Stories and other stuff

It's been an interesting week.  I prayed for answers.  Answers started coming. It's been a step-by-step process though.  Get one thing taken care of.  Then the next thing comes into view.  Take care of that.  Then the next thing.  A for instance would be how the whole retirement thing played out.  Get the deposit paid.  Get the life insurance paid.  After that, it was the phone call to the retirement lady and waiting three days for the appointment to be scheduled.  Then came a request for a bunch of documents I needed to print out.  And then, the where we're headed answer came.  I think.  I'm waiting on seeing HOW that's gonna come to pass.  I think it's a real thing, I think it's Oregon, and I'm thinking it got confirmed for me in a lot of strange ways.  But it's an answer to a question I prayed about.  Which leads to the next thing, which is fixing what got broken in the basement.  I'll be ...

I asked God a question yesterday about my retirement.  I'm really torn about which day to retire.  My closest friend told me June 30.  And I wonder if I'm a little afraid of that day.  It'll be here before you know it.  January is already just about gone and I have to decide soon because I have to start the paperwork.  It seems like things have been falling into place lately.  My military deposit issue (you have to buy back your active duty time if you were on Leave Without Pay or it affects your credited time for retirement) is corrected.  I have a life insurance issue I need to fix, too, and I got an e-mail about it earlier in the week.  But the day has been kinda up in the air because July 31 falls on a Friday, and the last day of a pay period.  It's only four more weeks.  I could do that standing on my forehead.  June 30 is a Tuesday and I won't get paid for the 4th of July and my last check won't be a full paycheck. So...

Often times in my walk, I have cried out to God, begged God, tried, I think at some point to bargain with God, and foolishly, once flat told God to either bless me or kill me.  Yeah, on a particularly bad day, in the parking lot of Harbor Freight, I melted town to that point. And, God didn't kill me.  He could have.  He, after all, holds each breath I take in His hands.  I'm thankful that He a:  Didn't, and b:  quickly led me to repentance for saying that.  I think God understands our pain, even in that, it was more a desperate cry for help. For the longest time a few years ago, every answer God gave me to a prayer was no.  In fact, there were a lot of times that the exact opposite of what I asked for happened.  It wouldn't be until sometime late last year, I would look back at those times and understand that what I wanted God to do was to keep me from having to go through what I went through, and He said no.  I got to go through t...

I just got back from a book signing and looking at some paintings a young woman had done.  The author and artist are the same person and I'm blessed to know her through the church we worship at.  She's a talented person.  We had a two minute conversation about writing last Sunday and I told her I'd stop by the coffee shop today to pick up her book today, so at least one person from our church supported her.  I hope she sells all her books and a few of her paintings.  I'm excited to read her book. Being an artist and writer is her gig.  She's talented and creative.  She's using the gifts God gave her to make other people happy.  I think that's great!  Many of you know that I like to write, but my style of writing isn't really suited for a novel.  I'm more of a storyteller or commentator.  I'm much more adept at telling a story or commenting on the world around us than I am at novel writing.  Today.  It doesn't mean th...

Among the many lessons I've learned over the last decade (wow, it's been ten years!), one of them was that these four little words had the biggest impact on the planet earth. They are "Thy will be done."  They were spoken by Jesus in the garden.  He asked for another way, but in the end, He told the Father, not His will, but God's will be done.  I've had to learn that God's plan is best and His way is perfect.  I've heard that three different times in the last two days, from three different places. I can't help if something is up. I've had a chance to reflect this last week or so on where I was ten years ago, and some of the things I learned.  I wrote about part of that lesson on Friday.  It's that we can make choices but we can't choose the consequences of those choices.  I spoke about choices t on Saturday evening at the Rescue Mission.  I got an e-mail today that reminded me that sin creates ripples like when you throw a rock i...

One of the hardest lessons I have ever learned is that you can choose your actions.  You cannot choose the consequences of those actions. I'm not gonna get political.  But in the mess of the week, an airliner most likely got shot down as an unintended consequence of what happened.  That will touch potentially thousands of people, who lost friends, family, and coworkers.  It puts Iran in a place where we've been with them, when we shot down one of their airliners.  Ukraine has had one shot down over their country, and now one of their own airliners over someone else's.  And the two biggest players in the mess that is our politics have both paid a price because of something we did. I'm not going to debate the merits of this.  I'll shed no tear over this man.  The same God that made me, made him.  He has to answer to that God for his actions.  He was a bad man that did bad things and had the blood of Americans on his hands.  But ...

One of the tests I remember taking in school was on reading comprehension.  Sadly, I wonder how many people actually comprehend what they read.  I mention this because of a couple of things that happened recently on Facebook.  I commented on a post someone shared and one of the first things I said was that elections are used to remove immoral people, not impeachment proceedings.  I had two different people say the very same thing as a rebuttal to my comments which implied that the impeachment was warranted, in my opinion, at least from the Obstruction of Congress point of view, but that's a different story. The premise of the original post was that our president is an immoral man, but being immoral doesn't constitute a reason for removal from office.  I agree with that premise.  I disagreed with the idea that his actions don't warrant impeachment, which is a fair argument to have.  But when people read my comments, they read them through the prism of...

When I was a teenager, Jimmy Carter was president.  Some people stormed our embassy in Tehran, Iran and took a bunch of Americans hostage.  There was a disastrous attempt to mount a rescue mission, where things went horribly wrong in the desert.  What finally brought about a resolution to the situation was an election. Ronald Reagan was president, and on the campaign trail he made it abundantly clear what was going to happen if the hostages were not released.  As he took office, the hostages were on their way to the Army hospital in West Germany.  The Iranians took Mr. Reagan seriously. When all that happened, one of the things that was done was that Iranian assets in the United States were frozen.  That included large sums of money on deposit at financial institutions inside our country.  A lot of people don't seem to remember that, and it's important that we do. Since then, a lot of things have changed in the world.  Iran became powerful....

I'm getting bad at writing on the blog.  I attribute it to a different habit; keeping a journal.  The blog used to kind of be my online journal.  Lately though, my life has been pretty much uneventful so there hasn't been much point in writing it on the blog. I hope that 2020 will change that. Anyway... I was thinking over the new year about how God has so changed my life.  It was 10 years ago that the avalanche of me leaving the Air Guard and a pretty great job for the unknown disaster I was walking into.  It's hard to believe that was ten years ago because the time has flown by.  It was about ten years ago, I started fooling around with writing the blog, and in the fall of 2010 I got serious about changing the what I was writing about.  I think this is like the third iteration of the blog itself, and I'm toying with changing the name of it once again.  You never know. A lot has happened over the last ten years.  And now that I'm on ...