Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring. Let another praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips.
-- Proverbs 27:1-2 (ESV)
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening:
Boasting about the future is the child of pride. The man who brags of what he will do is already undone. God holds the morrow in His hand, and we may not presume to claim it as our own.
John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew:
Nothing makes a man so admirable as when he is found occupied in doing those things which God requires of him. For if a soldier in the presence of his king performs his duty with exactness, much more should we, standing before the King of Heaven, show ourselves approved in every work.
Augustine, Confessions, Book X:
Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was without, and there I sought you. And, deformed as I was, I ran after those beautiful things which you have made. You were with me, and I was not with you. Those things kept me far from you, which, unless they were in you, would not exist.
The man who chases tomorrow's reputation ignores the God who stands beside him today. Augustine knew this -- he sought everywhere except where God already was. Every boast about what we will become is a refusal to attend to what we are now.
Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book I, Chapter 1:
He who does not die to self before his bodily death shall find no peace, either in life or in death. Learn to endure the hardness of your own heart before you presume to soften the world around you.
The disciplined life begins with the refusal to comfort yourself. Not self-punishment -- self-honesty. The man who cannot sit in the truth of his own weakness will build everything on the sand of his own estimation.
What would you do today if you knew your boasting about tomorrow was a lie you told yourself to avoid the work at hand?
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II.5:
Begin each day by telling yourself: today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness -- all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother; therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading.
St. Clair, MI: -- Morning mist clearing to sunny skies. High 84°F, low 56°F. Winds W 4-6 mph. Humidity dropping from 94% at dawn to 42% by midday. UV index 6. Sunrise 6:14 AM, sunset 8:59 PM.