The world needs writers. Writing is the heart of the matter. It is the root from which all other art springs. Writing is the mythic at its most basic form. To the literate, all other art needs interpretation, but writing–good writing–springs forth from the mind needing only a cupped hand to take in all of its glories. And it is the story that is at the heart of writing. Was Noah a writer? No. But his story is one of the most basic myths on which our culture is founded.

Just to make sure we're all on the same page, please indulge me in a brief digression on the nature of myth. It is common to think of myth as falsehood. We see shows like "Myth Busters" or read books like John Stossel's "Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity" and immediately get out our mental shovels and prepare to clear the walks whenever the word "myth" comes up. But "myth" doesn't necessarily mean "lie". The word comes from the Greek mythos and means "speech, thought, or story". There are several definitions of the word, but for our purposes the best way to think of myth is as a sort of cultural roadmap, a thing by which we chart the lay of our cultural landscape. When we hear the story of Noah, for example, we know (at least, those of us who pay attention know) that there is a point beyond which man should not go. That there is such a thing as wickedness, and that it can get so bad that God will have no real choice but to purge it from the world to preserve the rest of His creation.

So, the question now is this: Who tells our myths? Is it the writer of science fiction, with his story of man conquering the universe and becoming a deity? Is it the leftist intellectual telling of endless navel-gazing, nihilism, and how there is no hope save in creating an all-powerful state that intrudes into every nook and cranny of our lives to save us from, in part, an uncaring, pointless universe but mostly from our own selfish, superstitious, ignorant selves by their benevolent rule? Is it the romance writer, who tells stories of lust, desire, and unrealistic expectations?

I would say that WE should be the ones who tell the myths. We are, after all, well-suited to the task. Is not our Father the most creative of beings? And with a little instruction and discipline from Him, and a lot of humility on our parts, we could become great in this most humble of fields. We also have the myths, the cultural roadmaps that happen to be based on facts.

Overall, writing is not a career that pays well. There are far more writers than publishers, and publishers get many more manuscripts over the transom than they can possibly publish. Of those published, few make much money for the writer. The Stephen Kings and Michael Chabons of the world are the exception, not the rule. But when we discourage our sons from writing in favor of more lucrative careers or when we as men do not write, we cede our role in leading not just our families, but our culture. We surrender the ability to create the defining mythology of our culture, and we give it over to the adversary. Ever wonder why the Western, with its emphasis on rugged individualism, is, as a genre, in decline?

But writing is not the mere regurgitation of facts. It is the unique regurgitation of facts. By this, I mean that it is the telling, and not the idea, that makes the story. The story of Cain and Abel resonates with us, and has been told countless times in countless ways. We all understand that with God, those who do right are accepted, and those who don't are rejected, and that envy often overcomes those thus rejected. Whenever there's a story about conflict between brothers that involves someone getting hurt, the basic mythic elements of the story are brought to the fore. Sometimes it ends with full reconciliation, but more often the conflict remains fundamentally irreconcilable. It is this re-forging, recasting, and reworking of the basic myths, as well as our recognition that we invent nothing new under the sun, that marks us as the true masters of our craft. And the wisdom to see this comes only from the passage of time. This is why late bloomers are so important: Wisdom often comes, if it comes at all, with the passage of time, and all of the schools of the world cannot teach it.

Write. Write well.

He giggled, rubbed his hands together, picked up his pencil and started writing something. Then he turned to me and asked, "How do you spell dirtbag?"

I leaned over and whispered  in his ear, "D-I-R-T-B-A-G", as he slowly formed the letters with his four-year-old hand. Then he asked me to pass the paper to Joe. I read it before passing it on, and showed it to Paige. How can anyone laugh so hard and not make a sound? My sons trade insults. Some sort of rite of passage, I guess. (They do other things too, that we won't mention here.) A teacher in a class I once took on the philosophy of religion told me that he thought a child's first gods were his parents. I don't think he meant that children engaged in some form of idolatry when relating to their parents. Rather, he meant that to a child, a parent looms larger and more persistently in his vision than any more abstracted being ever could. This is why children obeying their parents is so important in scripture: The parent foreshadows God to the child. But the complement is also true: The relationship the child has with the parent foreshadows how the child worships. This is where Paul's non-exasperation clause comes in: If a parent actively drives a child away, then that child probably won't want to worship God.

I don't want to be in that place. That's one reason I want to encourage my sons to laugh, and to compete to make the wife and me laugh. I want them to see their relationship with God as a thing of joy.

Religion, in the truest sense of the word, means duty. The word originates in Latin and is a combination of re–again, and ligare–to bind or tie. So we are bound again and again in a web of duties to God and country, to spouse and children, to family and friends. So, is all of that religious in nature? In some ways, yes. But we wouldn't call our relationship with our country or children religion… would we? To our minds, religion is only that which involves God. Yet we do other things in a religious manner. Perhaps this is why James said that "True religion before God the Father is this: Take care of the widows and orphans in their distress". It's because our duty to God encompasses all of our other duties, and we are to perform those duties as if we were doing them unto God. Or perhaps it is because James had a disparaging view of religion, given that the people to whom he was writing used religious rituals to the exclusion of actually doing what God wanted. The case could be made that the whole book is about religion versus something else. But what is that something else?

Worship, in its etymological sense, comes from the Old English weorthscipe, composed of two words, woerth–worth or value and scipe–to ship or shape. Literally, it means to shape to have value. I like that. I like the idea that I go to church on Sunday morning not to perform the rituals, but that observance of the rituals will shape me to have value to God. Praising God in song strengthens my emotional connection to Him, and praying as part of a community brings me closer to my fellow congregants and instructs me (in a way far deeper than mere intellect) that we are all connected in a common purpose. Communion reminds me of the mercy and love required to do something for me that I could never do for myself, even when I was still enmeshed in sin. Listening to preaching, perhaps the most direct and obvious form of instruction, unites us in a common understanding of God and His purpose. But would it not follow that to be shaped to have value to God is not something that stops? Would it not follow that every act I do shapes me to have value to God, and that everything I do which doesn't shape me to have value to God is, in some sense, wrong? "Do everything as if doing it unto the Lord."

Making men of our sons is an act of worship. So, how do you do that? I don't know. Or rather, I don't know all of the answers. But I would think that one of the key ways is by doing what God did through Jesus–modeling the behavior of God. In letters to Timothy and Titus, Paul instructs these young preachers on how to select leaders for the local churches. In 1 Timothy 3:1-13 he writes:

Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer, he desires a noble task. Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?) He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap.

Deacons, likewise, are to be men worthy of respect, sincere, not indulging in much wine, and not pursuing dishonest gain. They must keep hold of the deep truths of the faith with a clear conscience. They must first be tested; and then if there is nothing against them, let them serve as deacons.

In the same way, their wives are to be women worthy of respect, not malicious talkers but temperate and trustworthy in everything.

A deacon must be the husband of but one wife and must manage his children and his household well. Those who have served well gain an excellent standing and great assurance in their faith in Christ Jesus.

And in Titus 1:5-9 he writes:

The reason I left you in Crete was that you might straighten out what was left unfinished and appoint elders in every town, as I directed you. An elder must be blameless, the husband of but one wife, a man whose children believe and are not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient. Since an overseer is entrusted with God's work, he must be blameless—not overbearing, not quick-tempered, not given to drunkenness, not violent, not pursuing dishonest gain. Rather he must be hospitable, one who loves what is good, who is self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined. He must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that he can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it.

To us, this reads like a list of qualifications, something taken out of an instruction manual or a cookbook. More often than not, cookbooks and instruction manuals are read uncritically. By this, I mean that that if the recipe calls for a stick of butter, we don't ask "What is the real purpose of the stick of butter?" or "What isn't being said when we add a stick of butter?" Yet in scripture there is often an unstated back story. When Mark wrote about Jesus being born of a virgin, his readers understood the prophecy in Isaiah, and they understood also that the translators of the Septuagint had rendered the Hebrew word that literally meant 'a young, unwed woman' as virgin. In Hellenized culture, there were many young, unwed women who were not virgins, but in the Hebrew culture of Isaiah's time, a young, unwed woman who was not a virgin was stoned to death. So too, when Paul instructs Timothy and Titus to appoint elders, there is a back story: They were to investigate the lives of the men they were selecting. And what would they find when they investigated? Love.

Love is the reason God sent Jesus to us, love is the reason Jesus died on the cross, and love is what we emulate in modeling our lives after Jesus. Love is also what Timothy and Titus were to find when they investigated candidates for leadership positions in the church with the actions of their families, their reputations in the community, and their desire to serve the Lord and the church as the seal of that love. And we, as fathers, emulate love to our sons, a love which they internalize and live out. To raise our sons to be loving men is to worship God. It is to shape both them and us to have value to God. Yet love alone, or rather love in the abstract—also known as sentimentality–is not enough. Tolstoy expounded on this when he described Russian ladies, sitting in the theatre weeping at the plight of the heroine on stage, while their coachmen shivered in the cold outside because they had no coats. Faith and love without works are dead.

Woe unto us if we raise sons who are dead inside. So how do we strengthen love? How do we raise up men who, at the core of their beings, are men after God's own heart? I suggest competition.

Some might say competition and love are opposites. I do, with all grace and humility, submit that this is a lie straight from the pit. That in fact, God created competition because it pleases Him, and the consequences of this reverberate through creation. Wherever there's life in our world, that life competes. Animals compete for mates, plants compete for sunlight, and everything competes for food. All of this strengthens the competing creatures. Even scripture says that iron sharpens iron. Competition is good. It is when our sin enters the picture that this good thing is turned to conflict and enmity. In Genesis 3, after God had received confessions from the man and the woman, He described to them what would happen because of what they had done. What we call the "curse" reads more like a set of self-inflicted consequences, rather than something done to us externally by God. The nature of those consequences involves conflict, between men and women and between parents and children.

If competition is good, then for what do we raise our children to compete? The approval of God. As God said to Cain: "If you do what is right will you not be accepted?" God's criterion for excellence is not the defeat of rivals, but His pleasure. Our sons compete to please God, and in doing so become better, strive for more, and achieve excellence. This then is our truest duty, our true religion: To compete to please God by loving Him and His creation more and better.

Let us raise men.

Then we had kids, and we discovered that (to the shock and amazement of no one I know), parenting IS daunting—but not in the way we thought. Handing our child over to the care of some stranger, however crisp and professional she might seem, loomed as a terrifying prospect. As it turned out, we were right to be alarmed. Our older son’s experience in a local Montessori kindergarten was abysmal. The teachers were high-handed, snooty, unhelpful, uncaring, unfriendly not only to us but to him, and daily left him tearfully begging not to be sent back there. Jon and I discussed it, and decided not to send him back. Having your child psychologically bullied by people you were paying–and paying well—to teach and protect him forces you to rethink your own willingness and ability to teach him yourself. Suddenly, I was a homeschooling parent.

I’d heard all the objections to homeschooling—that those kids are woefully ill-equipped to deal with social interaction, that they’re isolated, that they’re weird, blinkered religious freaks-in-training, that they’re being raised by fearful Klansman parents who consider every other ethnic or religious group to be marked by God. All I knew was that my kids needed to be taught, and that nobody else seemed up to the task. So, we were off.

The first thing I did was order books about homeschooling, about the legal and academic requirements, about the various approaches, the milestones to reach each year and the pitfalls common to most homeschooling households. Then, I forked over almost $400 on a packaged curriculum, which I figured was the safest bet for a first-time home educator. Every day, we sat down at the dining room table after breakfast, pencils and workbooks in hand, and pored over phonics and arithmetic, Bible and elementary biology, rudimentary American history and manuscript writing. This was in January of 2008; by the beginning of April, my son was reading, at the age of five. Whatever mistakes we were making, we had to be doing something right.

Since then, we’ve joined many, many homeschooling support groups, including the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), Home Education Information Resource (HEIR), Georgia Home Education Association (GHEA), and South West Georgia Homeschool Association (SWGHA). I’ve gone from being utterly bewildered by state requirements, to being able to “catch” the county school system in its blatant attempts to overstep their authority. My son has happily progressed to the second grade, reading well above his grade level, learning guitar, and more than meeting the milestones I’ve compiled from multiple sources. Our second son is now in K-4 and beginning to read and do math. They’re learning the fundamentals of Mandarin, and have been to raucous sessions of homeschool co-op classes. In general, we’re extremely proud of their progress, although (as is the case with any kid) there’s always room for improvement.

The threadbare stereotypes, however, are still being trotted out—not at our house, but in the media and by parents of government-schooled children, and by teachers in government schools. “Don’t they miss out on being around other kids? You know, socialization?” Well, that sort of depends on what you mean by “socialization”. If you’re referring to play, to interaction with other children, then no. My boys, like most other homeschooled kids, have almost too much social interaction. If you’re referring to exposure to gangs, to sexually predatory teachers, to drugs, to peer pressure to dress a certain way, talk a certain way, watch the same shows, play the same gaming systems, etc., then no. They’re not “missing out”. They’re also not “missing out” on being bullied, or on learning to be bullies. Obviously, not every government school out there resembles a demilitarized zone, but enough of our local schools are in the “failing” category that we feel justified in doing whatever is necessary to avoid them. (Are all teachers sex offenders? Obviously not, and nobody is claiming that they are. This is in vivid contrast to some critics of home education, who assert—with straight faces—that homeschooling exists as a “cover for abuse”, regardless of a bizarre lack of any evidence for that claim.)

Another myth I keep running into is that home-educated children have a philosophically and scientifically narrow education. That may well be true in some cases; I cannot speak for all homeschooling households. I can, however, state that narrowness of perspective is increasingly becoming an issue in government schools. The vaunted “tolerance” we conservatives are always urged to show isn’t forthcoming from the other side, which (glaring irony aside) is worrying. I’m teaching my sons that not everyone believes what we believe, that a and b and c and d are some views held by other people and other groups, that our reasons for believing as we do are not based on blind assumption but on solid ground, but that they will eventually have to make their own decisions on what to believe and why. From what I’ve read and heard, that’s about as open-minded as education gets these days.

“Isn’t homeschooling kind of an elitist, exclusionary thing?” Erm…no. No, it isn’t. A majority of homeschooling households are single-income families who have elected to make some sacrifices so that one parent, usually (but not always) the mom, can be home to work with her children. “Elitist” and “single-income” don’t generally go together. While most home educators have chosen this path for spiritual or religious reasons, a growing number of homeschooling parents are simply dissatisfied, even disgusted, with the public schools and their failure, despite the tons of money thrown at them, to perform. “But…but…what about DIVERSITY?” opponents sputter. Well, what about it? Which approach would you expect to contribute more to diversity: a vast bureaucracy that moves at glacial speed, whose performance can be statistically shown to worsen over time, or that of individual households whose experiences and personalities are as diverse as anyone could hope for? Or isn’t that the “right” kind of diversity? (Apparently, the only “wrong” sort of diversity is ideological diversity. Go figure.)

I also hear that the failure of the public schools is the fault of “uninvolved” parents—even that we homeschoolers have caused this fiasco somehow, by not lashing our own offspring to the masts of the sinking ship. As someone recently said, you’d think they’d be thanking us. Our property taxes still pay (and pay and pay and PAY) for these shambling, bloated monopolies, but our kids aren’t contributing to the crowding of their classrooms. If the goal really were to educate and to serve the best interests of American children, wouldn’t any method that works be lauded, not sneered at? How much time does the average public-school teacher even get to devote to academics, anyway, when you consider that part of every class period has to be reserved for taking attendance, making announcements, and dealing with disciplinary issues? Almost every parent of a public-schooled kid I know attests that his or her children spend 2 to 4 hours of every evening doing homework, studying, working on projects, etc., often with the involvement of the parent or parents. These people might as well go ahead and homeschool; they’re already doing the work and putting in the time, not to mention the fact that homeschooling rarely, if ever, requires kids to trot around the neighborhood selling wrapping paper or cookies to raise funds.

As for misconceptions and stereotypes, it doesn’t help when supposedly-objective media outlets cherry-pick stories to portray homeschoolers as lazy, slacker hippies who leave their children’s education to chance, trusting butterflies and pasture naps to stand in for rigorous academics. “Unschooling”, while not endorsed by HSLDA, can actually be a useful method for some families, but it’s usually dragged out as an example of educational neglect. I wouldn’t unschool, but that’s a personal preference; it doesn’t mean that nobody should. One thing unschooling has in its favor: The belief that learning is not a compartmentalized experience that ceases when the student leaves the building, or shuts down at 3 p.m.

When the homeschooling movement first got to its feet in the 1970s, home-educated kids numbered only in the thousands. Now, homeschoolers account for about 2 to 3 percent of all American school-age children, and the numbers are growing every year. Homeschooling is as cheap or as expensive as you want to make it; it’s self-paced, with a flexibility of schedule and approach built in. If your daughter breezes through her multiplication tables but needs to slow down and work harder to master long division, you have that luxury. There are not 19 or 22 other kids to worry about. If your son is a visual or kinetic learner who gets more out of kitchen-counter science labs than he ever would from a textbook, you can do that. If you have the chance to travel to the Grand Canyon in October or March, you can—and you can turn the excursion into the field trip of a lifetime. If you don’t like the entirety of a packaged curriculum, you can ditch part of it or trade or sell it and cobble together your own. You can make your own worksheets. You can write arithmetic problems in the sandbox with a stick, if you like. Your children can learn to play and get along with kids not only of their own ages, but years older and younger. You can spend hundreds, even thousands, of dollars each year on software, books, trips and supplies, or you can rely on free downloads and library trips and your own ingenuity. One thing you cannot pay someone to do, however, is love your child enough to care about his or her success, not only in school but in life. Not the way you love them.

Does homeschooling have its downsides? Definitely. There’s none of that “Thank goodness school starts in a few weeks” relief, no time off. Even when you’re taking a break from actual schooling, you’re still planning and inventorying and wondering how well you’re really doing. In short, it can be somewhat stressful. However, public-school parents who think they’re handing over the sobering responsibility for educating their kids to teachers should think again; no matter what method you choose, the buck stops with you. Homeschoolers merely cut out the middleman. And while public schools are allowed plenty of slack for not meeting their goals, homeschoolers walk a fairly fine line. Never mind that the local government schools aren’t meeting state standards—you’d better be meeting them.

Fortunately, it’s not that difficult. Home-educated children, even those in households where neither parent has more than a high-school diploma, outscore their public-educated peers, on average, by 37 points. The attainment of a college degree by either parent has little or no statistical impact on the student’s achievement. Homeschoolers represent a disproportionately large percentage of contestants and winners in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee—this, in a country constantly waging a battle for literacy. Homeschooled kids grow up to be considerably more civically active than their government-educated peers, and less likely to end up in jail or on the welfare rolls.

Not everybody CAN homeschool, of course. Temperament, or marital status, or job requirements can put the kibosh on this method, even if parents and kids would otherwise be willing. Some kids actually might do better if educated in a private or public school, although I have a hard time imagining such a scenario. The difference is that while we honestly prefer to homeschool, we acknowledge that it’s not for everyone, and we’re not about to insist that other families be denied the right to educational choice. We respect the right of other parents to decide for their families, and we expect—no, we DEMAND—that we receive that same right. It shouldn’t even be an issue.

And yet, it is. Per ParentalRights.org:

Several articles and a brand new book written by 20 American law professors urge the banning of all private and home schools in the U.S. in order to protect children from religious indoctrination by their parents. "Perhaps the more appropriate suggestion for our current educational dilemma is that public education should be mandatory and universal…." (Martha Albertson Fineman, What Is Right for Children?, page 237) “If the core principle in a parent's belief system is that there is only one immutable truth…many educational topics will be off limits. Such 'private truths' have no place in the public arena, including the public schools.” (Catherine J. Ross, “Fundamentalist Challenges to Core Democratic Values: Exit and Homeschooling”, page 8)

So much for diversity. We’re fit to breed, but not to raise our kids, and especially not to “indoctrinate” them. That job, it seems, should be left to the government schools, a monopoly that can’t manage to teach our kids to read, or to understand their own history.

Hey, at least we’ll be allowed to pay for it. I feel so much better, knowing it’s all for the children.

For further information:

ParentalRights.org

Statistics Homeschooling Foes Don't Want You to Know

Consider These Home School Statistics

Homeschool 101: What are the statistics?

Academic Statistics on Homeschooling

Home-schooling: Rising statistics

I wanted a suckerfish menu that I could edit from the backend instead of having to go through and code everything up by hand. BIG mistake.

Though I should have known better–anytime someone offers you something for free and advertises for paid support on the same page you should know you're in trouble.

I have a really active internal dialogue. Which means I think a lot about things but those things don't always get expressed verbally. I mean, you already know it, right? So why go to all the trouble to say it? (And why not write a post full of questions? I mean, we have more questions than answers as it is, right?) It really saves a lot of time if you just start barking orders and screw the explanation. In my case it was "read this book or the world will explode!" "Schnell! Schnell!" And then when the wife responds in a perfectly reasonable way I shut down because "she just doesn't get it anyway" and sulk off.

But, eventually, we start talking and I explain the back story (having by now realized that I had neglected that part of my imperial decree) and we start seeing eye to eye. In fact, we saw that we had so much in common that she realized I was right. And just as I was taking my victory lap around the bed, a random leg stuck out and tripped me.

Life is so unfair.

Tonight we went to Dairy Queen. My oldest has been talking about a surprise party he wants to throw for Mommy. (It's 'my mom' when he meets a cute chick but for family purposes it's 'Mommy'. He's only seven! Sorry about the gushing.) They kept on yelling about the surprise all over the house so it was kind of hard to pretend when it was that obvious. But, being a parent, she managed. We were thinking he really just wanted a trip to Dairy Queen. It's amazing how important a little ice cream is to a kid. Not that I got this big eating salads, mind you, but ice cream is nice, not NICE. If you know what I mean.

In other news:  So tired. Finished the child theme. Hope you like it. Oh, sure, it's nice. But I imagine I'll be moving some furniture, putting a little paint on the walls, patching a couple of leaks in the roof, but for now… it's home. She's torn up plenty, but she'll fly true.

It really is wonderful to be the daddy.

Turns out the best thing to do is find a theme you like and use a child theme to modify it. In fact, it's so easy I've been working on a new theme this weekend and with a few more tweaks, it should be ready to go.

This is because a child theme can be as simple as a theme folder with a style.css file inside. Then you load the parent theme(the one you're modifying with the child theme), the child theme, activate the child theme in the admin backend, and presto!: You've created a customized wordpress theme.

If you're confused, don't worry. It really is easy to pick up once you start looking at wordpress theme development this way and it's also easy to pick up just enough css to do just what you want and not have to learn the whole language.

Man, I'm still geeking out!

Deo gratias!

Ever wonder where your hard earned time goes during the course of a day? Well, part of it goes to support blogs like this one. Think of it as a little vacation for your mind or as cotton candy for the brain. The kind you don't throw up on the roller coaster.

Dei Gratia!

Isn't she beautiful? How could anyone resist such unabashed joy? It's like her super power would be verbose joy beams shooting out of her mouth making the villains too happy to fight and then… Well, it's too horrible to mention but suffice to say a wood chipper is involved. Coupled with the hyperbole ray she would be unstoppable. Call her Talkatron. That's my baby!

And in a non related note I have found that I have 1,000 emails in my gmail account and 300 friends on facebook. Serendipity!

God be with you!

The thing should be easy to fix, it's only three lights and two switches and they use it to time speeches. But that's the problem: I don't have time to do speeches. I was doing speeches and they were timing them with a stopwatch and a bell. Which is kind of jarring when you're just getting warmed up to your subject and 'ding', time's nearly up so then you get rolling again and 'Ding!', and times really almost up and you go on to the earth shattering conclusion and DING! So… the stop light is definitely better. I should get it back to them before someone winds up dead. That or the bell winds up in someone's backside.

They (the other club members) said my speeches were really good. My secret? I wrote them out and memorized them. I once took a journalism class and accidentally read the book and found out that the secret to timing speeches, soliloquies, and the like is to write it out, triple space all lines, and write in 12 point courier (typewriter) font. Each page will last one minute. If I needed a five to seven minute speech (the usual length) I wrote seven or eight pages read it over and over until I had memorized most of it. Of course I ended up forgetting some of it but that was okay, the point was to know what I was going to say before I got to the meeting and having enough material to fill the alloted time. (Why is my delete key so small? I was trying to delete something and had to hunt for the key. I used to have a nice big delete key on my last keyboard that I could just pound on with my right pinkie because, in writing, taking stuff out is far more important than putting stuff in. In fact, they should allow a negative word count because it makes for better writing.)  But writing a speech is a lot of work. How am I supposed to do all of this and write here and spend time with the wife and kids and go to church and waste time on the Internet (why is Internet capitalized? It's been over fifteen minutes, haven't we had time to get over the whole proper name thing?) posting things no one reads to facebook. So I've had to quit going. Not resign or anything, just quit.

I pray about this kind of stuff. I mean the writing thing. I came in the office this morning wondering what I was going to write. No, that's not accurate. I came in this morning feeling too tired and too filled with dark thoughts which puts one in no frame of mind to write well. You don't have to be HAPPY!!!! to write well but it helps if your mood isn't mired in darkness. So I prayed. I asked that His spirit would move in me.  I told someone a while back that I don't know where I end and the Spirit begins. By that I mean that I don't know how it happens but when I pray, things happen. So let's just say that all of the bad stuff in this post–is mine.