Chapel of Optimal Life



A traditional Bible-based Christian church
A Bible-based Christian church for the modern age
A church based on the teachings of all the great thinkers
A new age church for the inquiring mind
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SERMON: Ten Ways To Improve Your Relationships

No one person is an island. We all need friendships. Decide with whom you can share fellowship and devote yourself to those few regardless of feelings, setbacks or circumstances. How can we survive life's setbacks without the affirming fellowship, support and mutual protections of our friends?

A man once asked Henry Ford, "Who is your best friend?" Ford said, "Your best friend is he or she who helps you bring out of yourself the best of that which is in you."

An awkward statement but read it over again carefully and slowly. More...

EDITORIAL: Do Drugs Kill More Than Pain?

How much do drugs to kill pain, destroy our brains? If you smoke long enough you will probably get lung cancer or emphysema. If you drink enough alcohol and long enough your kidneys and your liver will probably let you know they are troubled.

Nicotine and alcohol are both relaxants, killing the pain of living in this difficult world. But what about the drugs we take for real pain? A dental procedure, an in-office internal exploration? How exactly do these necessary drugs dull or kill our pain? More...

OPINION: What If Hitler...?

I love what ifs. And for people who believe in a powerful, focused and merciless God, how good was Hitler for the world?

What if Hitler had been assassinated in 1936? Would we all be better off today?

Let's start supposing. Hitler is killed and millions of deaths in Europe are what?
Himmler takes over? He's meaner than Hitler but has no panache, no public personality, no mystical unifying force. More...

GOOD NEWS: Acceptance

Nothing, neither acceptance nor prohibition, will induce a child to stop swearing overnight. Teach your child respect for himself and others, that profanity can hurt, offend, and disgust, and you'll be doing the best you can... Jean Callahan

Acceptance of one's life means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices. Paul Tournier

I’ve gone from reluctance to acceptance to gung ho. Grace Bumbry

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one. Russell Lynes More...

FICTION: Micah's Miracle, Part Two Of Three

Young Micah was Mrs. Fishkins's real problem child. He was the youngest child, only five, and not old enough to go to school, Jonah was ten and in the third grade. He sold newspapers after school rather than work in the butcher shop, because he said he didn't like meat. He planned to be a vegetarian when he grew up, but I don't know whether he became one or not.

Jonah was a very bright boy for his age, though, He got all A's in school. The oldest Fishkin child was Esther, who was sixteen. She had quit school, not being very bright, and worked in a small factory, making rosary beads. More...
ADVICE: Dear Angel

My husband is fighting in a war and has been for over eighteen months. This Sunday at church, my minister quoted scripture to support the war. This shook my faith to think we are fighting and killing in the name of God. I am so confused. Can this be right?



More...

"There is much to be said for failure; it is far more popular than success."

Kingsley-Miller

"There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again."

W. H. Auden

"One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived."

Paul Bourget

"I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world."

Samuel Johnson

"Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets."

Oscar Wilde

"A man doesn't learn to understand anything unless he loves it."

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"Anger is the thorn in the heart"

Yiddish proverb

"The English like eccentrics. They just don't like them living next door."

Julian Clary

"Without kindness, there can be no true joy."

Thomas Carlyle

"It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult."

Marcus Annaeus Seneca



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