"Aim at Heaven..."

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in': aim at earth and you will get neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at work in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health one of your main, direct objects you start becoming a crank and imagining there is something wrong with you. You are only likely to get health provided you want other things more- food, games, work, fun, open air. In the same way, we shall never save civilisation as long as civilisation is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

There are lies, damned lies, then there are fact checkers!

-commenter Greg Mockeridge on this post

...I sat and meditated on the words that John the Baptist said about the One Whom he baptized; "As He grows greater, I must grow less." Therein was the secret of the Christian messsage. As the ego deflates, divinity takes up the abode. Nothing can be occupied by two objects at one and the same time. To decrease is to be less and less occupied with self. That was the day perhaps more than any other that I learned that humility is not something that is directly cultivated; otherwise one becomes proud of his humility. It is a by-product; the more Christ is in the soul, the less the "I" weighs it down. 

-Fulton Sheen, "Treasure in Clay"