Good Morning Digital Neighbors & Friends! Happy Wednesday and mid-week for those of you on the Monday - Friday work week, for the rest of us it is still Wednesday and that ain't too bad. 🌞 Another potential ponderable from Ifferisms by Grothe Mardy.
If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem. - Richard Bach
A simple quote charged with consequence. The way I look at happiness, while related to the happenings in my life, it is rooted in my attitudes more than anything else. The happenings of happy-ness are seasoned by what happens in life, many days of thoughtful seasoning when I am the main one responsible for the proverbial mixing of the daily dose.
No one ever starts with that awareness, it is in the hands of others. Families get the first shot at making or breaking our happiness by the way the dynamics, known or unknown, play out. The teen years or young adults years usually open our eyes to either knowing our family doing pretty decent job, or really screwed up and we didn't know life could be different. Unquestioned normativity mirrors peace, but it really hampers growth and change. Unquestioned normativity always works best for those who benefit from the current dynamics. Questions and non-normative behavior usually mark the beginning of the change for the family, almost always caused by them Youngins.
Whatever the passage you made through the years of childhood and happiness, at some point in our adult years, we need to come to the awareness that happiness is really our work. Other can help or impede us, but it really is one of our treasured gifts to discover in life.
Too many base their own happiness on others, their self inflected misery is well documented. These pod-people are ever vigilant for their Donald Sutherland moment to announce how you are robbing them of their happiness. Alone, such human variants are comical, in hordes they are very dangerous. 2020 ushered in two pandemics, one from China that attacked our health, and one from our cultural custodians that attacked our sanity. China has successfully wrecked many economies, the custodians have frayed and poisoned the bonds of civility and society.
Finding oasis's of sanity, refuges from the storm, places of recentering and people who help you realize that happiness is your treasure, which they can be supportive of, but not the source of such happiness. One can't reasonably expect to experience or project happiness 24/7, but even on those days when overt happiness seems muted, there is an interior sense of it, Happy Wednesday Friends!
Today marks the three hundred and thirtieth birthday of the Frenchman François-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (1694-1778).
Born into a bourgeois family during the reign of Louis XIV, the “Sun King” (r. 1643-1715), Voltaire suffered tragedy at a young age when his mother died. Never close with his father or brother, Voltaire exhibited a rebellious attitude toward authority from his youth. His brilliant mind was fostered in the care of the Society of Jesus, who introduced him to the joys of literature and theater. Despite his later criticisms against the Church, Voltaire, throughout his life, fondly recalled his dedicated Jesuit teachers.
Although he spent time as a civil servant in the French embassy to the Hague, Voltaire’s main love was writing—an endeavor where he excelled in various genres, including poetry, which led to his appointment as the royal court poet for King Louis XV. Widely recognized as one of the greatest French writers, and even hyperbolically referred to by ...
Padre - Tom Miller invites you to a Coffee Talk, Speakeasies, Schmoozes, Tea Times, Afterhours and other gatherings.
https://teams.live.com/meet/93792382189049?p=DiBHsYfuECPgDrG7vO
2026 Coffee Talk with the ADD Irregulars
Thursday, January 1, 2026
6:00 AM - 8:00 AM (CST)
Occurs every day starting 1/1 until 12/31/2027
Coffee Talk - Daily beginning at 6:00 AM Central Time Zone - USA
White Pilled Wednesday - A break from the heaviness of news and current events to focus upon things more personal & positive for the first hour of Coffee Talk.
Afternoon Chats - Most Tuesday, Friday & Sundays 2:00 PM Central
Other chats as posted in the community.
Good morning, Digital Neighbors! Blessed Sunday to all your fine digital neighbors scattered across the internet. If you want to harvest joy, cultivate gratitude. Even if you don’t believe in God and you just happened upon your life, gratitude for the giftedness of it all is the seedbed for joy. Without the work and effort of sustained gratitude, our joy will be random and happenstance. It will be more of a fleeting experience in life rather than a sustained one.
For Disciples, joy is the fruit of the Holy Spirit and a choice we must make daily. It never means we ignore the challenges and difficulties in life, but we choose what we will allow to possess our heart and command our attention. It is one of the real differences between those striving for spiritual maturity and fullness in Christ and those who settle for less. Those who settle for less will be blown around by their feelings and unexamined impulses. No one can ever claim complete self-possession and fullness in Christ (perhaps a ...
XIII
The Proud Minister
One day there came into the Garden a man in torn clothes badly bruised and cut, who said to the Lover, “In the name of the Beloved I demand your help.”
So the Lover and the Disciple let him in and dressed his wounds and prepared the best of the vegetables from the Garden for him to eat. When his wounds had been dressed and he had eaten and rested the Lover asked him how he had fallen into this plight, to which the man replied, “I was Minister of the Beloved in a city near this place, where I preached His gospel and expounded His doctrine to the people. I pointed out to them how their sins had made them wholly hateful to the Beloved and how therefore they were utterly beyond the range of His love and He would condemn them to eternal torments, whereon some fell into despair and wept bitterly but many were angry. One day the magistrates called me before them and begged me to leave the city and preach elsewhere for they said I had made many people so angry and desperate that they feared there might be a riot and they might not be able to protect me but that I might suffer some injury. I, however, very zealous for the Beloved and believing that the magistrates only feared that their own sins might be proclaimed, preached the more vehemently, denounced the magistrates and made it abundantly clear that the whole wicked city was foredoomed to eternal punishment by the just provision of the Beloved. Whereon a mob, stirred up no doubt by the corrupt and venal magistrates, fell upon me with sticks and stones, nearly killing me and driving me out of the city in the state in which I came to you.”
“My friend,” said the Lover, “this was not a good deed of yours, for besides denying the unfathomable compassion of the Beloved, you have by your obstinacy caused these people to commit a grievous sin, and this cannot be pleasing to the Beloved, that through you who profess to be His minister the people should become worse. Surely you remember that He Himself said, ‘If they persecute you in one city flee to another.’”
Therefore the man was very angry, and cursing the Lover, said, “I see that I have had a very false report of you and I do not believe that you are a servant of the Beloved at all. When I came to you so injured for the Beloved’s sake you set before me only herbs and fruits although the garden is full of birds which you could have killed to make me a worthy meal. I shall proclaim everywhere that you are no true servant of the Beloved but a mere falterer who dares not suffer in the cause of the Beloved. Be sure that you are foreordained to eternal torments who suffer nothing here.”
For the man was so blinded by his own pride that he could not perceive the scars on the hands and feet and the brows of the Lover nor how the cloth beneath the armpits of his tunic was dyed with a red dye. So he went out of the Garden cursing and shouting.
But the Lover looked sad and said, “A man like this does much harm to the cause of the Beloved, for by thus speaking falsely about the Beloved he may bring men to fear Him but none to love Him, and by love alone can any man approach the Beloved.”
