If someone asks you how to write your name, would you bark out each letter? And it they get angry, would you then return the anger? Wouldn't you rather gently spell out each letter for them? So then, remember in life that your duties are the sum of individual acts. Pay attention to each of these as you do your duty... just methodically complete your task.
Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits in the place of honor at God's right hand.
Unknown (resource) Alice Gray, Stories for the Heart
It was a few weeks before Christmas 1917. The beautiful snowy landscapes of Europe were blackened by war. The trenches on one side held the Germans and on the other side the trenches were filled with Americans. It was World War I. The exchange of gunshots was intense. Separating them was a very narrow strip of noman's land. A young German soldier attempting to cross that no mans-land had been shot and had become entangled in the barbed wire. He cried out in anguish, then in pain he continued to whimper.
[Deuteronomy 8-10 New International Version (NIV)]
8 Be careful to follow every command I am giving you today, so that you may live and increase and may enter and possess the land the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors.2 Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands.3 He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.4 Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years.5 Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you.
Ryan Holiday, The 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
Are you angry when someone's armpits stink or when their breath is bad? What would be the point? Having such a mouth and such armpits, there's going to be a smell emanating. You say, they must have sense, can't tehy tell how they are offending others? Well, you have sense too, congratulations! So, use your natural reason to awaken theirs, show them, call it out. If the person will listen you will have cured them without useless anger. No drama nor unseemly show required. — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.28
Ryan Holiday, The 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
Heraclitus would shed tears whenever he went out in public — Democritus laughed. One saw the whole as a parade of miseries, the other follies. And so, we should take a lighter view of things and bear them with an easy spirit, for it is more human to laugh at life than to lament it. — Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind, 15.2
Ephesians 4:20-32 New International Version (NIV) 20 That, however, is not the way of life you learned21 when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus.22 You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires;23 to be made new in the attitude of your minds;24 and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
