May 21, 2007

[Rev. Doc]

Patience To Endure

"The end of a matter is better than its beginning, and patience is better than pride."
Ecclesiastes 7:8

Thomas Cooper was born in Oxford, England in 1517. After receiving his degree from Oxford University, he practiced as a physician. In 1548, he began his literary career when he edited a Latin dictionary.
In 1549, Cooper began working on a comprehensive thesaurus. During the next eight years, he systematically chronicled 33,000 entries. Now Cooper had a troublesome wife who became jealous of his work. One day in 1557, she went into Thomas' study and burned all of his notes on the pretense that he would kill himself with study.

Arriving home soon afterward, Thomas asked who had caused this destruction. His wife boldly replied that she had burned his notes. "Oh Dinah, Dinah, thou hast given me a world of trouble" sighed Thomas. He then sat down and for the next eight years he recreated the notes destroyed by his wife.

In 1565 appeared the first edition of his greatest work, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae, and this was followed by three other editions. Queen Elizabeth was greatly pleased with the Thesaurus, generally known as Cooper's Dictionary and in 1571 she made him the bishop of Lincoln.

The setbacks in life are many. But God will give you the patience to continue on.

Prayer: Ask God to help you have great patience with all things and all people.

"God's patience is infinite. Men, like small kettles, boil quickly with wrath at the least wrong. Not so God. If God were as wrathful, the world would have been a heap of ruins long ago."
~Sadhu Sundar Singh