Bible Verse of the Day

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

You have value, never sell yourself short...


John 15:13 – “No one has greater love than this – that one lays down his life for his friends.”



Where does one draw the line? How much happiness do we need to give up, who do we have to forsake, how many do we have to disappoint, how many sacrifices do we have to make, how much self-inflicted grief do we have to pile on ourselves, how much precious time do we have to let waste?

Who determines the choices and decisions we take and their worthiness; for our wretched peace of mind to be appeased? How can we be sure the path decided upon holds divine appliance?

Sure we say, 'I've prayed about it', and 'God has ordained my actions' - how presumptuous of us to profess we fully understand the 'Aye' and 'Nay' of the Father without even fully understanding ourselves. How self-indulgent and misguided...




Much of the aforesaid builds a precinct in the mind for the following:

A desire to be well thought of makes people reluctant to say 'no' to anyone regarding anything. We should cultivate an ability to say 'no' to activities for which we have no time, no talent, and in which we have no interest or real concern. If we learn to say 'no' to many things, then we will be able to say 'yes' to things that matter most.

But rather we persevere with our short-sighted, blinkered aspirations of 'doing the right thing', no matter what the consequences may hold; because, in our limited understanding of ourselves and the will of God; we vindicate ourselves and wallow in the shallowness of false relief that we have thrown off the shackles of guilt and man's narrow-minded reproaches.

'From the sublime to the ridiculous', it is said, 'takes but one step'. How callously we embark upon and take this step, without fully exploring due diligence, without true guided direction, without challenging the status quo, without due consideration of the ensuing battle ahead. Relying solely on the convictions of our own limited and flawed ideals and hardened hearts; whilst unbeknown, still indeed an inherent and real result of life's struggles.

We usually take this rash path to 'make up' to those we feel we have grievously harmed or hurt, or caused unnecessary burdens to be placed upon; and carried further we do it in penance of our past self-destructive behaviour; which ironically we are now sub-consciously perpetuating...

If one really wants, or needs, to show and prove to our loving Lord and Saviour a pure and repentant heart, think about it, find a different alleviation. This self flagellation is tantamount to suicide, a mortal sin, reserved for the unsaved and hopeless; not for the Children of God.



Further:

A bit of fame or notoriety do funny things to people. They start to think that anything they want is possible and even probable. They get the peculiar notion that they are creatures of special grace, and that the whole purpose of each day's sunrise is to warm them. Sometimes, for a while, it even works out for them, and they read in this run of good fortune an entire lifetime's destiny, rather than a single extraordinary chapter - Bill Adler and David R Slavitt

This will of course anger many; but in the end only the pure in heart shall see God - the Master promised this - and to this end I will lay down my life for a friend (for the right, Godly reasons)... - SSL

Challenges - of the personal kind...


Through the fire, to the limit, to the wall
Right down to the wire, even through the fire



Personal challenges often get in the way of what you want to accomplish in your life and the on whole even normal challenges we must face it can sometimes feel daunting.  What's worse is that it's not always something that's acknowledged as a roadblock to rebuilding our life and the stress of personal resistance can range from annoying to incapacitating.

No matter where you are on your road for change you might feel at a loss about where to start in order to overcome this personal resistance.  Fortunately there are lots of tools for breaking through this resistance and creating the change you want in order to have a successful 'new' life.

Believe it or not there’s actually a formula to understand the components of change!  It was created by Richard Bechard and David Gleicher to describe organizational development but is also applicable to personal/professional change as well.

Here is Bechard’s Formula: D x V x FS > R 


This is how it works: 


D = Dissatisfaction:  The higher your dissatisfaction with the status quo gets the more likely you are to initiate change.


V = Vision:  The more clear and specific your vision is the more traction you can acquire in making change.


FS = First Steps:  The more clear you on your First Steps the more capable you are at following through on change.


R = Resistance to Change:  Resistance can be about fear, time or monetary costs, emotional concerns or any number of issues or reasons that hold you back.  Basically, resistance is anything that stops you.

Each of the variables is a core element to overcoming resistance and having the ability to move forward.  Using basic algebra you can see that if any one of the variables D, V or FS is big enough you will be able to overcome resistance.  In combination they can literally create massive momentum to changing the status quo.


Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Let It Be...



Follow your heart - to be willing to march into Hell for a Heavenly cause...

If you don't 'get' this - you're made of stone...


IF YOU ARE IN A RELATIONSHIP, MARRIED OR SINGLE , READ THIS YOU'LL KNOW WHY AT THE END...

"When I got home that night as my wife served dinner, I held her hand and said, I've got something to tell you. She sat down and ate quietly. Again I observed the hurt in her eyes.

Suddenly I didn't know how to open my mouth. But I had to let her know what I was thinking. I want a divorce. I raised the topic calmly.

She didn't seem to be annoyed by my words, instead she asked me softly, why?

I avoided her question. This made her angry. She threw away the chopsticks and shouted at me, you are not a man! That night, we didn't talk to each other. She was weeping. I knew she wanted to find out what had happened to our marriage. But I could hardly give her a satisfactory answer; she had lost my heart to Jane. I didn't love her anymore. I just pitied her!

With a deep sense of guilt, I drafted a divorce agreement which stated that she could own our house, our car, and 30% stake of my company.

She glanced at it and then tore it into pieces. The woman who had spent ten years of her life with me had become a stranger. I felt sorry for her wasted time, resources and energy but I could not take back what I had said for I loved Jane so dearly. Finally she cried loudly in front of me, which was what I had expected to see. To me her cry was actually a kind of release. The idea of divorce which had obsessed me for several weeks seemed to be firmer and clearer now.

The next day, I came back home very late and found her writing something at the table. I didn't have supper but went straight to sleep and fell asleep very fast because I was tired after an eventful day with Jane.

When I woke up, she was still there at the table writing. I just did not care so I turned over and was asleep again.

In the morning she presented her divorce conditions: she didn't want anything from me, but needed a month's notice before the divorce. She requested that in that one month we both struggle to live as normal a life as possible. Her reasons were simple: our son had his exams in a month's time and she didn't want to disrupt him with our broken marriage.

This was agreeable to me. But she had something more, she asked me to recall how I had carried her into out bridal room on our wedding day.

She requested that every day for the month's duration I carry her out of our bedroom to the front door ever morning. I thought she was going crazy. Just to make our last days together bearable I accepted her odd request.

I told Jane about my wife's divorce conditions. . She laughed loudly and thought it was absurd. No matter what tricks she applies, she has to face the divorce, she said scornfully.

My wife and I hadn't had any body contact since my divorce intention was explicitly expressed. So when I carried her out on the first day, we both appeared clumsy. Our son clapped behind us, daddy is holding mommy in his arms. His words brought me a sense of pain. From the bedroom to the sitting room, then to the door, I walked over ten meters with her in my arms. She closed her eyes and said softly; don't tell our son about the divorce. I nodded, feeling somewhat upset. I put her down outside the door. She went to wait for the bus to work. I drove alone to the office.

On the second day, both of us acted much more easily. She leaned on my chest. I could smell the fragrance of her blouse. I realized that I hadn't looked at this woman carefully for a long time. I realized she was not young any more. There were fine wrinkles on her face, her hair was graying! Our marriage had taken its toll on her. For a minute I wondered what I had done to her.

On the fourth day, when I lifted her up, I felt a sense of intimacy returning. This was the woman who had given ten years of her life to me.

On the fifth and sixth day, I realized that our sense of intimacy was growing again. I didn't tell Jane about this. It became easier to carry her as the month slipped by. Perhaps the everyday workout made me stronger.

She was choosing what to wear one morning. She tried on quite a few dresses but could not find a suitable one. Then she sighed, all my dresses have grown bigger. I suddenly realized that she had grown so thin, that was the reason why I could carry her more easily.

Suddenly it hit me... she had buried so much pain and bitterness in her heart. Subconsciously I reached out and touched her head.

Our son came in at the moment and said, Dad, it's time to carry mom out. To him, seeing his father carrying his mother out had become an essential part of his life. My wife gestured to our son to come closer and hugged him tightly. I turned my face away because I was afraid I might change my mind at this last minute. I then held her in my arms, walking from the bedroom, through the sitting room, to the hallway. Her hand surrounded my neck softly and naturally. I held her body tightly; it was just like our wedding day.

But her much lighter weight made me sad. On the last day, when I held her in my arms I could hardly move a step. Our son had gone to school. I held her tightly and said, I hadn't noticed that our life lacked intimacy.

I drove to office.... jumped out of the car swiftly without locking the door. I was afraid any delay would make me change my mind...I walked upstairs. Jane opened the door and I said to her, Sorry, Jane, I do not want the divorce anymore.

She looked at me, astonished, and then touched my forehead. Do you have a fever? She said. I moved her hand off my head. Sorry, Jane, I said, I won't divorce. My marriage life was boring probably because she and I didn't value the details of our lives, not because we didn't love each other anymore. Now I realize that since I carried her into my home on our wedding day I am supposed to hold her until death do us apart.

Jane seemed to suddenly wake up. She gave me a loud slap and then slammed the door and burst into tears. I walked downstairs and drove away.

At the floral shop on the way, I ordered a bouquet of flowers for my wife. The salesgirl asked me what to write on the card. I smiled and wrote, I'll carry you out every morning until death do us apart.

That evening I arrived home, flowers in my hands, a smile on my face, I ran up stairs, only to find my wife in the bed - dead. My wife had been fighting CANCER for months and I was so busy with Jane to even notice. She knew that she would die soon and she wanted to save me from the whatever negative reaction from our son, in case we push thru with the divorce.-- At least, in the eyes of our son--- I'm a loving husband....

The small details of your lives are what really matter in a relationship. It is not the mansion, the car, property, the money in the bank. These create an environment conducive for happiness but cannot give happiness in themselves. So find time to be your spouse's friend and do those little things for each other that build intimacy. Do have a real happy marriage!"

God bless us all ~ SB

Monday, November 28, 2011

Has to be said...



















Neglecting those you love, or profess to love, is truly one of the greatest causes of your own grief ~ SB

Saturday, November 26, 2011

For my Babykin...


Why?



Why in the silence of the night
do I hear a voice inside
that cries, that cries for more
since you rushed into my door
You, gave to me your Holy word,
but you left me in this world
I try, I'm try and pray,
but your light just fades away
I'm walking through the night
searching for a light, oh Lord
I'm wandering in the dark
looking for a spot, oh Lord
longing for the day
can't you show the way, oh Lord
don't leave me on my own
it's hard to be alone
when nothing's going right
when living and believing is a fight
don't leave me here alone
shine, you can take this heart of mine
now do you help me travel high
I cry, I cry and pray
I won't let you fade away
I'm walking through the night
searching for a light, oh God
I'm wandering in the dark
looking for a spot, oh God
longing for the day
can't you show the way, oh Lord
don't leave me on my own
it's hard to be alone
when nothing's going right
when living and believing is a fight
don't leave me all alone
why can't I live without you
Why?



Today I give thanks for the sweet sorrow of being apart, it hurts but  employs the power of Faith and Patience to such a degree that Joy results in the end - Love you - SB

Friday, November 25, 2011

...and prosper!


Reading the media and viewing television these days, one can easily be persuaded that the human species is on its last legs, still tottering along but only barely making it. In this view, disease is the biggest menace of all. Even when we are not endangering our lives by eating the wrong sorts of food and taking the wrong kinds of exercise (or worse still, no exercise), we are placing ourselves in harm’s way by means of the toxins we keep inserting into the environment that surrounds us.
As if this were not enough, we have fallen into the new habit of thinking our way into illness. If we take up the wrong kind of personality, we run the risk of contracting a new disease called stress, followed quickly by coronary occlusion. Or if we just sit tight and try to let the world slip by, here comes cancer, from something we ate, inhaled or touched. No wonder we are a nervous lot. The word is out that if we were not surrounded and propped up by platoons of health professionals, we would drop in our tracks.
The reality is somewhat different; there has never been a time in history when human beings in general have been statistically as healthy as the people now. Our average life expectancy has stretched from 45 years a century ago to today’s figure of around 75. More of us than ever before are living into our eighties and nineties. Dying from disease in childhood and adolescence is no longer the common occurrence that it was 100 years ago, when tuberculosis and other lethal microbial infections were the chief causes of premature death. Today, dying young is a rare and catastrophic occurrence, and when it does happen it is usually caused by trauma.
Medicine must get some of the credit for the remarkable improvement in human health, but not all. The profession of plumbing also had much to do with the change. When sanitary engineering assured the populace of uncontaminated water, the great epidemics of typhoid fever and cholera came to an end. Even before such advances, as early as the seventeenth century, improvements in agriculture and nutrition had increased people’s resistance to infection. In short, we have come a long way - the longest part of that way with common sense, cleanliness and a better standard of living, but a substantial recent distance as well with medicine. We still have an agenda of lethal and incapacitating illnesses to cause us anxiety, but these shouldn’t worry us to death. The diseases that used to kill off most of us early in life have been brought under control.
Rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease have almost vanished in the Western countries. Tertiary syphilis, once a common cause of insanity, is nowadays so rare as to seem exotic. Poliomyelitis is no longer any risk. Death from coronary heart disease has diminished in incidence by almost 30 per cent and the survival rate climbs every year. There is no such thing as a cancer epidemic, no matter who says so; there is more lung cancer, to be sure, caused beyond doubt by cigarette smoking, but the chief reason for the increased total number of cancers is that more of us are surviving into the age group most likely to develop these diseases.
Meanwhile, biomedical research has moved us into the early stage of a totally new era in medicine. So much has recently been learnt about fundamental processes at cellular and subcellular levels that there are no longer any disease mechanisms that have the look of impenetrable mysteries. There is a great deal still to be learnt about the ailments of our middle years and old age - cancer, heart disease, stroke, dementia, arthritis and the rest. But they no longer seem unapproachable, as they did just ten years ago.
Today’s powerful technologies for basic research have made it possible for scientists to investigate almost any question. This does not guarantee a quick answer, of course, or even a correct one; but the ability to make intelligent guesses and then to formulate sharp questions concerning medicine’s most difficult problems is something new. Never before has there been a time of such excitement and high confidence among biomedical researchers and I pray each day that both government and business will see to it that basic science is given the support it deserves.
It no longer stretches the imagination to see a time ahead when human beings can be relatively free of disease for a full run through life. This does not mean that we shall be any happier or be living much longer than we do now. We shall still die most often by wearing out, according to our individual genetic clocks; but we shall not be so humiliated by the chronic illnesses that now make old age itself seem a disease.


IF ONLY THEY WOULD SHARE IT WITH THE WHOLE WORLD, WITHOUT SEEKING SUCH ASTRONOMICAL FINANCIAL GAIN FOR THE GOD-GIVEN INTELLIGENCE!

May God grant us many, many more years... to a ripe old body and spiritual age… ~ SB
BKSB


Thursday, November 24, 2011

Count your blessings again... and again... and again...


ONE HELLO

ONE HELLO LYRICS - RANDY CRAWFORD


If you're not afraid
Of what love brings
Then endings are beginnings
Of beautiful things



Its a chance you'll take
It's a chance you'll win
If someone's gonna find you
First you gotta let them in




'Cause love begins with one hello
The hardest part is over
Now its easy letting go
One hello is how it starts
You might win it all or lose your heart




If you're not afraid of what you feel
Then try and keep it simple
Or try and keep it real
And if being real means
Means you'll someday will say goodbye



Remember, my friend
Goodbye's not the end
Its a circle you know
And it starts with one hello





Love begins with one hello
The hardest part is over
Now it's easy letting go
One hello is how it starts



Remember, my friend
Goodbye's not the end
Its a circle you know
And it starts with one hello
It starts with one "Hello"

You need not feel guilty that you turn to Me when you have exhausted all other possibilities for joy and there is nowhere else to turn. Thank yourself for going where you are sure to find comfort. Now is the only moment there is.





Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Just Being There...


What’s the most important thing you’ve done in your life?” The question was put to me during a presentation I gave to a group of lawyers. The answer came to me in an instant. It’s not the one I gave, because the setting wasn’t right. As a lawyer in the entertainment industry, I knew the audience wanted to hear about my work with celebrities. But here’s the true answer, the one that leapt from the recesses of memory…
The most important thing I've ever done occurred while playing tennis with a high-school friend I hadn't seen for some time. Between points we talked about what had been happening in each other’s lives. He and his wife had just had a baby boy, who was keeping them up at night. While we were playing, a car came screaming up the road towards the courts, its hooter blaring. It was my friend’s father, who shouted to my friend that his baby had stopped breathing and was being rushed to hospital. In a flash my friend was in the car and gone, disappearing in a cloud of dust.
For a moment I just stood there, paralysed. Then I tried to work out what I should do. Follow my friend to the hospital? There was nothing I could accomplish there, I convinced myself. My friend’s son was in the care of doctors and nurses, and nothing I could do or say would affect the outcome. Be there for moral support? Well, maybe. But my friend and his wife both had large families and I knew they’d be surrounded by relatives who would provide more than enough comfort and support, whatever happened. All I could do at the hospital, I decided, was to get in the way. Also, I had plans with my family, who were waiting for me to get home. So I decided to head home and get hold of my friend later.

As I started my car, I realized that my friend had left his truck and keys at the courts. I now faced another dilemma. I couldn’t leave the keys in the truck. But if I locked the truck and took the keys, what would I do with them? I could leave them at his house, but with no paper on me to leave a note, how would he know I had done that? Reluctantly I decided to go past the hospital and give him the keys.

When I arrived, I was directed to a room where my friend and his wife were waiting. As I had thought, the room was filled with family members silently watching my friend console his wife. I slipped in and stood at the door, trying to decide what to do next. Soon a doctor appeared. He approached my friend and his wife, and in a quiet voice told them that their son had died; the victim of sudden infant death syndrome.

For what seemed an eternity, the two held each other and cried, oblivious of the rest of us standing around in pained, stunned silence. After they had composed themselves, the doctor suggested that they might want to spend a few moments with their son. My friend and his wife stood up and walked stoically past their family. When they reached the door, my friend’s wife saw me standing in the corner. She came over and hugged me and started to cry. My friend hugged me, too, and said, “Thanks for being here.”
For the rest of that morning, I sat in the casualty room of that hospital and watched my friend and his wife hold the body of their infant son, and say goodbye.
 
It’s the most important thing I have ever done.

The experience taught me three lessons…
First: The most important thing I've ever done happened when I was completely helpless. None of the things I had learnt at university, in three years of studying law or in six years of legal practice was of any use in that situation. Something terrible was happening to people I cared about; and I was powerless to change the outcome. All I could do was stand by and watch it happen. And yet it was critical that I do just that - just be there when someone needed me.
Second: The most important thing I’ve ever done almost didn’t happen because of things I had learnt in classrooms and professional life. Studying law taught me how to take a set of facts, break them down and organize them - then evaluate that information dispassionately. These skills are critical for lawyers. When people come to us for help, they’re often stressed out and depend on a lawyer to think logically. But while learning to think, I almost forgot how to feel. Today I have no doubt that I should have leapt into my car without hesitation and followed my friend to the hospital.
Third: I was reminded that life can change in an instant. Intellectually we know this - but we think the bad things, at least, will happen to someone else. So we make our plans and see the future stretching out in front of us as real as if it has already happened. But while looking to tomorrow, we may forget to notice all the todays slipping by. And we may forget that a job retrenchment, a debilitating illness, an encounter with a drunk driver or myriad other events can alter that future in the blink of an eye.
Sometimes it takes a tragedy to regain perspective on your own life. From that one experience I learnt to seek balance between work and living, to understand that the most satisfying career isn’t worth one missed holiday, one broken relationship or one day off not spent with the family. And I learnt that the most important thing in life isn’t the money you make, the status you attain or the honours you achieve. The most important thing in life is the junior team you coach, the youngsters you introduce to your passion or the poem you write - or the time when you’re just somebody’s friend.
Adapted and edited from a piece by James Kennedy – may God grant us the sense to take some time out for others in need ~ SB

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Are You Working Too Hard?



For many people, work is now the emotional and spiritual centre of life. Professionals work an average of almost 44 hours a week. Some fields, such as law, finance,service industries and medicine, often require employees to work twice much.
We may live well, but that cannot ease the suspicion that we no longer live nobly. Many are burnt out from work, disillusioned with their professions. We seem spiritually damaged by the destructive cycle of working, wanting and having as ends in themselves. Workaholism and its hand-maidens, careerism and materialism, aren’t only social issues - they are religious issues. Someone once wrote: “Work is god for the compulsive worker, and nothing gets in the way of this god.” Work becomes an end in itself, a way to escape from family, the inner life, the world. All genuine religions are concerned with the shattering of false gods. How can we break the false gods of career?
First, remember the most profound revolution in religious thinking: your Sabbath. Whether one celebrates it on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, its spiritual reality goes beyond ritual. It is the ultimate statement that the world does not own us; that we are made for rest and holiness as surely as we are made for ambition.
Second, don’t sacrifice your family on the altar of career. The journey up the ladder to success may have brought us much wealth or stuff or adequacy to live. But it has also devalued the traditional role of the parent / care-giver as nurturer and teacher. From the time of the Industrial Revolution the anguish of the parent who has impaled himself on the sword of ambition has not changed. It has merely changed addresses.
Third, don’t judge yourself by what you do, but by the meaning you bring to it. Many people have transformed dull work into a true vocation - into a place where they hear the voice of something deeper and higher. At the funeral for a woman who worked in a lingerie shop, her colleagues warmly eulogized her for the compassion and sensitivity she showed towards customers who had been mastectomy patients. The boss of a moving crew once said: “Moving is hard for most people. They’re nervous about going to a new community and about strangers packing their most precious possessions. I think God wants me to treat my customers with love and make them feel that I care about their lives.”
As are so many anonymous people, this man was a messenger of God. We never know what we do in our work that will be remembered, that will be holy. It has nothing to do with our job titles. It has everything to do with the faith, vision and love that we bring to it.
Happy in service ~ SB

Sshhh..!


Monday, November 21, 2011

Stumbling but not Fallen...


While you're on earth, it is not God's goal to make everything around you right. His goal is to make YOU right.





Sunday, November 20, 2011

ONE DAY I'LL FLY AWAY

ONE DAY I'LL FLY AWAY LYRICS - RANDY CRAWFORD


I make it alone
When love is gone
Still you made your mark
Here in my heart



One day I'll fly away
Leave your love to yesterday
What more can your love do for me
When will love be through with me



I follow the night
Can't stand the light
When will I begin
My life again


One day I'll fly away, leave your love to yesterday
What more can your love do for me?
When will love be through with me?
Why live life from dream to dream
And dread the day that dreaming ends?


One day I'll fly away, leave your love to yesterday
What more can your love do for me?
When will love be through with me?
Why live life from dream to dream
And dread the day that dreaming ends?



One day I'll fly away, fly away, fly away
One day I'll fly away, fly away, fly away
One day I'll fly away, fly away, fly away


The way I've felt -
Whenever I think of you, I think of love.
The way you looked at me; the way you made me feel.
The way you touched me; the way you held me so close.
When you kissed my lips, how I got butterflies throughout my body
Just long unfinished Love.

Tips of the Slung


Rear deeders, how your beds...                   Let us salute the eponymous master of the verbal somersault, the Reverend William Archibald Spooner. He left us all a legacy of laughter. He also gave the dictionary a new entry: spoonerism. The very word brings a smile. It refers, of course, to the linguistic flip-flops that turn ‘a well-oiled bicycle’ into ‘a well- boiled icicle’ and other ludicrous ways, speakers of English get their mix all talked up.
English is fertile soil for spoonerisms, because our language has more than four times as many words as any other - approx 750 000 and growing at 500 a year. Consequently, there’s a greater chance that any accidental transposition of letters or syllables will produce rhyming substitutes that still make sense - sort of. Spooner gave us ‘tinglish errors and English terrors at the same time.’
Born in 1844 in London, Spooner became an Anglican priest and a scholar. During a 60-year association with Oxford University, he lectured in history, philosophy and divinity. From 1876 to 1889 he served as a dean and from 1903 to 1924 as warden, or president. Spooner was an albino, small, with a pink face, poor eyesight and a head too large for his body. His reputation was that of a genial, kindly, hospitable man. He seems also to have been somewhat of an absent-minded professor. He once invited a faculty member to tea “to welcome our new archaeology Fellow.” “But, sir,” the man replied, “I am our new archaeology Fellow.”
“Never mind,” Spooner said, “come all the same.”
After a Sunday service he turned back to the pulpit and informed his student audience: “In the sermon I have just preached, whenever I said Aristotle, I meant St Paul.” But Spooner was no feather-brain. In fact his mind was so nimble, his tongue couldn’t keep pace. The Greeks had a word for this type of impediment long before Spooner was born: metathesis. It means the act of transposing or swapping things around. Is not spoonerism a more playful word? It means the same thing.
Reverend Spooner’s tendency to get words and sounds mixed up could happen at any time, but especially when he was agitated. He reprimanded one student for ‘fighting a liar in the quadrangle’ and another who ‘hissed my mystery lecture.’ To the latter he added in disgust, ‘You have tasted two worms.’

Patriotic fervour also excited Spooner. He raised this toast to Her Highness Victoria: ‘Three cheers for our queer old dean!’ During the First World War he reassured his students, ‘When our boys come home from France, we will have the hags flung out.’ And he lionized Britain’s farmers as ‘noble tons of soil.’
His goofs at chapel were legendary. “Our Lord is a shoving leopard,” he once intoned. He quoted I Corinthians 13:12 as, ‘For now we see through a dark, glassly…(For you lazy lot; lol – the verse actually reads: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”) Officiating at a wedding, he prompted a hesitant bridegroom, “Son, now it is kisstomary to cuss the bride.” And to a stranger seated in the wrong place: “I believe you’re occupewing my pie. May I sew you to another sheet?”

Although he might simply have been concealing a dry wit, all of the professor’s slips seem to have been accidental. So if you come across one with too much meaning, it’s probably not authentic. For instance, ‘a scoop of boy trouts’ for ‘a troop of boy scouts’ seems contrived and was probably invented by one of his students. A sign in a tavern notes: ‘Our customers enter optimistically and leave misty optically'. That’s beautiful, but it was obviously contrived. Here’s another often attributed to Dorothy Parker: ‘I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.’ That’s genius. Did Spooner really say, ‘Which of us has not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?’ He certainly could have - he was trying to say ‘half-formed wish.’
A few more offers; (probably) authentic spoonerisms:  At a naval review Spooner marvelled at ‘this vast display of cattle ships and bruisers.’ To a school official’s secretary: ‘Is the bean dizzy?’ Visiting the country cottage of a friend: ‘You have a nosey little crook here.’
 Two years before his death in 1930 at the age of 86, Spooner told an interviewer that he could recall only one of his trademark fluffs. It was the one he made announcing the hymn “Kinkering Congs Their Titles Take,” meaning to say, “Conquering Kings.” He obviously could have made many others. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “spoonerism” began appearing in colloquial use as early as 1885, when Spooner was 41. Once when a group of students clamoured outside his window for him to make a speech, he called down: “You don’t want to hear a speech; you just want me to say one of those . . . things.”

So if you make a verbal slip, rest easy. Many have. A radio announcer once introduced the US President as Hoobert Heever. And British minister Sir Stafford Cripps was once presented as ‘Sir Stifford Craps’. Thanks to Reverend Spooner’s style-setting somersaults, our own little ‘tips of the slung’ will not be looked upon as the embarrassing babblings of a nitwit, but rather the whimsical lapses of a nimble brain.
So let us applaud that gentle man who lent his ‘tame to the nerm’. He had a habit of ‘spewing up his screech’, but this was a ‘finer malt’ and he was ‘well miked by everyone who let him.’ May ‘sod rest his goal’ lest all this just be 'a lack of pies!'



Thank You God -

in Your wisdom You created such colourful delights for us to enjoy, use and remark upon. ~ SB