Give us grace and strength to preserve. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends and soften to us our enemies. Give us the strength to encounter that which is to come that we may be brave in peril constant in tribulation temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death loyal and loving to one another.
God has not promised skies always blue flower-strewn pathways all our lives through God has not promised sun without rain joy without sorrow peace without pain. But God has promised strength for the day rest for the labor light for the way Grace for the trials help from above unfailing sympathy undying love.
We did sometimes play jokes on each other. It was fun, until about a month ago when he attacked me with nerf guns when I walked in the door. I slipped while running away and fell on the coffee table. Let’s just say I wouldn’t be winning the most graceful woman’s award any time soon.
PatienceA word so difficult to pronounce because it is so difficult to wait or to be patient. But no matter how someone is behaving, appreciate the grace you have for God to give you people that will build that character in you!! It isn't easy but for the Christ like being, it is joy overwhelming. Thank and praise God for every situations that require you to be patient. God bless you.
And I love that even in the toughest moments, when we're all sweating it - when we're worried that the bill won't pass, and it seems like all is lost - Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise. Just like his grandmother, he just keeps getting up and moving forward... with patience and wisdom, and courage and grace.
The first memory I have in the world is of death and tears. That is how I would mark the beginning of my life: the way people mark the end of one. My family had gathered at Papa Joe's house because Mam' Grace was slipping away, only I didn't register it that way. For some reason I thought that it was her birthday.
Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we're waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there's no glittering one hidden under the dirt.
Jephus Hardy?" Stunned. My jaw dropped when I saw Cephus Hardy walk up to me in the magazine aisle of Artie's Meat and Deli. I was admiring the cover of Cock and Feathers, where my last client at Eternal Slumber Funeral Home, Chicken Teater, graced the cover with his prize Orloff Hen, Lady Cluckington.
“Why do you want to keep this beauty for yourself? Why don’t you want to share it? The world is made of shared grace and harmony. Look at the sun shining, at the bees flying, the flowers blossoming. What would happen if they were ashamed like you are? No beauty would be revealed. We would live in an eternal shadow of what could exist.”
Once, when I was about ten, we were approaching the ranch after veering north to look at some pasturage when we saw a small barefoot boy racing along the hot road with terror in his face. My father just managed to stop him. Though incoherent with fear, the boy managed to inform us that his little brother had just drowned in the horse trough. My father grabbed the boy and we went racing up to the farmhouse, where the anguished mother, the drowned child in her arms, was sobbing, crying out in German, and rocking in a rocking chair. Fortunately the boy was not quite dead. My father managed to get him away from his mother long enough to stretch him out on the porch and squeeze the water out of him. In a while the boy began to belch dirty fluids and then to breathe again. The crisis past, we went on home. The graceful German mother brought my father jars of her best sauerkraut for many, many years.