Dear Friend,

Let me give you some simple thoughts to reflect upon on "All Souls Day."

Early in his career, someone said that Vince Lombardi, the Hall of Fame Football Coach of the Green Bay Packers, knew very little about the game of Football.

Thomas Edison’s teachers gave up on him and said that “He was too stupid to accomplish anything.”

Dear Friend,

Sin demands to have a person be alone. It withdraws the individual from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him or her, and the more deeply the person becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is the isolation. Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed, it poisons the whole being of a person.

Dear Friend,

All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much you blame another, it will not change you. The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when you are looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration.

Dear Friend,

One day, two Irish monks, James and Patrick, were walking through the countryside. They were on their way to another village to help bring in the crops. As they walked, they spied an old woman sitting at the edge of a river. She was upset because there was no bridge, and she could not get across on her own.

This is a different kind of saint's biography-one that reads almost like a novel. In these pages Bernadette lives again. We follow her from birth to death, hearing her speak, watching her interact, experiencing with her the life-changing impact of the eighteen apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.

Dear Friend,

The great inventor Charles Kettering suggested that we must learn to fail intelligently. He said, "Once you've failed analyze the problem and find out why, because each failure is one more step leading up to the cathedral of success. The only time you don't want to fail is the last time you try." Here are three suggestions for turning failure into success: