The Hand of God?

Christ's Vineyard Christian Reformed Church
2716 West Chicago Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60622

Michelle Shocked

It wouldn't be a cross if it wasnt to bear!

Ferdinand Foch,Marshal of France, on the Holy Rosary

“I think that I did not miss a single day in reciting [the Rosary], including the most terrible times of battle when I had no rest night or day. How often did I see her manifest intercession in the decisions which I made in choosing a precise tactic. Take, then, the advice of an old soldier seasoned by experience: Do not neglect the recitation of the Rosary for any reason.”

Two Friends: a lesson in humility.

Though he would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956, in the early 1940’s Juan Ramón Jiménez was a refugee. A poet, who had fled Spain during the Civil War, he settled in Washington, D.C. where he worked as a professor of literature. He was an obscure and lonely man, until one day he chanced upon a man working in his garden. The man, Henry by name, described by Jiménez as “timid yet firm at the same time,” struck up a conversation with Jiménez.

“Of all my acquaintances in this country,” Jiménez recalled, “none have I come to understand better or more quickly.” The two men spoke the same language, the language of God and the growth of the soil, democracy, and an abiding faith in the people. Often they spoke in Spanish. Jiménez often read Spanish poems, his own and others, to his friend Henry, who in turn often spoke of his deepest spiritual convictions. Jiménez was later to write:

There can be no doubt tat this man is a mystic, made of the same stuff as the greatest of the Spanish mystics, Saint Teresa de Jesus, John of the Cross, Louis de Leon. He is as militant in his faith as they were ... Saint Terese’s “God Can be Found in a Well Watched Kettle” means to him “God can be found in a dairyman’s milk-pail and in a farmer’s corn-crib ... he is convinced of an enduring and just principle of ancestry — every man is the son of his own words and work.

Months after meeting Henry, Jiménez mentioned his friend to some colleagues who then made a shocking revelation about Jiménez’s friend. “Was it possible?” Jiménez wondered. He ran all the way to Henry’s garden, where he found his friend working alone. “Señor Wallace, tell me the truth,” Jiménez asked breathlessly, “Are you the vice-president of the United States?”

“Si, Juan Ramón, lo soy. Look, aren’t my tomatoes magnificent? Take some along with you for lunch.”

Have an Eye Single for Righteousness

Advice given by "Uncle Henry" Wallace to his grandson, Henry Agard Wallace on his twenty-first birthday.

You must not expect to be a really big man unless you live a sincere, earnest, religious life. In other words, you want always to be on the side of the great Power that rules this world, and that we have learned to call "Our Father." In solving the questions that will come up from year to year and from day to day, the man who is on God's side is really on the side of the majority, although the world will not think so and he may for a time doubt it. Nevertheless, posterity will appreciate the man who does the right as he sees the right, and who has an eye single for righteousness.

Henry Agard Wallace later went on to found Pioneer Hi-Bred (the first company to sell hybrid seed commercially and the second largest in the field today), to breed the Wallace Leghorn Chicken (which now accounts for more than half of the world's egg production), and to serve as Secretary of Agriculture and Vice-President of the United States.

Dorothy Day - Servant of God

"Thinking gloomily of the sins and shortcomings of others, it suddenly came to me to remember my own offenses, just as heinous as those of others. If I concern myself with my own sins and lament them, if I remember my own failures and lapses, I will not be resentful of others. This was most cheering and lifted the load of gloom from my mind. It makes people unhappy to judge people and happy to love them."

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