Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. - Norman Vincent Peale

Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, “I find no pleasure in them.” ECCLESIASTES 12:1 NOVEMBER 9 I was once interviewed by reporters from a hometown of mine — Findlay, Ohio. They asked me the usual questions. Finally, one of them asked, “Dr. Peale, have you any advice for young people about how to work for a good future for themselves, and, beyond that, how they can help make the world a better place for people everywhere?” With that question in mind, I would suggest that the essential first step would be to let God release a fuller measure of our potential. Everyone has potential. God put it in you. That is a tremendous word: potential. Eleven men once got their potential freed and began to use it, and they turned the whole world upside down with their message of Christ. They were so dynamic that wherever they went, they turned things upside down, bringing new life, new understanding, and new joy. Did anyone ever say that about you? How to release our potential — this is the challenge.

The secret is to fill your mind with thoughts of faith, confidence, and security. This will force out or expel all thoughts of doubt, all lack of confidence. To one man who for a long time had been haunted by insecurities and fears I suggested that he read through the Bible underlining in red pencil every statement it contains relative to courage and confidence. He also committed them to memory, in effect cramming his mind full of the healthiest, happiest, most powerful thoughts in the world.

Just a moment ago nature put on one of its most spectacular demonstrations.The widest rainbow I have ever seen stretched from the lake over a high snow-clad mountain to touch down in a deep valley in the Alps. There was about this gigantic rainbow a deep benediction of peace and hope. But as ineffable as nature is in the effect of natural beauty on the mind, it cannot match the peace of God in its healing effect on the human mind.