Dan

“Humility helps you to recognize that all you are and all you have is a gift from God and a result of other people contributing to your life.”
― Richard E. Simmons III, The True Measure of a Man, How Perceptions of Success, Achievement & Recognition Fail Men in Difficult Times

“When J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was published in the 1950s, a woman named Rhona Beare wrote Tolkien and asked him about the chapter in which the Ring of Power is destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom. When the ring is melted, the Dark Lord’s entire power collapses and melts away with it. She found it inexplicable that this unassailable, overwhelming power would be wiped out by the erasure of such a little object. Tolkien replied that at the heart of the plot was the Dark Lord’s effort to magnify and maximize his power by placing so much of it in the ring. He wrote: “The Ring of Sauron is only one of the various mythical treatments of the placing of one’s life, or power, in some external object, which is thus exposed to capture or destruction with disastrous results to oneself.”
― Timothy Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

“But at the heart of character is the ability to restrain our desires. As a man grows in character, he builds the muscles of self-restraint.”
― Richard E. Simmons III, The True Measure of a Man, How Perceptions of Success, Achievement & Recognition Fail Men in Difficult Times

“So suffering is at the very heart of the Christian faith. It is not only the way Christ became like and redeemed us, but it is one of the main ways we become like him and experience his redemption. And that means that our suffering, despite its painfulness, is also filled with purpose and usefulness.”
― Timothy Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering