difficulty

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.

Bernard Loomer's father was a sea captain. He was acquainted with his small place in an uncontrollable nature. In a talk in 1974 Loomer described his father's instructions about the uses of a baseball glove. The father had just overheard his son's sandlot complaints about the thinness of a glove inherited from his older brothers. When his father asked him what a baseball glove was for, young Loomer had said that it was to protect the hand. In the words of Bernard Loomer in his sixties, his father replied: Son, I never have played baseball, but it seems to me you ought to be able to catch the ball bare-handed. The way I look at it, you use a glove not to protect your hand, but to give you a bigger hand to help catch balls that are more difficult to reach. I assume that in this as in all walks of life there are tricks to the trade. I suggest you learn how to catch with that glove for two reasons. First, because you are not going to get another one, and second, because you don't need protection from life. You need a glove to give you a bigger hand to catch baseballs you might otherwise miss. As the decade of the 1970s progressed, Loomer reflected increasingly on the fact that what you might otherwise miss [in theology] was irrational, even evil, but [that it] must be caught anyway. Loomer grew increasingly dissatisfied with those who seemed to restrict their reach-even Whitehead was faulted. And increasingly it appeared that Christian theology was the theology Loomer had-that he was not going to get another one-and so, although it was thin in places, he attempted to use the one theology he had, to catch all he could. [This] suggests the meaning of Loomer's special term, "size." Size signifies "the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity."

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.

The fascination of what's difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart.

Opportunity is often difficult to recognize; we usually expect it to beckon us with beepers and billboards.

Much of the present difficulty in industrial relations arises from the fact that too many employers as well as too many legislators take the Labor Leader more seriously than he deserves to be taken, while taking the ordinary, everyday, middle-of-the-road wage-earner less seriously than he deserves to be taken.

Our lives improve only when we take chances - and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves

The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was.