In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude.
It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.
Do we gratefully remember those who helped us succeed?
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1906 – 1945
Pastor/Theologian/Thought-Leader
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German theologian and thought-leader – a man of rare courage and conviction and one of the few German christians who refused to bow down to a modern day Nebuchadnezzar, the demonic Hitler who ruled and ravaged Germany. He was involved in a resistance movement which sought to assassinate Hitler for which he was later executed – just 23 days before the liberation of Germany. Bonhoeffer was an exceptional pianist and his parents thought he might pursue a musical career. He was also athletic and played tennis and chess with ardor, Expected to follow his father into psychiatry, Bonhoeffer surprised and dismayed his parents when he decided by age 14 to become a theologian and later a pastor. When his older brother told him not to waste his life in such a "poor feeble, boring, petty, bourgeois institution as the Church" the 14 year old Dietrich replied "If what you say is true, I shall reform it!"
Changi Chapel 
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