Long

Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the Holy Book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.

At all costs try to avoid granting yourself the status of the victim. No matter how abominable your condition may be, try not to blame anything or anybody. The moment you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything.

Try to build and treat your vocabulary the way you are to treat your checking account. Pay every attention to it and try to increase your earnings. The purpose is to enable you to articulate yourselves as fully and precisely as possible.

When you get knocked down — which is plenty often — you get right up in a hurry. Then you get your strength in the huddle. You get it by going back and running that play together with your teammates. That 'together' is the thing that gives you the buildup to get ready to go again.

Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong.

The work itself is the reward, and if I choose challenging work, it'll pay me back with interest. At least I'll be interested, even if nobody else is.

Integrate what you believe into every single area of your life. Take your heart to work, and ask the most and best of everybody else too.

You are going out. You will meet suffering. You will meet humiliation. You will meet sorrow. You will meet joy. You will meet success. You will be wanted. You will be unwanted. You will be loved. You will not be loved. All that is part of Jesus' fate.

Hunger is not only for a piece of bread. Hunger is for love. Nakedness is not only for a piece of cloth. Nakedness is for human dignity. Homelessness is not only for a home made of bricks. Homelessness is being rejected, unwanted, unloved.

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can't get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you're doing. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover will be yourself.

Silence is the soul's invisibility. We can, of course, conceal ourselves behind lies and sophistries, but when we speak, we are present, however careful our disguise.