Blog One Another suggests you not take someone with you when you go to church this weekend.  Nice work, Jon.

My homie Chris Swenson (and fellow descendant of Nordic ancestry) needs to get his blogging life together!  We’ll cut him some slack; he’s a newly-wed.  His last post was great.  Hurry up and write another post, Swen.

I stumbled onto this guy, Josh Foreman, and I happen to think his writing is remarkable.  Scroll down and check out his art.

If it rains on Saturday, and you need a way to kill an hour google search “Derek Webb Stockholm Syndrome”

If you’re new to Ream of Paper and in the mood for some short fiction, check out this story.

Spiritual Lessons From a Homeless Cat

Blogging King, Seth Godin says, if you want to drive blog traffic don’t write about your cat (see #11).  This isn’t about my cat per se…

We have a cat.  I should clarify.  We never intended to get a cat.  A kitten chose to live at our house, constantly demanding food from us while morphing into a cat.  I fed her dog food, hoping that she might turn into a canine or just leave altogether.  At first she stayed under the porch, but then there was the night of the thunderstorm when we put her in the garage, which she mistook for a toilet.  After she stuck around for about 2 weeks we hung a name on her, and taught her how to use a litter box.  Before this, I thought the litter box thing was instinctual.

We call her Motor.  Motor is a four-legged life lesson on living spiritually.  This is my second go-round with a spiritual cat.  My other spiritual cat was named Satan.  So this experience is vastly different.  Now, I have no intention of writing a book called Motor and Me, nor selling its rights to a film company for a movie starring Jennifer Aniston.  It’s not that kind of relationship.  But in the past two months, Motor has taught me many things. Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone interested in blogging for any purpose: fame, fortune or just plain old fun should read this manifesto.  In 279 Days to Overnight Success, Chris Guillebeau, blogger at the Art of Nonconformity, lays out a great plan to conquer the blogging world.

You can read my bad blogging tips here.

What is so funny?

Need the perfect euphemism?  Invent one here.

If you loved 27 Dresses, you’ll love the Christian version (of course if you loved 27 Dresses, you are clinically insane).

reamofpaper friday edition: Spiritual Lessons From My Homeless Cat…

It’s probably happened to you.  You were debating the existence of God, and your friend or debate sparring partner pulled out the winning question, “If God is a God of love, how come he killed off so many tribes of non-Israelites in the Old Testament?”  It is kind of hard to answer.  You spout off something about penal substitutionary atonement before the Mosaic covenant, argue for God’s moral law being broken or talk about cherem – shunning someone because of their behavior.  Your friend looks at you funny because your answer was confusing and it also did not satisfy the original question about a God of love.  I think I have a better answer for you; we’ll use the Ammonites as our example.

So the Ammonites needed something.  We’ll choose an arbitrary item, like: new shoes.  Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks for stopping by reamofpaper.com.  For the past few weeks we’ve been keeping a Tuesday/Friday publishing schedule with a couple of extra or early posts.  This week we will not be publishing a regular Friday article/story due to my work schedule.  Everyone needs to get paid sometime!

Also over the past couple of weeks we’ve begun to make a shift in the content of reamofpaper.  Our new heading belies the changes we are making: “a subversive reminder that life is spiritual.”  If you are a Read the rest of this entry »

I am toying with the idea of producing a Ream of Paper ebook tentatively titled, 26 Days of Normal Grace (spiritual thoughts for the rest of us).  The idea is to take a slice of normal, everyday life and turn it into a moment of grace and, well, something like beauty.  Here is one entry.  Let me know your thoughts…

I’m sitting beside a box full of envelopes that all contain pieces of paper with a “total amount due” on the bottom of the page.  I am hopeful that you cannot relate, but perhaps you have a box like this somewhere within your personal space too.  Occasionally it seems I am the culmination of all the things I must do or pay.  Read the rest of this entry »

I heard the greatest modern story the other day.  It was so packed with irony and morals, if O. Henry had read it, he’d have thrown up his hands and retired on the spot.  It goes like this…

There was young woman named Carrie Prejean who, as Miss California, competed for Miss USA, part of the Miss Universe dynasty.  Now please don’t confuse this with Miss America, which continues to have some merit.  Miss Universe, run by the ever-classy Donald Trump, is the meat-market variety pageant. juicy details here!