Life is what you make it.

By His Grace, I will go forward, step by step, and even if those steps are small, yet, because He is my Father, He will understand, and He will help me to do better in the days to come.

Work and service and effort; love translated into action; passive Christianity turned into active, vibrant effort—

This is what it means to work for God until the last straying one is gathered in.

There are no barriers between those in the physical world and the gifts of the Spirit. 

If you would prepare your heart and mind by self-discipline, by observing simple spiritual laws, by retreating into the Silence of the Spirit, you could not only see the things, which are of God, but demonstrate them in person so that others might be convinced.

Promise yourself that in addition to those deep feelings of sympathy, which go out so readily to those who are in sore distress, you will try and extend that sympathy in regard to the opinions, the attitude of mind of those who are not quite in agreement with you.

Be certain that in God's sight the wish to know Him, the wish to serve Him is all He ever asks from anyone, and if you allow barriers or obstacles or divisions to be reared up between yourself and your fellow beings, in that measure you are denying the Love, which you wish to proclaim.

Other gifts are enumerated but they are all classed as secondary to that greatest gift of all—

Charity.

When Paul said—

Though I have the gift of prophecy, all knowledge, all faith, and have not charity, I am nothing— 

He was referring to love—

That love, which understands; that sympathy without which love is but half itself; that ability to place oneself in the position of others, and—by that wide charity—not to judge but to help them.

Life is what you make it—

This is true in a far greater sense than you can grasp; on the other hand, it is a very dangerous thing to anyone to say who is without that precious protection of sympathy.

Though I have all knowledge and have not charity I am nothing, and when the body is laid aside, this is worked out down to the last degree. 

In the measure that you have understanding and sympathy for others, so is your rate of progress, but if you do not have that charity—that love—then, in a spiritual sense, you are without anything with which to work.

There is no getting away from facts. 

Try to understand the lives and points of view of others—literally, to put yourself mentally in the place of the other—to consider their physical conditions, their burdens and responsibilities—and to say to yourself—

How would I act if my life were the same? 

If that questions is put and answered fairly, then condemnation would be withered down to its roots.

And the greatest of these is love—

That love, which some call charity, but which means just the same to those who have God in their hearts.

Yes; the good Samaritans are few; yet, thank God, they are there to inspire others. 

The good Samaritans have much to do in a very short time, and it is this that I would impress upon you all. 

Never do you know when your hour cometh and you go hence. 

Never can you say—

I will do this tomorrow, for it happens that tomorrow does not come.

—Spirit Abraham Lincoln