Things I Learned And Wrote At Age 30

• You can always judge a thing by its effects.

• The reason most people are living with major problems is because to solve them they have to be willing to do things that are hard.

• People do not accept the stringency of an upright lifestyle because of what it would signify to the condemnation of the rest of mankind.
• But, this error in judgment does not calculate that each is judged by the light he has.

• Envy is discomfort at the success of another.

• God-given inspiration is exclusively that of the spirit.  This means that it is not the words which are under inspiration, but the message.  If the spirit of truth is what inspires words, the words are still subject to fallacy and error but not the message.

• Atheist mindset: I won't believe it until I see it.
• Christian mindset: I won't see it until I believe it.

• A tyrant is known by his intolerance for error.

• Be respectful to people because of who you are, not who they are.

• You know you hate someone if their nonexistence would please you more than their life.

• When God is on your side, every problem in life is really only an attitude problem.

• A smart person starting from wrong foundational principles can reason his way into anything.

• People reject the notion of God's existence because they find the mysteries of religion either too much above man or too much below God.

• "The definition of courage is not the absence of fear but the conquest of it."  - William Danforth

• One of the most defining characteristics of maturity is the ability to determine what is not important.

• The adjective to describe marriage accurately which has been lost today above all others is: categorical - meaning without exception.

• The success of a husband is measured by the width of his wife's smile.

• Compassion and mercy are both unjust.

• A book that's wearing out probably belongs to a mind that isn't.

• Greater love requires greater vulnerability.

• The deceptive aspect of vain pleasure is its urgency.
• It is hard to believe a desire is vain when it is strong.

• Pray for the ends, not the means.

• One of the rarest virtues is to have patience with another's ignorance.
• The moment we are liberated from an ignorance, we have immediate intolerance for anyone else retaining that ignorance.
• This is also at the root of why some people do not like children.

• The question that most tortures humankind is not so much, "Why is this happening to me?" as, "Did I do something to cause this to happen to me?"

• I used to correlate honesty with openness.  But, I didn't account for inevitability of misinterpretation.

• Inflexibility is indicative of weakness.

• We are only upset by things we don't understand.

• The function of content renders fact.
• The function of context renders meaning.

• Be childlike.  Do not be childish.

• Commitment and sacrifice are the same thing.

• There isn't one kind of carefree person.  There are two.

1. One who either doesn't realize or acknowledge that problems exist.
2. One who knows problems exist but remains unaffected by them.

• I spent most of my life as the first, not realizing that the purpose of life is to become the second.