What type of crop do you want?

When you bless someone else, the biggest recipient of that blessing may surprise you. It’s not always the person you bless, but it’s often yourself. When you forgive someone else, even when they were demonstrably wrong, do you know who receives the liberation? Or when you try to speak evil or I’ll into someone else’s life, that you cannot hurt anyone else without doing injury to yourself? 
Life has a way of giving to the givers and taking from the takers. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. 🎶you can’t beat Gods giving. No matter how you try. 

2 Corinthians 9:6… 

What is it you wish to reap? What did you sow? The songwriter wrote, sowing the seeds of love. Will you sow love? Or hate? Peace? Or strife? A bounty? Or a famine? 
The blessings need not be large. They can be simple. But in all cases, the blessings were paid for by the sacrifice of Jesus. So don’t get it twisted. Don’t shout hallelujah on someone else’s work. Be glad only on the blessings of Jesus. 
Take the limits off. The zip code you come from and the gender you are does not dictate your eternal blessings. 
Ecclesiastes 3 I have put eternity in their hearts. Don’t limit your hopes on where you are right now. Heaven is expansion and you are capable of so much more as Jesus Christ strengthens you. 
Poem by Pauline Murray (excerpt)
“Hope”

Hope is a crushed stalk

Between clenched fingers

… A word in a tumultuous 

A dream of forty acres and a mule 

A cabin of ones own 

And a moment to rest

At last

A song a weary throat 

Give me a song of faith and a people 

Who will believe it

A song of hope and song of love 

In a brown girls heart. 

To just hear it. 
-autobiography “a song in a weary throat”

Don’t substitute good words for good work. 

Good goals and plans and programs for good work. 

There is no substitute for good work. Practice what you read, hear, sing and know. 

Here was a good person

Death comes to us all. None are immune to its effects. Perhaps the greatest pain is not for those who finally expire and pass on into that oft written about ‘undiscovered country’. Perhaps the sting of death is does not linger the longest or harshest upon those it touches. But rather the cessation of life is impacted the most upon those who survive. Those who are still awake and aware.

Today, one of the greatest Americans this country has ever birthed, has gone from us never to return. Maya Angelou.

There is little that has not been said about her and her writings. It is unnecessary to repeat her many well deserved accolades here and now. Novelist. Poet. Civil rights leader. Influencer of millions. All those and more are inadequate descriptors of her. But I will say this.

When I first heard her read “Still I Rise” I was moved. When I saw her read “On the Pulse of Morning” I was impacted. When she was quoted as saying “My dear. When someone tells you who they are; believe them. When they SHOW you who they are; you best believe them.” I was motivated. Few humans have moved, impacted and motivated me as she has. And though I’ve never met her, I feel in many ways I actually already have.

I am richer for having read her musings and listened to her verse. I still have much to learn from her and that is a long road I will walk. But I believe that it’s a road that I will enjoy because she was in the end a good person. And isn’t that really all we truly want in the end? To be remembered not as a mover and a shaker. An influencer of millions and worshiped as demigods. No. In the end, my greatest wish is that when the trump sounds and the gates are thrown wide, someone out there testifies that this was a good person.

Maya was such a good person. I pray I live to be one too.