Jeff Giddens

We think ordinary to spend twelve or sixteen or twenty years of a person’s life and many thousands of public dollars on education—and not a dime or a thought on character.

"The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

When a teenager asks why they need to learn calculus, what should you say?

...

It’s to prove you can do hard things.

I have a theory about nostalgia: It happens because the best survival strategy in an uncertain world is to overworry. When you look back, you forget about all the things you worried about that never came true. So life appears better in the past because in hindsight there wasn’t as much to worry about as you were actually worrying about at the time.

We often ask: What is God’s purpose for my life?

Better to ask: What purpose does my life have within God’s purpose for all life, wrapped up in his mission for the whole of creation?

Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly – but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth. No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie.