Lisa Wingate

The trouble with drowning in the mess of your own life is that you're not in any shape to save anyone else. You can't be a lighthouse when you're underwater yourself.

...The most important thing, I think. You can't run from your past. You have to take it for what it is and realize that it's part of you.

One of the secrets to life, Epiphany, is to find your gifts and focus on those. Leave your liabilities in the dust of the road not taken. The world is an imperfect place. Everyone struggles. Successful people see trials as growth experiences, rather than stumbling blocks. You have everything you need for success. You're a beautiful young woman, and you're strong, and you have a clever mind. If you let anyone convince you otherwise, you steal from yourself.

Somewhere, deep within me, beyond the passion, beyond the beauty of the night, that little spark of Daily magic ignited in me again, began burning in a place that had gone dark and untended, that had yearned to be bright and warm. I felt it now, something old, something new, something complete. Perhaps it had been in there in me all along, the belief that there is a plan and a purpose, that God whispers into every life, some things that are beyond the scope of the mind, and can only be felt with the heart and the spirit. Those dreams, the dreams that are dreamed *for* us, not by us, are the truest of all.

What does a lighthouse do? I ask myself. It never moves. It cannot hike up its rocky skirt and dash into the ocean to rescue the foundering ship. It cannot calm the waters or clear the shoals. It can only cast light into the darkness. It can only point the way. Yet, through one lighthouse, you guide many ships. Show this old lighthouse the way.

Sooner or later, the future always circles back to the past.

The past must be let go before the future can be grasped.

I think of an old sermon my grandfather quoted from time to time_ something about not looking back when you__e plowing a field, but instead finding a mark in the distance and focusing on that. Otherwise, the rows won__ come out straight.

Everything you want waits on the other side of fear.

Your children are the greatest gift God will give to you, and their souls the heaviest responsibility He will place in your hands. Take time with them, teach them to have faith in God. Be a person in whom they can have faith. When you are old, nothing else you've done will have mattered as much.

The upscale neighborhoods in Blue Sky Hill weren't all lily white anymore, but you could be sure their kids didn't wear our kind of clothes, or get free lunches at the Summer Kitchen, or pick up used books and magazines down at the Book Basket store, or go to the public school. These days it wasn't about what color you were, but how much money you had. The same, only different. It was still people not wanting to be with people who weren't their kind.

How often ... do we pass by a need, a life that could be changed with the smallest bit of effort? And it's not that we don't care but that we're driving so fast, all we see are the fence posts flashing by on the side of the highway?Maybe the first step in changing the world is in slowing down and looking through the fences.

That__ the only thing you can do with a mess. Start cleaning it up, a little at a time.

Help them to show the world that our greatness is not in things we do for ourselves, but in things we do for others.

The hardest thing about the road not taken is that you never know where it might have led.

A person must have principles, Epiphany. That's the one thing no one can take from you. The only way you can lose your principles is to give them up. Remember that.

Every decision you make in life has benefits and consequences. Sometimes you just have to go on faith, and even that comes at a price. It means you have to give up the idea that you__e the one in charge of the universe.

I wrote about the rush of love, the changing of a woman into a mother__ process that happened without conscious thought, as if the heart knew what the mind and body took time to learn. Love is the one thing that matters. That makes everything else matter. That makes everything worthwhile.