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And as Dad said to me, 'You can't always stop people from being mean. But you can stop them from making you mean.
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Mike Mason |
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Theology, it turns out, is Satan's favorite game.
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Mike Mason |
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What is such a believer, whose very life depends upon the daily bread of the living Word of God, supposed to do when God is silent?
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Mike Mason |
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Happy people have just as much pain as anyone else, in some cases more. It could even be argued that the happy feel pain more acutely than the unhappy, whose feelings are relatively numb. The real difference in happy people is that they're not trapped by their pain. Rather than settling inside a happy soul, pain moves through it as through a channel, and that channel is joy. Joy keeps pain moving.
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Mike Mason |
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so the best marriages and the deepest relationships with God grow out of the startling discovery that there is nothing one can do to earn love, and even more startling, that there is also nothing one can do to unlearn it, or to keep oneself from being loved. This is a religious awakening that is utterly different from any other religious experience, no matter how profoundly spiritual it may seem.
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Mike Mason |
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There is no trick of a magician or spell of a witch doctor, no drug or mesmerism or bribery or torture or coercion that can compare in power with the force for change unleashed in the human breast through the touch of love.
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marriage
relationships
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Mike Mason |
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Love coaxes and even hood-winks us into the making of a decision so radical that if left to our own devices we would never have entertained it for a moment.
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marriage
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Mike Mason |
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As long as the self is consumed in the struggle to make itself lovely, it cannot love. First it must come to the end of its own resources, for the power to love derives purely and solely from the knowledge that one is already loved in return.
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Mike Mason |
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If God accepts us at all, He accepts us wholeheartedly, and He covers us completely with the spotless robe of righteousness. This robe of divine acceptance does not come in gray, but only in dazzling white, and one either has the robe or not. One is either righteous or wicked. And anyone who is wicked can have that status quickly amended by a trip to the cross.
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Mike Mason |
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The Email Phishing Hack: Phishing refers to a social engineering method used by hackers to gain what should be confidential information from unwitting victims. Phishing works in this way: the hacker sends an official-looking email to the target, purporting to be from the a legitimate institution that
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Mike Mason |
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With trust, everything is possible.
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Mike Mason |
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hate makes you a prisoner, not just of them but of yourself.
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Mike Mason |
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A marriage, or a marriage partner, may be compared to a great tree growing right up through the center of one's living room. It is something that is just there, and it is huge, and everything has been built around it, and wherever one happens to be going--to the fridge, to bed, to the bathroom, or out the front door--the tree has to be taken into account. It cannot be gone through; it must respectfully be gone around. It is somehow bigger a..
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Mike Mason |
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Of course, it is almost always the case that the couple has much more in common than they may suppose. But marriage seems to specialize, at times, in radically de-emphasizing the similarities between the partners and wildly exaggerating the points of difference.
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Mike Mason |
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The taking of vows is an act of faith. If people were faithful by nature, vows would not be necessary; their yes would be yes and their no would be no. But it is because people are not inherently faithful nor honest nor loving that they must stand up and declare they will be.
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Mike Mason |