Writing Goals

 Everyone who wants to write needs to set a written goal. 

Why?

Because for most of us if we don't have a goal to write a day goes by without writing and then two, then a month and you get the idea.

Each of us needs to have a personal one that is reasonable considering the life we live. It needs to be flexible like any writing counts, or if you have a bid day coming up you can write tomorrow's word count today. 

It's also good to make it public so you can be accountable. 

You guessed it, that is what I am doing. 

Here is my goal. 500 words a day on Monday-Thursday and Saturday. Friday is my day off and Sunday is, well I'm a preacher so it's busy. I don't need to justify myself I just know myself and this will work. I also will allow myself to write more one day for up to a week ahead. So if I know Monday is going to be busy I can write 1000 words on the previous Thursday. This also means if I get deep into writing one weekend and pump out 30,000 words I won't take three months off. I actually did this once. Yes the writing and then not writing though I'm not sure if it was three months I went without afterward. I'm also giving myself two weeks off so when I'm on vacation with the family, I'll be with my family. You get the idea and now I do too.

Word Count for 2022 -- 125,000

What is yours?

Good Luck everyone. 

Chained To The Past

I am not telling most of you anything that you do not know. 

If you keep doing the same thing today you have done in the past you will keep getting the same results.

Most of us know this and yet we keep making the same mistakes. So what is the problem? 
Most people are slaves to what they know or have done. I will admit that at times I am. To be honest, there are things that are just easier and even very enjoyable. (I love to cook sweets and eat them)

There is something to be said about persistence and sticking with things, but the problem for most of us is we are persistent in areas where we shouldn't be and are not persistent in important matters.

But what I want to make clear is that when there are things in our life that need changing, we need to work on changing them. If it feels like there are too many things then just start with one, but if you refuse to start then you will never be anything more than you are today.

So start...do that one thing...

let's get some different results. 

Be A Scrooge!!

I hope you enjoy this blog repeat from last year by my friend Garret Lee. I agree with him...be a Scrooge.

An Overplayed Carol

By Garrett A. Lee

Card players warn against “overplaying your hand.”  This is when you are dealt a strong hand, and, rather than settle for simply winning the round, you go for bonus points—only to end up losing the round after all.  What was a strong hand for normal play, was not strong enough for bonus play.  It was overplayed.

I suggest there is a tendency at Christmas to overplay a popular literary hand: Charles Dickens’ classic story, A Christmas Carol.  This cherished tale is so ingrained in American culture we overplay its message (even more than we over-play its myriad media adaptations).  The fear of “being a Scrooge” who doesn’t “keep Christmas,” drives us to distraction and obsession.

Keeping Christmas isn’t what it used to be, though.  We start sooner, wear out quicker, spend more, and enjoy less.  By the time Christmas Day arrives, many are ready to be done with it.  The celebration takes priority over the thing celebrated.  Expectations and obligations have grown “link by link, and yard by yard….It is a ponderous chain!”  We can become so bent on keeping Christmas we end up not having Christmas at all.

We have overplayed our hand.

Dickens dealt a very strong hand when he penned his “Ghostly little book.”  It was a time when many London industrialists and businessmen were taking oppressive advantage of the under classes.  Children, as well as adults, were forced to work twelve hours or more a day in unfit conditions and for meager wages.  Many employees were even denied Christmas Day as a holiday.  Dickens, a social activist, saw this as the ultimate exploitation of the poor. A Christmas Carol  was created to highlight these evils; and, of all his writings, none other have affected more social change.  The Christmas card trumped the business suit.  It was a very strong hand indeed.

Over the ensuing sixteen decades, we have overplayed its revered message.  Dickens’ message was that we really are to be our brothers’ keepers, not merely keepers of Christmas.  He used Christmas as a tool to affect the culture; we have let the culture affect Christmas.  Whatever the culture identifies as Christmas, we must keep—and keep up with—lest we be labeled a Scrooge.

As American society has grown wealthier and more materialistic, we have become more like Old Scrooge than we care to admit.  We see less and less reason to let a good holiday stand in the way of good commerce.  We have played Dickens’ hand so well, that Christmas has become a greater source of business than Old Ebenezer himself could ever have conceived.  To Scrooge, Christmas was an intrusion to commerce, but to the executive today it is the critical figure of the annual balance sheet.  The prize turkey was to Bob Cratchits’ family the ultimate Christmas gift; now Christmas itself is the ultimate golden goose.

At the beginning of the Carol, the miserly Scrooge berates Christmas as an unprofitable, costly waste.  Nephew Fred’s classic speech (which never makes it in its entirety into the movie adaptations) follows:

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited [economically], I dare say,” returned the nephew: “Christmas among the rest.  But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in all the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them  as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.  And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”   

Maybe it’s the Victorian English, the antiquated phrasing; or perhaps it’s just our short attention spans.  All we hear is, “Christmas is a good thing, even if it’s expensive.”  That’s good as far as it goes.  But Fred’s discourse also includes two primary reasons Christmas is good.  

First, Christmas is good “due to its sacred name [Christ] and origin [religious observance of His birth].”  This is assumed to such degree that Fred doubts it possible to separate any part of Christmas from it.  Yet Western culture has labored hard to do just that.  Though A Christmas Carol is a secular story, in the mid 1800s even a secular story could accept this religious basis, and even vague references to the Christ Child of Christmas would not be wasted on most readers.  Such reference today, however, is easily removed altogether and not missed.  In a morbid twist on the old adage, we throw out the Baby and keep the bathwater.

Secondly, Fred notes Christmas is good as the unsurpassed time of year when people care for others across all socioeconomic levels and collectively take notice of the needs of the less fortunate.  Traces of this still play out today.  Many still attempt to “make some slight provision for the poor and destitute.”  But it is often very slight and more often short-lived generosity.

If we are to stop overplaying this hand, we must become Scrooges all.

“Christmas a humbug!  You don’t mean that, I am sure?”  Not at all.  Most commonly overlooked when thinking of Scrooge is that A Christmas Carol is a story of redemption.  Scrooge repents!  The image of Scrooge we usually hold onto is the “clutching, grasping, wrenching, covetous old sinner.”  But by the end of the tale, remember, he is the model of keeping Christmas.  He sends a turkey to his employee.  He pledges an unspeakable amount for the poor.  He attends Christmas church service.  He accepted his nephew’s invitation to Christmas dinner.  He raises Bob’s salary.

“Scrooge was better than his word.  He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father.  He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world….And it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”  

Repent the humbug, and be a real Scrooge this Christmas.  Downplay the tinsel and gold, and buy a scuttle of coal for a Cratchit near you.

Merry Christmas

And a Happy New Year!




What did you expect its busy this time of year.

KEEP SMILING!


CSA

Membership has its responsibilities

I believe that it is the American Express Card that advertises that Membership has its privileges.  Companies spend a great amount of money letting you know the privileges you have if you join them. If you are offered membership in a Gym or Country Club again you are told of the privileges you get by being a member. Yes, the person selling the membership will talk about the cost but the selling point is the privileges you get. 

This is all true but the problem is the conclusion that membership has privileges without many responsibilities has made its way into the church. Are there privileges that come with being a church member? Sure, but actually becoming part of the church has just as many if not more responsibilities than privileges in this life. 

I believe many well-meaning Christians and Pastors have sold church membership as a good return on investment rather than on the commitment it actually represents.

A more accurate example of membership in the church of Jesus Christ is that of joining the military. If you are a member of the armed forces there are privileges, but there are lots of res[ponsiblities and the commitments can cost you your life. 

Remember Membership has its responsibilities...

CS Areson