"As children, we believed that the image of ourselves that we saw mirrored in our parent's faces and in their behavior toward us, accurately reflected our true identities.

Children assume that Mommy and Daddy always tell the truth, that's why they accept without question the reflection they see of themselves in their parent’s faces and voices.

  Young children lack the reasoning skills to figure out that what they see in their parent's faces and hear in their voices reflects and echoes who the parent is, not who the child is."

Think about the ramifications of that for a minute. 

 Dr. Sandra D. Wilson from, "Hurt People Hurt People." 

"The mother's heart is the child's school room." 
Beecher.

  "I like to see people sing when they have to stop in the middle of the verse and cry a little. I like such unwritten rests and pauses in the music. Beecher.

  "Going into a village at night, with the lights gleaming on each side of the street, in some houses they will be in the basement and nowhere else, and in others in the attic and nowhere else, and in others in some middle chamber; but in no house will every window gleam from top to bottom. So is it with men's faculties. Most of them are in darkness. One shines here, and another there; but there is no man whose soul is luminous throughout." Henry Ward Beecher.

 "There is a personal language in the Bible; we hear in its pages living voices of living men speaking to us. 

Phrases of the Bible startle us by their direct application to us; they cling to us and reach even where no friend's voice can reach.

A presence falls quietly on the soul, stillness is appreciated, living without the epic, but finding under the surface an alluring simplicity.  

Every moment a promise, not to be found slipping through our fingers, but grasped, possessed, enjoyed.

New sensations of hope, and a heart quieting peace all permeated with a deep elation and joy. Leaving the shallows for deeper currents.

Jesus brings the fascination back into life: laughter, charm, and purpose. And even the smallest doubting faith finds a self-multiplying power." James Martineau. 

"The rules of quantity, the laws of weight and measure, do not hold beyond the outward world; they disappear wherever the Holy Spirit claims its own. The smallest spiritual store, taken into the most retired spot, has a self-multiplying power; and if only used with holy trust, will pass the dimensions of nature and betray the resources of the infinite. The great Creative Spirit is every ready to touch the merest grain of manna in the heart, and make it numerous to shine on all the ground. When He flings a handful of moral endowments into the furrows of our nature, he never withholds the mellowing winds and dews; and the germs will not perish unless we deny them root. Within the smallest genuine grace he has wrapped up boundless possibilities; and whoever will but believe in it and apply it faithfully shall never fail of more." 

James Martineau.

  "Jesus was know as a Man of sorrows; of one serene indeed in spirit, and of strength divine and clear; but with a tinge throughout of sad earnestness, -- sometime flushing up into a transient glow of hope, -- rarely deepening into the shade of visible anguish; and yet throughout, from the wrestling’s in the desert to his cry upon the cross, showing itself in miracles of pity and in nights of prayer; in the light of his love and the flash of his invective, -- his delight in nature and in childhood, his abhorrence of Pharisees and hypocrites; in the deep beauty of his parables, and the melancholy wisdom of his prophecies; in the sedate unity of his life and quiet majesty of his death. How indeed is he represented by the emblem in which Christendom has embodies its veneration? The crucifix is the accepted symbol of grief divinely borne." J. Martineau.