Insurance means that all of your risks are considered safe. You give a portion of the money you earn for a piece of protective paper. The paper protects you from nothing. It does not drive defensively, it is not flame-retardant, it will not make you quit smoking or lose weight. It will not prevent death.
Risk is everywhere; be fearful.
Or not.
Last Sunday night I read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, which proved to be the smartest decision I made all week, all Summer, all of 2010. If I were the sort of person who passed around MUST-reads, this would be a mustmustmustmust. A 4-must read. (Pic is an affiliate link.)
I fixed it. This is an accomplishment since I only have one hand. Technically I have two hands, but the left one is only useful for tapping keys, waving and head-scratching.
The pick up broke down on the way to register for some classes. Is this a cosmic sign? My wife says yes. She says that difficulty is a sign that you MUST do a thing. This is why we’ve managed to stay married for almost 14 years.
Ate the best sandwich of my entire life! Thanks for graduating, Rem.
For money. Yay, money. FYI: RoP does not love money, but he does need to make a little to buy bacon.
Here is a quote from it:
“…you can’t take things at face value, even things that you might be more comfortable leaving unexamined, as truths. Theologians wrestle with this dilemma all the time. How can you study an idea or a trend or a belief system if you also accept it as a universal, unquestionable fact?”
If you ever do any God-type thinking, you should read it too.
If you’ve ever spent any time in the figurative desert, you may have seen me there over the past three weeks. I am trying not to hate the environment in the desert. A friend of mine just asked me a cacophony of “why” questions. I told him, “I don’t know and neither does anyone else. Chill, bro, and try to smile a little.” That’s the way of the desert. Have a cool beverage. No one knows the answer to the “why’s”. Smile.
One more week of stay-at-home-dadding until I can be p-p-p-productive in the real world.
Coaching a baseball game later in the morning.
Life is beautiful.
I got a gig writing some things for a group of people who need some things written. So far, my work is good, I think. My ego says, “Add the words ‘I think,’ because what if it turns out to be not-so-great.”
Ah, the ego. It will keep you so very safe and completely average.
Every couple of weeks I try to point you to a great online place to kill some time. Occasionally time needs killing. If you’ve got a couple moments running around aimlessly this weekend, I suggest:
The sticky note has never been such a useful tool. Find a tiny piece of viral art at thingsweforget.blogspot.com. Found this site on Twitter thanks to The Daily Letter, who is, as you’ve already discovered, awesome.
And if you are a writer, visit YingleYangle – two dudes who blog about writing. Stephen Maher is a librarian, so you know he is a mad reader, and Paulo Campos is, well – I’m not sure what he is but he writes great stuff for other writers. Check them out for daily prompts and ideas.
I should add one positive way Christians can 
use their social media presence. It seems like a given.
You should definitely do that. Also things like saying “Thank you” to other people is a really important dimension to social media.
Thanks for reading.
I grew up knowing a couple things about faith. On certain Saturday nights my mother and I would drive past the local Catholic church. The building was painted red like a barn with maybe a bit of brown stirred in to darken it a little. This was Minnesota after all, and I suppose even the Catholics knew a good deal on barn paint when they saw it. I’d ask my mother, “Why do they go to church on Saturday?” She told me it was so that they could go to the bar afterward.
The other thing I learned in the race toward heaven was that Lutherans were as unlikely to make it upstairs as the Catholics. When I became a little older, my mom assured me that my great-grandparents were good Lutherans who read the Bible, as was Sharon, her closest friend from work. The Lutheran section in the afterlife included two Gatewoods, two Linds and Sharon – that was probably it.
I have written a lengthy ditty about my year outside of church and my adventures in Lutheranism (if Lutherans are allowed to have adventures). I am breaking it up into about a 300 parts and posting it on RoP. There is no underlying intention. Just a story; kind of a brief internet memoir. Hope you subscribe to receive email updates (or RSS) on my madness.
I began my career of rescuing pagans from their imminent conversion to Catholicism or Lutheranism when I was a very young man.
You never die from the big undoings. You might have a heart attack, but you’ll go out with untreated pneumonia because you thought it was only a cough. Or you’ll get a cut and it will become gangrenous because all your white blood cells are busy tending to you healing heart. And you’ll leave behind a stack of unopened mail, small envelopes, mostly bills for your loved ones to pay. Not the big bills because you’ve got enough foresight to plan for those with your life insurance policy. It will be the the two bras and the fancy corset you bought your wife on the Victoria Secret card at like 47% APR. You never got to see them; now you
