If your every human plan and calculation has miscarried, if, one by one, human props have been knocked out, and doors have shut in your face, take heart. God is trying to get a message through to you, and the message is: "Stop depending on inadequate human resources. Let me handle the matter.".

No matter how little you have, you can always give some of it away.

Our prayers must not be efforts to bend God to our will but to yield ourselves to His.

When we hold a photo negative up to the light all objects are reversed. Black is white, white is black. Moreover, the character lines of any face in the picture are not clear. Once placed into the developing solution, what photographers call "the latent image" is revealed in the print-darkness is turned to light; and, lo, we have a beautiful picture.

The cross stands as the final symbol that no evil exists that God cannot turn into a blessing. He is the living Alchemist who can take the dregs from the slag-heaps of life - disappointment, frustration, sorrow, disease, death, economic loss, heartache - and transform the dregs into gold.

My father always told us that if we will let God, He can use even our disappointements, even our annoyances to bring us a blessing. There's a practical way to start the process too: by thanking HIm for whatever happens, no matter how disagreeable it seems.

So many people never pause long enough to make up their minds about basic issues of life and death. It's quite possible to go through your whole life, making the mechanical motions of living, adopting as your own sets of ideas you've come to any conslusion for yourself as to what life is all about.