Pity The Imbecile Among You

July 19, 2011

I grew up in the deep South. All my life I’ve been surrounded by “good Christian folk”. Some of this rubs off, so of course I consider myself pretty well acquainted with the basics tenets of Christianity. It’s widely known the Ten Commandments are a foundational element of southern spirituality. It [...]

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Lessons From A Thirty-Day Writing Challenge

July 12, 2011

Last month I participated in a daily writing challenge. In thirty-two days I wrote and published more posts than I had in the previous eighteen months combined. As may be expected, I took away several lessons:
Committing to a deadline ensures you’ll ship. (Ok, I didn’t say they were earth-shattering lessons.) There’s [...]

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Electrical Fire Of The Soul

July 2, 2011

Adolescent males are dangerous creatures. Keeping one about the house is risky business. I should know.
During the first half of my teenage years, my family lived on the edge of several thousand acres of timber land. The land owners didn’t care if I wandered the forest so long as I didn’t do [...]

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Image & Faulty Values

June 30, 2011

Why do we work so hard to portray a particular image? When we do this, what is it we are really valuing?
If we truly value something, wouldn’t it be better to be a genuine work in progress? Why must we insist on being a good looking fake?
What do you value so much you are willing [...]

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Recipe For A Story

June 29, 2011

Take twenty years’ experience,
Add two years’ musings,
Reflect for one day,
Write for two hours,
-and-
Presto bango, you have a story!

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Welcome To My Blog!

June 28, 2011

Today is my big debut. Eighteen months ago I was told no one would read my blog until I had written sixty posts. This is my sixty-first. (As you can see, that advise didn’t exactly provoke a sense of urgency within me!) So, to the thousands of you who are undoubtedly tuning [...]

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Death, Goodness & Feeling Alive

June 27, 2011

When I was twenty-five I became an EMT. I wanted to save the world. I imagined the struggle I’d face resisting the hero complex that was sure to accompany all my good deeds. It didn’t take many nights in Jackson, Mississippi to realize this would not be an issue. Working for [...]

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Recipe For Sanity

June 26, 2011

When I was twelve or thirteen years old I joined the Boy Scouts. I LOVED being a Scout. Everything about the Scouts was fantastic; there was a right way to do everything, there was a right way to do everything and it all happened outdoors. I idolized my scoutmaster and I read [...]

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Marching Orders For Dads

June 25, 2011

“A young boy needs a father who tells him that life is a loaner, who helps him discover why God sent him to this troubled earth so he doesn’t die without having tried to make it better. Most of all, a boy needs to be able to look into his father’s eyes and see [...]

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Extraordinarily Ordinary

June 24, 2011

What is it about us humans that gives us such an infinite capacity for simultaneous ignorance and arrogance? Do we all share this ability or am I uniquely gifted?
For years I’ve struggled to recognize my gifts. If I could just identify them, I would be able to put them to use. Deliberate [...]

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