is an explicit attempt to bring her back to life (“O Lord, bless these poor paragraphs, that would do in their vile ignorance Your work of resurrection”), and a meditation on the extent to which it’s possible to recapture experience and preserve it through writing. The death of his grandparents diminished his family by two fifths and deprived him of a treasured part of his past, the sheltered years of his youth and childhood. Could he make his grandmother live again on the page? It’s certainly one of his finest prose portraits, tender, clear-eyed, wonderfully vivid. At one point the narrator remembers how, as a high-spirited teenager, he would scoop up his tiny grandmother, “lift her like a child, crooking one arm under her knees and cupping the other behind her back. Exultant in my height, my strength, I would lift that frail brittle body weighing perhaps a hundred pounds and twirl with it in my arms while the rest of the family watched with startled smiles of alarm.” When he adds, “I was giving my past a dance,” we hear the voice of John Updike exulting in his strength. Katherine takes center stage only after an account of the dramatic day of her husband’s death. John Hoyer died a few months after John and Mary were married, on the day both the newlyweds and Mary’s parents were due to arrive in Plowville. From this unfortunate coincidence, the Updike family managed to spin a pair of short stories. Six months before he wrote “Blessed Man,” Updike’s mother had her first story accepted by The New Yorker. For years her son had been doing his filial best to help get her work published—with no success. In college he sent out the manuscript of her novel about Ponce de León to the major Boston publishers, and when he landed at The New Yorker he made sure her stories were read by editors instead of languishing in the slush pile. These efforts finally bore fruit when an editor at the magazine named Rachel MacKenzie championed “Translation,” a portentous family saga featuring Linda’s version of her father’s demise. Maxwell assured Updike that his colleagues all thought his mother “immensely gifted”; if that sounds like tactful exaggeration, Maxwell’s idea that he could detect “the same quality of mind running through” mother and son is curious to say the least. Published in The New Yorker on March 11, 1961, “Translation” was signed Linda Grace Hoyer and narrated by a character named Linda—but it wasn’t likely to be mistaken for a memoir. The story is overstuffed with biblical allusion, psychodrama, and magical thinking, most of it Linda’s. She believes that her ninety-year-old father plans to be translated directly to heaven, ascending like Elijah in a whirlwind, with chariots of fire, and to pass his mantle to a new generation, again like Elijah. It’s not clear whether this grand design is his obsession, as she claims, or hers. As it happens, the whirlwind is only a tussle with his wife that lands the old folks on the floor beside the bed. Linda finds them there and says, “Of all things. . . . What are you two doing?” Her father answers, his voice “matter-of-fact and conversational”: “We are sitting on the floor.” Having spoken these words, he dies. Linda’s son Eric (a writer, of course) arrives on the scene almost immediately. When she tells him, “Grampy died,” he replies, “I know, Mother, I know. It happened as we turned off the turnpike. I felt

Living beings must take into account both human savagery and human congeniality. The stupendous irrationality and meanness that underlies much of human behavior contrasted with the love and compassion that people unselfishly exhibit makes ordinary life both appalling and fascinating. Using all available knowledge, we must grope our way through the bizarre twilight zone cast while living amongst the great apes, an unpredictable species that is capable of displaying both immense charity and engaging in the most outrageously inhuman actions imaginable. The blessed oddity of human behavior prompts an immense swath of tolerance and produces a wellspring of sympathy for our fellow humans. The radiant minds of history’s great thinkers infused with the quick of experience of today’s perceptive students of life will assist light a pathway though the byzantine jungle for the preeminent torch bearers of tomorrow to claw through. Our collective and interweaved journey through this wrinkle of time shall produce the backdrop of the story of the next generation, a unique tale paying tribute to these thunderous times.

GRATITUDE May we be grateful for everything good. Good is everything. May we remember that God is the only Love. May our eyes radiate nonconditional benevolence. May our awareness be of spiritual perfection. May our freedom be boundless. May we know the loveliness of love. May the Divine presence fill our consciousness. May we feel the magnificent capacity of Life. May our thought’s touch be uplifting. May our sphere’s influence be a blessing. May we feel the immensity of Divinity. May we know the sublime Love that we are part of. May it sustain us. It is us.

First, in many cases, conservative American evangelical biblical interpretation is not only parochial but also weird and whacky. Only American evangelicals use Scripture to argue against gun control, against environmental care, and against universal healthcare.28 Second, while there is a great blessing in American evangelical scholarship, one I’ve benefited from immensely (not least of all from Beale’s brilliant Revelation commentary), we do not need Americans to teach us that the Bible is authoritative and how to do text-based interpretation. Here’s the thing: we already knew that; in some cases we knew it a millennium before the Americans, and why do Americans presume to teach us a proper doctrine of biblical authority and biblical interpretation when they live in the same country as Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, and the Left Behind series!

Something deep inside the caverns of your psyche is beginning to transform. Can you feel the magic beckon? Are you ready to reclaim, repair, and knit together all the pieces of the authentic you that were lost within when you were wounded in your past? They can serve you now, but you have to illuminate them and see them in a new light. The old stories of your life can take on new meaning. When you free yourself from their stamp on your identity, miracles can and do happen. All it takes is willingness to let go and let something new reveal itself to you. A map is appearing for you now, and it’s like a spherical, sparkling hologram, calling you to journey home to who you truly are. Unlike maps in the modern physical world, this map of the soul has plenty of uncharted places. And the map itself is only revealed when you take blind steps inward, led by your first sense. Those steps you take will lead you into the dark, mysterious world of your inner psyche, where you can come to know yourself and Spirit and experience unconditional love and acceptance. There’s no reason to be afraid, because Spirit is always with you. You will know that and feel it when you say the words that bring in the magic: not “abracadabra” but “thank you.” Thank you! This abracadabra is simple and profound. Immersing yourself in a meditation on deep, immense gratitude invokes Spirit to fill your consciousness and remind you that you are blessed to be given the gift of life—the gift of being able to co-create reality. While we always live between the pillars of what is and what might be, we reclaim our power to be the storytellers of our own lives when we connect with Spirit through gratitude.

You have been a real blessing to me. Today, I understand something I didn’t see before: every blessing ignored becomes a curse. I don’t want anything else in life. But you are forcing me to look at wealth and at horizons I have never known. Now that I have seen them, and now that I see how immense my possibilities are, I’m going to feel worse than I did before you arrived. Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don’t want to do so.

God has blessed us with immense potential and Unlimited Energy. We need to explore and understand the relationship between our mind, body, and the universe.

To all who read these words, may abundant grace accompany you through life's transitions. Embrace the extraordinary journey of gracefully navigating womanhood, growing with each passing day. Let love and vulnerability guide your relationships, careers, spirituality, and well-being. Nurture yourself with grace, surrendering to the divine plan that orchestrates your path. Know that this chapter holds immense potential for growth and self-discovery. Embrace it wholeheartedly, as extraordinary blessings eagerly await your journey.

To get back lost things or property one has to pray to Lord Bhairava every evening by lighting a lamp made out of pepper corns tied in a cloth. The blessing of happiness is immensely received by doing so.

The Holy One. I have never stopped believing in him. I don’t understand the idea that God wants to be worshipped one way alone, and when I feel overwhelmed by the immensity and beauty of his creation, I am glad my mother taught me to bless and praise him everywhere. My

Now, I am not suggesting that we all adopt a lifestyle of absolute poverty but rather a theology, praxis, and lifestyle of enough. We have enough. We are blessed and blessed immensely. God has given us enough. God is our enough. I’m reminded of the wise words G. K. Chesterton said: “There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”11

If rich men delight to sum up their vast revenues, to read over their rentals, look upon their hoards; if they bless themselves in their great wealth, or, to use the prophet’s words (Jer. ix. 23), "glory in their riches," well may believers rejoice and glory in their "knowing the Lord" (ver. 24), and please themselves in seeing how rich they are in having an immensely full and all-sufficient God for their inheritance.

If you want to see God do wonders in your marriage, start praising your spouse. Start appreciating and encouraging her. Every single day, a husband should tell his wife, “I love you. I appreciate you. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” A wife should do the same for her husband. Your relationship would improve immensely if you’d simply start speaking kind, positive words, blessing your spouse instead of cursing him or her.

Emma finally understood. Life was magic, a gift from the heavens, and each person harbored an immense potential within themselves. It was all very simple, really. “We’re all blessed,” she whispered.

In thinking about other animals, we are biased by our own senses and by vision in particular. Our species and our culture are so driven by sight that even people who are blind from birth will describe the world using visual words and metaphors.fn4 You agree with people if you see their point, or share their view. You are oblivious to things in your blind spots. Hopeful futures are bright and gleaming; dystopias are dark and shadowy. Even when scientists describe senses that humans lack altogether, like the ability to detect electric fields, they talk about images and shadows. Language, for us, is both blessing and curse. It gives us the tools for describing another animal’s Umwelt even as it insinuates our own sensory world into those descriptions. Scholars of animal behavior often discuss the perils of anthropomorphism—the tendency to inappropriately attribute human emotions or mental abilities to other animals. But perhaps the most common, and least recognized, manifestation of anthropomorphism is the tendency to forget about other Umwelten—to frame animals’ lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs. This bias has consequences. We harm animals by filling the world with stimuli that overwhelm or befuddle their senses, including coastal lights that lure newly hatched turtles away from the oceans, underwater noises that drown out the calls of whales, and glass panes that seem like bodies of water to bat sonar. We misinterpret the needs of animals closest to us, stopping smell-oriented dogs from sniffing their environments and imposing the visual world of humans upon them. And we underestimate what animals are capable of to our own detriment, missing out on the chance to understand how expansive and wondrous nature truly is—the delights that, as William Blake wrote, are “clos’d by your senses five.

When you serve others with sheer excellence and kindness, you find your purpose and unlock a door of immense blessings.

Every blessing ignored becomes a curse. Now that I see how immense my possibilities are, I'm going to feel worse that I did before you arrived. Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don't want to do so.

Real America, in honor of the hellhound, our beloved Bukowski You hate America, no, not at all, I love it so much that I can say obvious truths that they themselves do not want to accept. If I criticize myself all the time, why would I stop criticizing others? A poem in honor of the only sincere American, Bukowski. The myth of America tells us of the land of freedom, founded by descendants of intelligent and puritanical Europeans. It's all a load of crap, no, it's the land of slavery, my friends, not just in the sense of slavery of African descendants, but of mental slavery. Yes, the land of the alienated. Eden, created by Angels. This is all a load of crap. Real America, Real America, Strong America, came from the indigenous tribes, from the toil of blacks and the industrious mentality of descendants of Europeans, all lazy, violent and who wanted to get fat like pigs, without worrying about anything. Dirty America that produces clean America, sold in the movies. Why lazy? Well, they don't like to make a lot of effort, and this indolence produces innovation. Is that why they are so creative? Well, they are creative in order to pay well the brains of other nations who go to work there. They knew that numerous wars and constant friction were much worse than anything else and cost money. So? Well, then, let's create a land where everyone can get fat, rich and kill each other, but only as long as the general profit of society increases. Let's sell the excess food, weapons and our gourmet culture to other peoples. It worked. But let's not fool ourselves. America is Golden on the outside and dark on the inside. America is the country of weapons, drugs, fantasies and lies. Above all, lies. See, the mafias that operated there to supply the demand for alcohol, prohibited in order to maintain the pure "spirit" of the drunken bourgeoisie, were all called mafias of other nationalities. But they were all Americans. America is geography, not history or ethnicity. You are an American because of your ties to this immense land blessed by God. Is that what these bastards have done? They have turned their own pain into art and sold it to us in the movies. The weapons, yes, they have to be good and they have to kill quickly. Why? Because Americans are lazy and don't like anything that lasts long. Even wars have to be fought in other countries and if they are too exhausting, they lose their Hollywood shine, so we have to abandon Saigon. Fatness, that is another thing that best represents America. Americans are all obese. Well, at least you can't help but notice them. They are, well, heavy people, especially the Karens. I love Karens, I'm a male Karen, you know. And as for drugs, well, that's the most interesting part. It's the country that consumes them the most, why? Well, maintaining the American dream requires a lot of mescaline. Fat drug addicts with guns sticking out of their own toilets. The toilets in America must hide everything we really want to know. I will probably never get a visa there, thanks to this poem. Still, you can't deny that my writing is anthological. God bless all the Americas. Please don't blow me up, I have poetic license to write these words.

Liberty bestows upon us an utterly incalculable and nearly inexhaustible array of benefits. Yet, in the immensity of such overwhelming blessings, we can never afford to forget that the single greatest benefit that liberty will ever bestow upon us is the privilege of sacrificing every single one of those benefits for the preservation of the liberties that gifted us with those benefits. This attitude empowers great nations and draws the admiration of others.

Cana’an is a crossroads of the earth. Be it birds or seeds, humans looking for life and refuge, or empires with a will to dominate for power and profit, this land has been frequented by many over the course of the past several thousand years. Our collective diasporas make one of the largest in the world, and our migrational lines are as complex with layers. Despite constant war, endless stories of exile, migration, language loss, and land degradation, there is palpable vitality and wholeness in the elements of place that still live through us. There is a lesson here—a medicine in this crossroads of rupture and immense resilience and revitalization at once, where loss insists on continuation, and life recreates itself constantly through the persistence of tending what remains, from wherever we are. No matter what has been lost or taken, a way persists as long as we do. Plants of place and origin are an interwoven part of these understated worlds that mend and make belonging. They, like our ancestors, have adapted to the challenges of lifetimes, embedding wayfinding intelligence inside of us. When we are lost or have forgotten, they have the power to re-member us. They wake up the ancestral lifelines inside of us. Every time we eat our cultural foods, harvest and prepare our medicines, nurture the soil where we are, plant ancient seeds in new places, these legacies bless our bodies and guide our beings back into union with deeper sources of life’s fundamental wisdoms and the earth’s unfaltering guidance.

LA’s 468 square miles of land and 34 square miles of water extend to the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, include nine lakes, one river, and a million trees. Within its borders are 390 public parks and 15,710 acres of parkland. Surprised? Most people—even some who live in LA—are not aware of the immense connection the city still retains to the natural world. Los Angeles has made nature its own, woven its own unique cultural landscape onto the physical one, and perhaps shaped the tale of Mother Nature into a structure it’s comfortable with—that of a Hollywood blockbuster screenplay. Jenny Price, author of the brilliant essay “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA,”writes: “The history of Los Angeles storytelling, if more complicated, still basically boils down to a trilogy. Nature blesses Los Angeles. Nature flees Los Angeles. And nature returns armed.

We must understand the significance of suffering in spiritual life; it is only when we go through immense suffering that we start to seek the source of suffering, the purpose of life, and so on, and make a beginning in our journey towards God. Here, for Arjuna, the suffering has come in this form. And by the grace of Krishna, Arjuna’s vishāda transformed as yoga. “śūnyamāpūrṇatāmeti,” says Yoga Vasishtha. When one comes in contact with an Enlightened Master, śūnya becomes pūrṇa; depression becomes fulfilment. Since Arjuna’s vishāda took place in the presence of the Sat-guru, his vishāda itself paved the way for his yoga; otherwise, it would have remained as his roga (disease)! When faced with suffering, rather than lamenting about it to others, if we submit to the Lord, even suffering can lead towards our upliftment. The simplest way to transform sorrow into spiritual energy is to have contact with the Lord. When we turn towards God, all our problems become a path towards bhakti. If we are happy and satisfied in life, we may go to the temple and pray to the Lord and make a show of our bhakti, but it may not have come from the heart. Śruti-mātā consoles us by saying that suffering never comes for the sake of suffering alone—as each dark cloud brings comforting rain, and as each dark night is followed by lustrous light, so too after each sorrow, the cool spring of bliss is sure to follow. Here, Arjuna’s grief became a great blessing for him and the whole world, as it gave us the treasure that is the Gita.

was here on the backs of generations who had struggled through hardship and sacrifice—the blessed recipient in a long lineage of striving African Americans to have a stable, educated, middle-class life in America. Mom-Mom and Daddio’s generation grew up in the throes of segregation and immense poverty. Gigi’s family had escaped the Jim Crow South. My mother had fought through decades of school district bureaucracies, financial uncertainty, and Daddio’s bullshit to get me to this point. And she was going to be damned if I didn’t go to college because of some music I was doing at basement parties with homeboys named Jazz and Ready Rock.

O unique Word of God! This Word was not created in time but was eternally begotten by the Father and, in the realm of time, was made incarnate through the Blessed Virgin Mary! O eternal Word of God, immense and infinite, the bread of angels and of humans. This bread, when it is taken, is not reduced nor transformed into the one who consumes it. Rather, it transforms the one who consumes it, drawing them from the realm of created things up to the incomprehensible and eternal Good. O, what a marvelous thing it is to know this Word of God! What a stupendous wonder it is to hear this Word—the Word not of any human being, nor of any angel, nor of any created being existing under heaven, but of God himself! This Word dwells forever in the bosom of the Father, and yet from there proceeds forth as the only begotten Son, coeternal and coequal with the Father in divinity and power.

What they had done was more immense than they had ever imagined. They quivered. Their toes sang songs. Their hearts beat poetry. Through the tingling gates of their fingertips their souls were liberated. For out on the range, in the last of the moon, leaping and kicking up heels as though at play, the buffalo ran free.

I’ve had this shop for thirty years. I know good crystal from bad, and everything else there is to know about crystal. I know its dimensions and how it behaves. If we serve tea in crystal, the shop is going to expand. And then I’ll have to change my way of life.” “Well, isn’t that good?” “I’m already used to the way things are. Before you came, I was thinking about how much time I had wasted in the same place, while my friends had moved on, and either went bankrupt or did better than they had before. It made me very depressed. Now, I can see that it hasn’t been too bad. The shop is exactly the size I always wanted it to be. I don’t want to change anything, because I don’t know how to deal with change. I’m used to the way I am.” The boy didn’t know what to say. The old man continued, “You have been a real blessing to me. Today, I understand something I didn’t see before: every blessing ignored becomes a curse. I don’t want anything else in life. But you are forcing me to look at wealth and at horizons I have never known. Now that I have seen them, and now that I see how immense my possibilities are, I’m going to feel worse than I did before you arrived. Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don’t want to do so.

You are worthy to take the scroll and break the seals of it,  because you were sacrificed, and with your blood you bought men for God of every race, language, people and nation 10 and made them a line of kings and priests, to serve our God and to rule the world." 11 In my vision, I heard the sound of an immense number of angels gathered around the throne and the animals and the elders; there were ten thousand times ten thousand of theme and thousands upon thousands, 12 shouting, "The Lamb that was sacrificed is worthy to be given power, riches, wisdom, strength, honor, glory and blessing." 13 Then I heard ail the living things in creation -- everything that lives in the air, and on the ground, and under the ground, and in the sea, crying, "To the Orie who is sitting on the throne and to the Lamb, be ail praise, honor, glory and power, for ever and ever." 14 And the four animals said, "Amen"; and the elders prostrated themselves to worship.

And let us therefore, conscientiously gathering together in harmony, cry to Him earnestly, as with one mouth, that we may be made partakers of His great and glorious promises. For [the Scripture] saith, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which He hath prepared for them that wait for Him.” Chapter XXXV Immense is this reward. How shall we obtain it? How blessed and wonderful, beloved, are the gifts of God! Life in immortality, splendour in righteousness, truth in perfect confidence, faith in assurance, self-control in holiness! And all these fall under the cognizance of our understandings [now]; what then shall those things be which are prepared for such as wait for Him? The Creator and Father of all worlds, the Most Holy, alone knows their amount and their beauty. Let us therefore earnestly strive to be found in the number of those that wait for Him, in order that we may share in His promised gifts.

As Father, the authority he claims for himself is the authority of compassion. That authority comes from letting the sins of his children pierce his heart. There is no lust, greed, anger, resentment, jealousy, or vengeance in his lost children that has not cause immense grief to his heart. The grief is so deep because the heart is so pure. From the deep inner place where love embraces all human grief, the Father reaches out to his children. The touch of his hands, radiating inner light, seeks only to heal. Here is the God I want to believe in: a Father who, from the beginning of creation, has stretched out his arms in merciful blessing, never forcing himself on anyone, but always waiting; never letting his arms drop down in despair, but always hoping that his children will return so that he can speak words of love to them and let his tired arms rest on their shoulders. His only desire is to bless. In Latin, to bless is benedicere, which means literally: saying good things. The Father wants to say, more with his touch than with his voice, good things of his children. He has no desire to punish them. They have always been punished excessively by their own inner or outer waywardness. The Father wants simply to let them know that the love they have searched for in such distorted ways has been, is, and always will be there for them. The Father wants to say, more with his hands than with his mouth: 'You are my Beloved, on you my favor rests.' He is the shepherd, 'feeding his flock, gathering lambs in his arms, holding them against his breast.' The true center of Rembrandt's painting is the hands of the father.

Today, I understand something I didn't see before: every blessing ignored becomes a curse. I don't want anything else in life. But you are forcing me to look at wealth and horizons I have never known. Now that I have seen them, and now that I see how immense my possibilities are, I'm going to feel worse than I did before you arrived. Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don't want to do so.

The theologian Fr. Edward O’Connor writes: … Jesus told Blessed Dina Belanger of a gift of “Divine Substitution,” that He would bring about. He explained it thus: ... the greatest joy a soul can give Me is to let Me raise it to the Divinity. Yes, my little spouse, I feel an immense pleasure in transforming a soul into Myself, in deifying it, in absorbing it entirely in the Divinity ... I wish to absorb you, my little spouse, to such a degree that I shall exist in your place with all the Attributes and Perfection of my Divinity ... I wish to deify you in the same manner that I united my Humanity to my Divinity in the Incarnation ... The degree of holiness that I desire for you is my own Holiness, in its infinite plenitude, the Holiness of My Father realized in you by Me. (ST, vol. & no.1, p. 36)[390]

Our blessed Jesus, as God, is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent. Will it not console you to know that all these great and glorious attributes are altogether yours? Has He power? That power is yours to support and strengthen you, to overcome your enemies, and to preserve you even to the end. Has He love? Well, there is not a drop of love in His heart that is not yours; you may dive into the immense ocean of His love, and you may say of it all, “It is mine.” Has He justice? It may seem a stern attribute, but even that is yours, for He will by His justice see to it that all that is promised to you in the covenant of grace shall be most certainly secured to you.

they emerged on the other side and found themselves in the shadow of a gigantic stadium. Though Harry could see only a fraction of the immense gold walls surrounding the field, he could tell that ten cathedrals would fit comfortably inside it. “Seats a hundred thousand,” said Mr. Weasley, spotting the awestruck look on Harry’s face. “Ministry task force of five hundred have been working on it all year. Muggle Repelling Charms on every inch of it. Every time Muggles have got anywhere near here all year, they’ve suddenly remembered urgent appointments and had to dash away again . . . bless them,” he added fondly, leading the way toward the nearest entrance, which was already surrounded by a swarm of shouting witches and wizards. “Prime seats!” said the Ministry witch at the entrance when she checked their tickets. “Top Box! Straight upstairs, Arthur, and as high as you can go.” The stairs into the stadium were carpeted in rich purple.

There were various theories about why so many adventurers outclassed ordinary humans. The most likely possibility was that in extreme circumstances, the flesh—or according to another hypothesis, the brain—became abnormally stimulated, triggering a process akin to supercompensation and increasing their abilities. Others thought it was blessings from the gods or some kind of evolution due to magic exposure, but what all the theories had in common was the rapid improvement of physical, mental, magic, and/or other capacities. The more powerful opponents one faced, the more often this improvement would occur, so it was especially frequent for adventurers, who faced immensely powerful monsters with a diverse array of abilities.

The old man continued, “You have been a real blessing to me. Today, I understand something I didn’t see before: every blessing ignored becomes a curse. I don’t want anything else in life. But you are forcing me to look at wealth and at horizons I have never known. Now that I have seen them, and now that I see how immense my possibilities are, I’m going to feel worse than I did before you arrived. Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don’t want to do so.... And, as he smothered the coals in the hookah, he told the boy that he could begin to sell tea in the crystal glasses. Sometimes, there's just no way to hold back the river.

well knew that the word of God ought to be enough; but I considered that I ought to lend a helping hand to my brethren, if by any means, by this visible proof to the unchangeable faithfulness of the Lord, I might strengthen their hands in God; for I remembered what a great blessing my own soul had received through the Lord's dealings with his servant A. H. Franke, who, in dependence upon the living God alone, established an immense orphan house, which I had seen many times with my own eyes. I therefore judged myself bound to be the servant of the church of Christ in the particular point on which I had obtained mercy; namely, in being able to take God by his word, and to rely upon it.