Sacrificing sleep for Mitch Albom's books!

Mitch Albom's books never fail to sweep me off my feet. This time round, "Have a little faith" indeed did not disappoint. Just a few meaningful excerpts from the book:

It's perfectly fine to say "Someone is imperfect but they don't need improvement because it simply means you are willing to accept them as they are."

Faith is about doing. You are how you act, not just how you believe.

There is no cynism in the line of work revolving faith. Let me answer with a story, "There's this salesman, see?" And he knocks on a door. The man who answers says, "I don't need anything today."

The next day, the salesman returns. "Stay away", as he is told. The next day, the salesman is back. The man yells, "You again! I warned you!" He gets so angry he spits in the salesman's face. The salesman smiles, wipes the spit with a handkerchief, then looks to the sky and says, "Must be raining."

That's what faith is. If they spit in your face, you says it must be raining. But you still come back tomorrow.

Make a case against God; When you come to the end, that's where GOD begins.

Why do bad things happen to good people? ..... Because when you lose someone you love, you can curse GOD. You can yell. You can blame him. You can demand to know why. But when you don't believe in God, and things happen, you can only blame yourself. "Oh yes, it is far more comforting to think God listened and said no, than to think that nobody's out there."

Most religions warn against war, yet more wars have been fought over religion than perhaps anything else. Sodom and Gomorrah.... But so many people wage wars in God's name. God does not want such killing to go on. But MAN does.

When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched. Because a baby, not knowing better, wants to grab everything, to say, "The world is mine." But when an old person dies, his hands are open because he has learned the less, "We can take nothing with us."

What do people fear most about death? And Thomas Hardy answers in his poem

"They count as quite forgot, They are as men who have existed not, Theirs is a loss past loss of fitful breath. It is the second death."

Fear of being forgotten - That's the second death.

Marriage & Commitment: What do you lose if you don't commit? "A happiness you cannot find alone."

The same things in life can be good or evil, depending on what, with free will, we do with them. Speech can bless or curse. Money can save or destroy. Science can heal or kill. Even nature can work for you and against you: fire can warm or burn; water can sustain life or flood it away. Nowhere in the story of Creation do we read the word "bad". From the beginning, God put this world into our hands so we were created with a piece of divinity inside us called free will. And what God does is watch us every day lovingly, praying that we will make the right choices.

Everyone has done some bad things in his life. But it's not about you against the other guy. It's God measuring you against you. "Maybe all you get are chances to do good, and what little bad you do ain't much bad at all. But because has God has put you in the position where you can always do good, when you do something bad - it's like you let God down. And maybe people who only get chances to do bad, always around bad things, like us, when they finally make something good out of it, God's happy."

It's amazing how folks can't see you, cause they want to keep you in that past. They just looked at your past. And when we're still looking at ourselves through our past, we're not seeing what God has done. What He can do! We're not seeing the little things that happen in our lives. You knew me. You knew that person, but you don't know the person that I'm trying to become. Judge Not.

It's amazing how all these excerpts struck a chord in me as I was reading. Another 10 years down the road, these excerpts will continue to remind me of how the book has touched my heart for I probably would not have the time to re-read it again. Perhaps, some day I will. Just like I would relish the opportunity to journey through "Tuesdays with Morrie."

It seemed too small for what I wanted to achieve in life, like being stuck wearing your grade school clothes. I had dreams of travelling, making foreign friends in foreign cities. I had heard the phrase "citizen of the world." I wanted to be one.