| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A treatise on Good Works by Dr. Martin Luther: written, Wisdom of Solomon v: "We have wearied ourselves in the
wrong way; and have gone through deserts, where there lay no way;
but as for the way of the Lord, we have not known it, and the sun
of righteousness rose not upon us."
VII. In these works faith is still slight and weak; let us ask
further, whether they believe that they are well-pleasing to God
when they suffer in body, property, honor, friends, or whatever
they have, and believe that God of His mercy appoints their
sufferings and difficulties for them, whether they be small or
great. This is real strength, to trust in God when to all our
senses and reason He appears to be angry; and to have greater
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Paradise Lost by John Milton: Thy way thou canst not miss, me mine requires.
Thus said, he turned; and Satan, bowing low,
As to superiour Spirits is wont in Heaven,
Where honour due and reverence none neglects,
Took leave, and toward the coast of earth beneath,
Down from the ecliptick, sped with hoped success,
Throws his steep flight in many an aery wheel;
Nor staid, till on Niphates' top he lights.
Paradise Lost |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: no living presence, save for the limpets on the rocks, for some
old, gray, rain-beaten ram that I might rouse out of a ferny den
betwixt two boulders, or for the haunting and the piping of the
gulls. It was older than man; it was found so by incoming Celts,
and seafaring Norsemen, and Columba's priests. The earthy savour
of the bog-plants, the rude disorder of the boulders, the
inimitable seaside brightness of the air, the brine and the iodine,
the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden springing
up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea-front of the isle,
all that I saw and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt
with scarce a difference. I steeped myself in open air and in past
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