To THINK BIG and to use our talents doesn't mean we won't have difficulties along the way. We will - we all do... If we choose to see the obstacles in our path as barriers, we stop trying. "We can't win," we moan. "They won't let us win."

Compassion, however, should mean providing a mechanism to escape poverty rather than simply maintaining people in an impoverished state by supplying handouts. By doing this we give them an opportunity to elevate their personal situations, which eventually decreases our need to take care of them and empowers them to be able to exercise compassion toward others.

Military action is never the first thing that you jump to. You always look at other possibilities, including economic sanctions, tightening the screws.

I always say if God didn't allow any bad things to happen we would already be in heaven, and we are not there.

As far as the command centers are concerned in Raqqa and to a lesser degree Mosul, cut those off. Do the same kind of thing that we did with Sinjar , working with our embedded special forces with the Kurds, shut off the supply route, soften them up, then we go in with specials ops followed by our air force to take them over. Those are things that work.

God has given to every one of us more than fourteen billion cells and connections in our brain. Now why would God give us such a complex organ system unless He expects us to use it?

I could easily have decided that life was cruel, that being black meant everything was stacked against me.