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Labor Contracts

1023) When I was young, my mother would sometimes put a list on the refrigerator of all that we needed to do before we could go out and play. These weren’t laborious but, as kids, we thought they were. When we were “done” in our eyes, my mother would look over the jobs and declare
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Bad Company

1022) As a teacher of middle school kids, a large part of my job is to prepare the kids for the “next level” in life. Yes, that’s academically but often it means things in the subject of “life lessons.” One of these life lessons I try to teach my kids is that they need to
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How Long Do You Have to Pay?

1021) Today’s “minute” poses a question I really need to understand the answer, and I figured, maybe others of you need to understand this, too. The question is: How Long Do You Have to Pay? For all the things you and I have done that were wrong, how long do we need to beat up
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It’s Worth Everything You Put In

1020) Love is a wonderful and tragic thing. On one side of the “coin”, there is joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness and more, but the other side holds pain, sometime excruciating pain–at least in this life. As much as I would love to avoid pain, love and pain coexist on this earth and the pain
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What Works?

1019) There are thoughts I have from time to time that I would hesitate to speak about because of what people may think. One of them is that if God loves everyone, then what makes me important to him? Or If I am suffering over something, does this mean that it doesn’t “count” because there
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Gifts with Your Name on Them

1018) Do you remember Christmases from your childhood? How did your family distribute and open gifts? Did everyone just go right to it, grabbing these packages with their name on them and opening them immediately, or was it more structured? After the gifts were opened, did everyone look at what the others received? Was there
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The Lone Wolf Myth

1017) Here in Maine it is often said that there are only three seasons: winter, summer and mud season. If you live anywhere with snow and ice that accumulate during the winter, when these thaw, the ground becomes mushy and mud covers anything that travels through it. Therefore, my classroom floor is often coated with
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Bickering is Tiresome

1016) Bickering is tiresome. Ask any parent or teacher; it’s my bet that they will agree. Imagine a classroom of middle school students (some of you see this every day) and you will be reminded of how bickering makes life stressful. No one benefits from bickering. It’s like chewing gum and hoping to fill an
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I Came Trembling

1015) Courage is a difficult thing to produce. There was a time in my life that I mistakenly thought courage was something that appeared when difficult things happened. Instead, courage is a choice. It says that despite how I feel; despite the circumstances; despite how others see me, I do what needs to be done.
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We Stand?

1014) Every year my 6th grade classes read a non-fiction account of the Shackleton Expedition in 1914 and even though I have read it more than a dozen times, I’m still in awe that the 28 men who were stranded on ice at the South Pole for two years came out alive. They survived sub-zero
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