The virtuoso caresses her violin,
And the two merge into one – flesh and spruce.
Chin hugging the wooden body,
Strings teased by flesh into singing their melodies.
No magic this violinist’s craft.
She did not wake up one morning
With Tchaikovsky flowing from her fingers.
For years she courted and romanced the music.
A woman in her dream wedding gown stood at the back of the church sanctuary, the Wedding March about to begin, and she told her father that she did not want to go through with the wedding. He did not give her the answer she expected but rather said that she should not marry this man if she had reservations about it.
“What about all the people I will be disappointing,” she asked. Continue reading When the world hates you…
Any organization that requires money to fulfill its mission goes through the regular discipline of closely examining its profit and loss statement. The P & L is a financial statement that summarizes the revenues, costs, and expenses incurred during a specific period of time – usually a fiscal quarter or year. Organizations that neglect to do this fail.
Using the same financial analogy, Jesus said that a man does not begin building a tower unless he first calculates the cost of construction as well as whether his venture could financially support itself. Nor does a king declare war unless he has enough resources to fight it.
Calculating the cost of a venture seems self-evident.
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