I’d like to take advantage of this early opportunity to wish all of you an enjoyable Christmas season and a happy New Year filled with good fortune. Of course I realize this can’t happen for everyone. Some of you are going to die next year, and others will be crippled and maimed in accidents, perhaps even completely paralyzed. Still others will be stricken with diseases that can’t be cured, or will be horribly scarred in fires. And lets not forget the robberies and rapes – there’ll be lots of them. Therefore many of you will not be able to enjoy the happy and fortunate New Year I’m wishing for you. So just try and do the best you can.
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Mark 2:5:
When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, 'Son, your sins are forgiven.'
(NIV)
And when Jesus saw their faith [their confidence in God through Him], He said to the paralyzed man, Son, your sins are forgiven [you] and put away [that is, the penalty is remitted, the sense of guilt removed, and you are made upright and in right standing with God].
(AMP)
When Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy, Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.
(KJV)
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Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.
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I think it is a kind of subject matter that needed exploring ... the identity of the single woman had not caught up with what was happening. Which was that a lot of perfectly attractive, intelligent, nice, normal girls in their 30s had decided not to get married for very good reasons. And they were paralyzed somewhere between the Cosmo girls, you know with the good life and their own flat and car and independence and lots of fun, and haunted by this horrible image of ... the tragic spinster who ends up dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by a dog.
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I have witnessed and tended to calves in rodeos who became paralyzed and whose tracheas were totally or partially severed. Slamming them to the ground has caused rupture of several internal organs leading to a slow and agonizing death.
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John 5:3:
Here a great number of disabled people used to lie – the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.
(NIV)
In these lay a great number of sick folk--some blind, some crippled, and some paralyzed (shriveled up)-- waiting for the bubbling up of the water.
(AMP)
In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water.
(KJV)
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To teach how to live with uncertainty, yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy can do
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If you realize too acutely how valuable time it, you are too paralyzed to do anything.
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The Human Spirit can never be paralyzed. If you are breathing, you can dream.
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