Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.
–Thomas Merton, in a letter to Jim Forest dated February 21, 1966, reproduced in The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters by Thomas Merton (W. Shannon ed. 1993).
I spent grades 5-12 residing in the North End of Boise. Admittedly, that formed a bit of snobbery in me. It is a hippie-ish snobbery, I am sure there is a better term, but it is snobbery none-the-less. I always thought of Nampa as the ghetto. Funny, now, we make a life here. This Nampa sunrise reminds me of the error I make in judging. That the judgments we make eventually come back to condemn us and what a loving God that, "He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."...and the snobs.
