Decked Out

♫ Deck the halls with boughs of holly ♪

Tomorrow evening is the last activity that I will be in charge of as Activities Committee chairperson. With the help of an awesome friend and some other members of my church group, the decorations look amazing! I'll try to remember to bring my camera tomorrow, so that I can get some pictures of the goodness! :)

I'm going to miss my calling as the activities' chair. It's been a great opportunity to learn, grow, and to gain some management skills. It's also provided a huge challenge that, as I've overcome it, I have gained some measure of confidence in my abilities and learned, bit by bit, what it means to delegate responsibilities - how much I've learned in that respect will be revealed when I get to "boss" people around for the party tomorrow!☺

At any rate... I should probably get to work on putting that "to do" list together for tomorrow, so I'm not running around... chicken... you get the point. Wish me luck on this final activities committee endeavour!

God Speed

Testimony (AKA "My Faith: Take Two")

Upon reading my previous post with fresh eyes, and then reading another friend's expression of faith, I decided that I didn't approach the former in quite the way I anticipated. Since it took me over 4 hours to write it, I will forgo rewriting it and will simply write a new post, instead.

My Faith
I believe in a Supreme Creator, who is God; even the God of Israel, who led Moses and his people out of Egypt. I believe that selfsame God is perfect, omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. I believe that He is our Father and that we are His children, created in His image and after His likeness, just as we are the image and likeness of our mortal parents.

My Faith

Preface:
Religion / Faith / Beliefs. This is a subject area I've been known to avoid in mixed company. Starting with friendly, respectful sharing of beliefs all too often digresses past disagreement, fault-seeking, and "disproving" until it becomes an epic religious trench war or a holocaust on an individual's beliefs. The worst part is that the entire process often occurs before either party realizes what has happened. --- I detest this pattern; I hate it to the very core. Why? It whisks love out the door, to a hasty execution. I believe that love is the most human and precious characteristic that any man can possess. Anything that destroys love has no value and deserves no consideration, even though it may have the world to evidence its truth.

Lessons of Life

Mistakes are not a foreign concept in my life; I've made my fair share of them. Living in a world filled with adages for success and failure, right and wrong, or good and evil, it is easy to get confused about what making a mistake really means.

4-Hour Curse

This morning was another of those nights...

Don't worry, you're not crazy... at least not as a result of reading this post (although, arguably, you could be classified crazy just for reading my blog!).

I've been noticing a trend over the past few weeks... upon setting myself to the task of going to bed at a reasonable hour (e.g. 10 p.m.), it frequently follows that 2 a.m. passes without my eyes being closed for a contiguous timeframe of more than one second, let alone several hours. So embodied in my life this behaviour has seemingly become that I was even tempted to write this post before attempting sleep (which, invariably, would further delayed sleep by another hour or two while producing a much more verbose, and boring, response).

At present it seems that, with a little mental effort and attention, I can kick this obnoxious behaviour where the sun doesn't shine and kindly ask it to never return... Or I could just get a job.

Blah....

That about describes...




(You've had those days... feel free to fill in the details yourself) :P




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Simplicity to the Rescue

Sometimes, we make decisions in life that we immediately (or shortly after) turn around and say to ourselves, "I don't actually want to do that!" These situations are even more frustrating when the simplest solution (in this case, to reverse the decision) would also have a negative impact on personal integrity.

Stripping my inward self of nearly all its temperance, I pined for options, alternatives. Finding nothing more than further excuses to fuel my incensing, a heroic question was asked: "[On a scale of 1-10] how much of an impact is this decision really going to have on your life?" LIBERATION! That was just what I needed to hear.

Recalled to mind was a lesson received, but not yet learned, from Tim Ferriss' The 4-Hour Workweek: Rate events or circumstances on a scale of 1-10 based on permanence, then re-evaluate within that new perspective. It worked perfectly! The powerful fire I had stoked within had instantly been cooled to nothing more than a few, softly glowing embers and then to little more than a memory of the inferno that had raged just moments before.

Now, while I still may not be happy about my decision, the decision won't make me unhappy; the permanence of the choice is, at most, a 2 or a 3 and there is no need to fret about it. :)

I love it when I can witness the truth and strength of simple principles unfolding before my eyes.