Suffering – Perpetual Adoration

April 18, 2020

The Deceptive Speculation Behind The COVID-19 Pandemic

You may have heard of Charles Mackey (1814-1889), a Scottish poet, journalist, and author who was best known for his book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Mackey’s book, which was published in 1841, was critical of public manias, such as economic bubbles, fortune-telling, haunted houses, and other manias that were occurring at the time that he wrote his book.

April 11, 2020

The Anxiety & Panic Surrounding the COVID-19 Virus

After I started my law practice in January 1983, one of my first clients was Donna Schmidt. I had met Donna several years earlier when my mom introduced me to her. I don’t remember where we were introduced, but I do remember that it was at a Catholic religious event. Donna was a year younger than my mom. They had known each other since they were teenagers, when they both attended the same high school — the Academy of Our Lady, in Peoria, Illinois.

April 4, 2020

The Illusion of Security

There are several ugly truths about life that most of us ignore. I want to cover two of those ugly truths today. The first is that the path through life is fraught with uncertainty. The second is that by the time we’re mature adults, we have had experience with the first truth, but most of the time, we tuck it away into a deep dark corner of our minds. Then we go on with our lives behaving as though the first truth does not exist.

March 28, 2020

A Blank Check From A Billionaire

When I was 12 years old (1969), I experienced two events that changed the course of my life: I got my own paper route, and my mom drove me to the bank and opened a checking account in my name. The reason she opened the account was because she didn’t want the job of writing a check every week to the company that owned the newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star. When we got home from the bank, she taught me how to write checks. When the first bank statement arrived in the mail, she taught me how to reconcile the account.

March 7, 2020

The Coronavirus Reveals An Evil Government

When I was growing up during the 1960s and 1970s, there was one TV in my parents’ home, and there were only three television stations to choose from. The stations were affiliated with the three national networks — ABC, NBC, and CBS. The programming for each of the stations ran from 6:00 AM in the morning until 1:00 AM the following morning. After the last TV program ended at 1:00 AM, there was usually an instrumental patriotic song that was played and then the images on the station were replaced with several thick, horizontal, colored lines that appeared while an annoying audio tone played in the background.

February 29, 2020

A Little Bit of Knowledge Can be Dangerous

When was the last time you used a proverb while you were speaking to someone else? I would bet that if I followed you around for a day, I would hear you repeat a popular proverb to get your point across to a person you were talking to.

February 22, 2020

Ready or Not, Here It Comes!

Last week, I wrote about how we spend a good part of our lives in sorrow because of suffering that is, in most cases, unavoidable. I provided a short but specific definition of the word “suffer,” which is, “to undergo or feel pain or distress.” I then provided the definition of “sorrow,” which is “a feeling of deep distress caused by loss, disappointment, or other misfortune suffered by oneself or others.”

February 15, 2020

Suffering And Sorrow Are Here To Stay

In a perfect world, there would never be any suffering or sorrow. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. Our world was forever marred by the sin of Adam and Eve. It was their sin that condemned each of us to a life that would include suffering, sorrow, and death.

February 1, 2020

A Question of Why

When I was a teenager, my mom told me that I didn’t talk for the first two years of my life. When I asked her why she thinks I waited so long before I started talking, she said that she thought it was because I was able to get what I wanted without talking.