Richelle E. Goodrich

If I expect nothing of you, it will be far easier to forgive your offenses than if I place my whole world in your hands.

One grateful thought is a ray of sunshine. _A hundred such thoughts paint a sunrise. _A thousand will rival the glaring sky at noonday - for gratitude is light against the darkness.

Have you noticed how children never bypass a puddle of water, but jump, splash, and slosh right through it? _That's because they know an important truth: Life was meant to be lived; puddles were meant to be experienced.

Life is a test. _It was designed to be so. _It is where we taste the bitter and the sweet; where we feel pain and pleasure; where we learn right from wrong; where we pass through both darkness and light. _It is a time to make choices. _And through this process we form our characters__ome grand and glorious, some barely decent, and others just plain monstrous._

What I learn today I shall know forever. Whether or not I remember that I know it is a different story.

Life is learning to take God's hand.....and hold on.

I believe the main purpose of life is to accept with gratitude what you've been blessed with so that you may use those gifts to mold yourself into the best person you can possibly be. Learning to discern things of true value from those of little or no worth is part of the process.

We grow up opposing our parents only to become like them enough to oppose our children who behave as we once did__ reminder of how dreadful we were toward those now vindicated grandparents. And you thought God had no sense of humor.

The moment a person feels he has nothing left to learn is the moment life prepares to hit him hard enough to correct such ignorance.

I am, for the most part, who I am because my good mother was who she was.

Life isn't a lazy cruise on some endless, calm, and temperate sea. Life is a raging ocean with swells and tidal waves that wreck and sink your boat. Life is a series of storms__vercast skies, fierce winds, and pelting rain. You were meant to be immersed in it all__irst to float, then swim, and eventually to walk on water.

The irony of life: Realizing a lifetime is barely long enough to figure out how it should have been lived.

No one is born a sprinter. We all learn to push ourselves up from the floor and then balance before taking that first, wobbly step. It is an individual choice where to go from there.

Far more important than the tribulations and heartaches, the thrills, merriment, and pleasures of life is what you learn from it all. It isn't the tunnel we pass through that matters, it's what emerges on the other side.

I learn by doing....the same thing over and over and over again countless times.

For things I am not thankful for__xperiences I would never volunteer to relive__ recognize how they have changed me. My depth of compassion and humility, the sincerity of my empathy and understanding, and the duration of my patience have all been refined by bitter suffering. I thank God for the lessons learned. I am a better person for it, but I still abhor those awful trials.

I believe life is an education meant to teach us the need to be better people. _And I believe this learning often takes place through trial and error which may mean being an awful person at times before clearly seeing and grasping the necessity to improve. If you don't agree with me, just ask Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge. _I think Charles Dickens got it quite right.

Win or lose, good or bad, the experience will change you.