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Fwd: Note of Encouragment

This is an essay that I shared with some missionary friends, and thought some 
of you would really enjoy it also. 

K

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Hi Bill and Laurie!

We have sure enjoyed your E-mails and are glad you are doing well and growing 
tremendously in the Lord.  Here is something I read in my devotional the 
other day that I feel I'm led to share with you.

"Somebody copied the following paraphrase from a well-worn carbon in the 
billfold of a thirty-year veteran missionary. With her husband, she was on 
her way to another tour of duty at Khartoum, Sudan. No one seemed to know who 
authorized it, but whoever it was captured the essence of the greatest essay 
on love ever written.

    If I have the language ever so perfectly
and speak like a pundit, and have not the
love that grips the heart, I am nothing. 
If I have decorations and diplomas
and am proficient in up-to-date methods
and have not the touch of understanding
love, I am nothing.

    If I am able to worst my opponents
in argument so as to make fools of
them, and have not the wooing note, I
am nothing. If I have all faith and great 
ideals and magnificent plans and wonderful
visions, ans have not the love
that sweats and bleeds and weeps and
prays and pleads, I am nothing.

    If I surrender all prospects, and 
leaving home and friends and comforts
Give myself to the showy sacrafice of a 
missionary career, and turn sour
and selfish amid the daily annoyances
and personal slights of a missionary
life, and though I give me body to be
consumed in the heat and sweat and
mildew of India, and have not the love
that yields its rights, its coveted
leisure, its pet plans, I am nothing,
NOTHING. Virtue has ceased to go out of me.

    If I can heal all manner of sickness and
disease, but wound hearts and hurt feelings
for want of love that is kind, I am nothing.
If I write books and publish articles that set
the world agape and fail to transcribe the word
of the cross in the language of love, I am nothing. 
Worse, I may be competent, busy, fussy,
punctilious, and well-equipped, but like
the church at Laodicea- nauseating to Christ."

Love, Keisha

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