The Wisdom Chronicle is designed to bring nuggets of wisdom from the dozens of books I read every year in all genres. Each week, I endeavor to share the best of what I have gleaned. The determination of relevance lies with you. Blessings, Jim Whiddon

91. TRUTH “We are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

—Thomas Jefferson”

92. NUMBERS “It takes only about eleven and a half days for a million seconds to tick away, whereas almost thirty-two years are required for a billion seconds to pass. Rock music has been around for only about two billion seconds.”

Excerpt From: John Allen Paulos. “Innumeracy.”

93. MUST WIN “The only must win was World War Two.”

— Buffalo Bills coach Marv Levy

94. BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW  “Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must be either true or false.… If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of the state or civilization, compared with his, is only a moment.”

— C. S. Lewis

95. INTELLECTUALS  “Both in antiquity and today, people who reject the knowledge of God think of themselves as “enlightened” (Heb. 10:32). Their ignorance here is not lack of general education; some are brilliant in their own way, but such brilliance is all wasted and futile in the end when combined with hardness of heart toward the truth of the gospel in Christ.”

Excerpt From: Crossway. “ESV Study Bible.”

96. GET THE FACTS  There are four people on a train en route from Paris to Barcelona—a beautiful young girl traveling with her elderly grandmother, and a stately general traveling with his aide, a young, handsome second lieutenant. The foursome is sitting in silence as the train enters a tunnel in the Pyrenees, the mountain range on the border between France and Spain.

It is pitch-dark in the tunnel. Suddenly there’s the sound of a loud kiss, followed by a second sound, that of a loud, hard smack. Upon exiting the tunnel, the four people remain silent, with no one acknowledging the incident.

The young girl thinks to herself, “Boy, that was a swell kiss that good-looking lieutenant gave me, and I really enjoyed it.What a shame my grandmother slapped him, because he must have thought it was I who slapped him. That’s too bad, because when we get to the next tunnel, he won’t kiss me again.”

The grandmother thinks, “That fresh young man kissed my granddaughter. But fortunately I brought her up to be a lady, so she slapped him real good. I’m glad because now he’ll stay away from her when we get to the next tunnel.”

The general thinks to himself, “I can’t believe what just happened. I personally handpicked him to be my aide, and I thought he was a real gentleman. But in the dark, he took advantage of that young girl and kissed her. But she must have thought it was I who kissed her, since I was the one she slapped.”

Meanwhile, I young lieutenant is thinking, “Boy, that was wonderful. How often do you get to kiss a beautiful girl and slug your boss at the same time?”

The story shows that while four people can have the same set of facts, they can arrive at four different conclusions.

Excerpt From: Elko, Kevin. “The Pep Talk.”

97. RAISING CHILDREN “Children are messengers to a time we will never see. As parents, our job is to make them INDEPENDENTLY DEPENDENT on Christ.”

— Dennis Rainey

98. FAMILY “Without strong families, we won’t have freedom and limited government for long. By recognizing the perennial nature of the family in its laws, the government limits its jurisdiction over individuals and the family. If the government can’t manage to acknowledge something as basic as the family, it won’t acknowledge individual rights for long. The destruction of families leads to a larger, more intrusive nanny state. The family is a huge check on government power. As Mike Huckabee has said, “The most important form of government is the family.” The better a family functions, the less you need from local, state, and federal governments.”

Excerpt From: James Robison & Jay W. Richards. “Indivisible.”

99. U.S.A. PROPHECY? “Henry and most of the Revolutionary generation believed that a republic needed religion to preserve virtue, honesty, and independence lest it trespass into amoral individualism and a degenerate complacency. An ethically directionless people would eventually succumb to the enticements of a tyrant, Henry feared.”

Excerpt From: Thomas S. Kidd. “Patrick Henry.”

100. LIFE’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS “If this life is all there is, then everything will eventually burn up in the death of the sun and no one will even be around to remember anything that has ever happened. Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavors, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God’s calling, can matter forever. That is what the Christian faith promises. “In the Lord, your labor is not in vain,” writes Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians, Ch. 15.”

Excerpt From: Keller, Timothy. “Every Good Endeavor.”