A meek person is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority. Rather, he may be in his moral life as bold as a lion and as strong as Samson; but he has stopped being fooled about himself. He has accepted God’s estimate of his own life. He knows he is as weak and helpless as God has declared him to be, but he knows at the same time that, in the sight of God, he is more important than angels. In himself, nothing; in God, everything. He knows that the world will never see him as God sees him and he has stopped caring.

To say that God forgives us for our misdeeds is not a statement about God, about God’s emotional generosity. It is more of a statement about us. To feel forgiven is to feel free to step into the future unburdened by the mistakes of our past, encouraged by the knowledge that we can grow and change and need not repeat the same mistakes again. Forgiving others and ourselves is taking a bold step into power.

An author once wrote that voluntary simplicity is choosing to live more frugally on the material side of life so we can live more abundantly on the spiritual side of life. To have what we want is riches, but to be able to do without is power. In this sense, a person’s wealth is measured by the amount of things they can afford to do without.

There are no more useless words in the English language than the words “If Only.” They consume all the energy we could spend on making our lives better today. “If Only, “I could have”, or “I should have” never change “What is.” Focusing on the future too heavily is also deadly, because it is an invitation to excessive worry. Excessive worry contaminates the present moment more than almost any other activity, primarily because it precludes any possibility of developing our faith in the sense of trusting God more and acknowledging He is in control, and thankfully, not us.