TIP OF THE DAY NUMBER FIFTEEN

Tip of the day:


It is inadvisable to challenge a full grown Polar Bear to a wrestling match.

Unless you have home field advantage.

TIP OF THE DAY NUMBER FOURTEEN

Tip of the day:

Owning a cell phone does not NECESSARILY make you cool.

It's only when you talk really, really loudly on your cell phone in Walmart so that everyone in the store knows you are talking on your cellphone that makes you cool.

Try to remember that.

SALEM WITCH HUNTERS

I left this comment over at a friends blog, and I wondered if it was too harsh. But the truth is, I don't wonder all that much. Maybe I am becoming jaded, or maybe I am becoming myself. Maybe I am becoming that person who isn't afraid to speak his mind, and the person who doesn't care what everyone else thinks. I assure you, I think these thing anyway; why not just say them, and leave the chips fall where they may? Are you going to hate me for it?

Honestly, most of the time, I don't care. You can reem me out for these words, and I won't reem back. You are who you are, and we all need space to be just who we are. How else is this world going to be a better place to live than it was yesterday?



T"e truth is, just being ourselves in this world is a mountain of pain no matter who you are or what you think yourself to be. One thousand years from now, when people no longer believe in God, we'll see the same pain and hardship from people finally learning how to accept themselves for who and what they are. Our friend was fortunate enough to come to that point before death. So many don't. I applause him for that, but I don't applause him for killing his God to do it. The fact is, any of us can live in this world, be ourselves, and not let ourselves be controlled by something that never was. Image control runs rampant in this world. That's not a disease that only Christians can claim. Everyone I have met is knee deep in that disease, no matter what their beliefs.

Maybe this comment has been too hard, or too honest. But if you spend some time talking with people who don't believe in God, you'll find that their marriage to the image they portray is no different than any religious folk you've met.

You can spend your life blaming a group, or walking in denial, it's your choice. But the sooner we accept that EVERYBODY has issues they want to hide, the sooner we'll get off our high horse...the sooner we'll stop judging like a bunch of Salem witch hunters. "

TIP OF THE DAY NUMBER THIRTEEN

Tip of the day.

Never, ever, lean a sixteen foot ladder against a beam that is worn to the point of breaking. I learned the hard way on Monday, and fell about twelve feet.

Did you know it's possible to get injured falling from that height? Who woulda thunk?

TIP OF THE DAY NUMBER TWELVE

Tip of the day:

If you are going to hunt deer during the gun hunt season, it's a good idea to bring along a gun.

I am off to the North Woods of Wisconsin for five glorious days of peace and Bambi bloodshed. I will be back on Wednesday, the 23rd.

I invite you all to leave your own tip of the day each day in the comments section, so we can make certain that all this good advice keeps flowing. The world is counting on you.

TIP OF THE DAY N UMBER ELEVEN

Tip of the day:

If beer is the nectar of the gods, and I drink beer........

TIP OF THE DAY NUMBER TEN

Walk loudly and carry a small stick.

After all, carrying a big stick gets tiring. It's much easier to do a lot of shouting than to do all that manual labor.

I recommend shouting whenever you get the opportunity. It makes a good impression on whomever you are shouting at.

And if you can't make a big impression, at least you'll have made a dashing attempt at breaking their eardrums...so it wasn't really a total waste of breath after all.

TIP OF THE DAY NUMBER NINE

Tip of the day:


Strapping a bundle of dynamite to your back so you can be "jet" propelled on roller skates like Wyl E. Coyote when he chases the Roadrunner doesn't really work.


Therefore, I don't recommend it.

LEARNING TO LIVE IN A NEW HOUSE

One of the first things I noticed about my life when I began to realize the loss of fear that comes through Christ was the way my perspectives were changing. This is a process that could have gone unnoticed. It's such a simple thing really; how do I see other people?

That question used to be easy. Other people weren't me, and therefore, they, while being people, were subject to judgment on all the things I deemed necessary. This should begin to tell you something about what I thought of other people, but almost as importantly, what I thought of myself.

At first glance, my vast judgment of other people might lead one to believe I was outwardly judgmental, yet inwardly self-praising. That, however, was not my experience of it. My arrogance was not based on anything I could be proud of achieving; I used it more like a defense mechanism, to protect myself from what I really thought of myself.

Strange, isn't it?

Would you believe I was even more judgmental of myself than I was of others? That was part of my slavery; slavery to performance and slavery to self. The judging of others was merely an outworking of what I was doing to myself on the inside.

But as fear departed, as the sense of failure faded, I began to see a development in compassion towards others. When I use the word compassion, I am trying to define that trait within me that makes me similar, or bonded to, other people. We share comparable experience and comparable emotions. We are comrades in commonality.

As that sense of compassion grew, the need to judge others waned. Maybe you can understand what was happening within me. I was being remade. I was becoming a person who could come to terms with my mistakes. I was learning to un-dwell on the failures of my past, failures I had analyzed into vapors.

I was literally learning to live in a new house.

Tell me today that you are gay, or that you are a drug user or a porn addict, and instead of the past frothing from my lips, you might instead find me leaning my ear toward you as I listen to what you are living. It's not so easy to judge (although I am still capable of doing it) when you realize that you aren't judged. Things just don't seem to be so evil anymore.

I guess I can't really explain what it means to be free enough to accept failure within me. Those who knew me in the past may not have known that I struggled in beating myself up for my failures, because I am not sure I ever let too many people know that. It just wasn't part of the image I wanted to portray.

But now, I don't really care who knows how hard I was on myself for failures and lack of success. The truth is, none of it matters. I am free enough to succeed, and living in this new house, I know it won't crumble if I happen to install a brick that disintegrates.

TIP OF THE DAY NUMBER EIGHT

Tip of the day:

It is considered bad etiquette to bend over and moon a charging grizzly bear.

THIS IS AN AMAZING POST

You have got to head over to Bruce's blog to read this. It's called Religion Will Rob You of Your Life. It's simply amazing!

FREE ENOUGH TO BE ME

How do you become someone you never were to begin with?

When I walk into a church on a Sunday morning, one of the things I notice is that everyone is smiling, and everyone is dressed really nice. Everyone except for me.

I have the smiling part down, because I am naturally upbeat; I mean, I wake up that way, so it isn't hard for me to be smiling at just about any moment you will meet me. But if I walk into a church, I do so wearing some old sweatshirt, a baseball cap, and blue jeans, the very same type I work in.

But not everyone is upbeat, and as I stroll through the church, I begin to be bothered by the idea that someone here, possibly many someones, are faking it. This doesn't only happen in a church. It happens everywhere you go.

Everyone I meet is busy, and happy. They are so busy that they haven't had time to stay in touch with their friends, friends, they would admit, who make their lives more enjoyable. Did you catch the contradiction there?

If I am so busy that I don't have time to stay in touch with my friends, outside of my natural upbeat outlook, I am not going to remain "happy" for very long. If I am so busy that I am living without fulfilling a natural need; that of connecting with family and friends regularly, then it could seem impossible for me to remain happy for very long.

Recently, I had to stay away from this blog, for the most part, because I was sick, and so busy that at the end of the day, I was too tired to make connections with people who had come to mean a great deal to me. Although my demeanor was upbeat, inside, I was sinking. Worse than that, I found myself faking it.

I didn't like that one bit. I felt empty, because instead of filling up on life as it happens, I tried to create a mental picture of happiness despite bad circumstances that I couldn't uphold for very long. I had a choice. I could try to keep up the smile, and force myself to quiet the voice inside which was screaming for connection. Or, I could make changes.

Do you know how easy it seems to just maintain the status quo? I am not kidding you when I tell you that to just keep going without connecting with my friends, to keep working and keep busy and keep being too tired to write here seemed like the simplest answer. But that also meant that I would have to keep faking it, and there is something in my nature that just rebels against faking things. I can pull it off if I stay persistent, but the more I pull it off, the more rebellious I become inside; the more I desire reality. There becomes an urge to scream at the top of my lungs at the next person who asks me how I am doing, "I'm doing shitty! I don't like life right now! I'm not who I thought I was, I feel disconnected, and I don't even care that you don't have time to listen to me rave!"

In essence, I am screaming both to give attention to someone else, and receive likewise. Connectedness. This nation screams for it; the Internets success is the result of it. Without it, we fake it. Yet even on Sundays, when people "go to church", they feel the need to fake it. Instead of being real, instead of allowing themselves to be themselves, they put their makeup on and become someone they are not.

It seems easy to maintain this, it seems like the best plan, the only plan, because changing it means doing things in a way most of us never have. It means being the real me, who admittedly is very upbeat, but who gets sidetracked at times when life seems to be a hurricane of events, all of them outside of my control. It means letting loose emotionally, which is something that people are taught not to do from a very early age, especially in "church". In "church", it's time to smile and act as though the Lord has blessed you greatly. In "church", it's time to be someone you are not. Sadly, that someone we are not gets carried into daily life, and we drag him to the store, the gas station, the movies, the bar, to events and parties and every other moment we live.

There is what I would call a phenomenon taking place in America in this age. I have observed it and am shocked at its prevalence.

Did you know that over fifty percent of all adult Americans are, or have been under prescription for anxiety or depression related illness at some time in their life? I am one of the lucky ones; I have never been under that sort of prescription. Maybe this means the field of medicine has learned something about people's well-being, and the drug prescriptions are merely a way of providing a more fulfilling, normal life. I think for a few people, these prescriptions are absolutely necessary, but for the vast majority of people under these prescriptions, my observation is that they are an escape from reality; a way to trick the mind into believing that everything is okay, especially when everything is not okay. I think the drugs are a mask, or provide the means to make the masks we wear seem better somehow, more like reality.

You see, a person can't fake it for very long before his nature begins to rebel against the act he is putting on. One can carry on this deception forever, but not without grave consequences to the inner man. One can fool his friends, one can wow his contemporaries with his supposed wealth and success, and generate envy through making one's life seem better than everyone else's. Isn't that the kicker, to make things seem better, in some cases far better, than what they really are? To make our lives look attractive, so that others will believe we have it all together, that we have become what we dreamed we would when we were young? Because to admit failure, to admit that when we were young, we never dreamed of having three mortgages and two jobs, we never dreamed we would be so miserable, so lonely, so forgotten. We never once thought that life could be so hard, that our plans wouldn't work out the way we thought.

So we create the lie, that everything is okay, that we are happy, and that life is better than we imagined it could be as a child. We wear this mask because that is what is expected of us. Every so often, a few of us are fortunate enough to find just one or two people with whom we can confide the truth in. I have that one person, but so many people I know do not. For those people, the mask becomes the reality, even though the mask is nothing more than a well-written lie.

At some point, wearing that mask for so long is going to exact a price on our mental well-being. Medicine has the answer; give them a drug that will help them fake it. Many doctors prescribe these drugs without ever demanding that their patient receive psychological help. And if they do get psychological help, many of these patients are treated by people who themselves wear masks. There's not much help and advice being received from someone who doesn't know how to live with themselves to begin with. The cycle becomes more vicious.

The patients are told that there has to be a reason, or maybe a few reasons why they are so unhappy. They are told to recall memories that might have caused this depression, or this anxiety. In truth, some people do have memories that cause depression and anxiety. But over fifty percent of all adults? I doubt it.

I think the mask is to blame. I don't think that mask is created in church; it's just that church is where people polish it specially to make it look its best. I think that mask is created from everything we learn and observe in our society. If church is part of your society, then church is partly to blame.

The mask is slavery. It is slavery to an image we cannot achieve. We control our emotions, and hide our feelings, and sooner or later, the mask takes over...on the outside. Meanwhile, the inside, the inner man is dying, screaming for release and celebration. The inner man is crying for someone to care enough so that we can take off this mask and be real. Most of all, the inner man is crying for us to have the courage to be ourselves so we don't have to fake it anymore.

Why do we fake it? Because we are afraid that the real me isn't acceptable, isn't lovable, and most of all, isn't even likable. Paxil will help you feel that you are; so will Xanax. But those two drugs only create another mask, effectively hiding the real you, possibly forever.

Would you like to know the real you? Would you like to see that the real you is lovable, AND likable? Would you like to live without fear of judgment and doubt in yourself because things didn't work out the way you planned as a child? Would you like to stop looking for ways to escape a reality that just hurts too much?

I'll bet you thought I was going to say the answer is Jesus. He's not the answer, though. He provided the way to the answer, showed us how to get to where He was going, but He's not a drug that fixes masks that we have worn all of our lives. He is the Way. And I will tell you this: in my life, Jesus provided the door to the real me. After He made it clear that God is not angry with us, that each of us is acceptable just as we are, things began to clear up a bit. But to believe that God was still angry at those who didn't believe caused a desire for all sorts of mask making in me. I had to show everybody I believed, so much in fear was I over being one of those who didn't believe enough. I created a mask, and sometimes, I still wear it.

But once I realized that the fear of hell was gone, that God is not an angry, condemning God at all, the reasons I had for wearing my mask disappeared one by one. And if everyone were redeemed, if even the worst of all sinners for all time was redeemed to my Father, then what need was there anymore for fear in me? What need, literally, was there to wear a mask?

We wear masks to hide things; to hide our identity, to hide what we really look like, and to hide what we are ashamed of. But when there is no condemnation forthcoming, what need have I of shame any longer?

Once I realized how total the love of God is, I realized that freedom was within my grasp. Once I realized that God was not partial to anyone, but a lover of everyone, I realized that my mask had been hiding the real me all of my life. I had been trying to hide the real me not only from myself and others, but from God, as if He could be fooled. Upon the realization of His total love for all of us, even me, I began my life as a free man.

Jesus isn't the drug that's going to cure you. He is the way to freedom. He is just some person on the pages of a big, big book, but He is real when we realize that here was a man who never had to worry about what others thought of Him, and he especially never had to fear what His Father thought of Him. He knew the truth, and the truth sets us free.

The lie is that hell is real, that God is so petty that at some point, He just can't take us anymore, and none of us really knows when that is. The lie is that God is so small that the slightest mistake in our life angers Him. The lie is that He is only pleased when we are behaving, as if God sits on a yo yo string that is attached to our actions. The lie is that God requires us to believe in order for us to be redeemed.

I must tell you this; if my redemption rests on my faith, then I will burn in hell, because I don't have any faith. Sure, there are moments filled with the realization of how much God loves me, and how I know Jesus to be my friend and savior. But most of my time is spent doubting these days, and for those of you who know me, you also know that I have just removed a mask in saying that. Are you surprised?

There may come a day when I have a chemical imbalance, and the need for drugs to regain some balance within will be met. There is nothing wrong, so far as I can see, with curing medical conditions. But by and large, drugs like Paxil and Xanax only paint a thicker mask. If people only realized that there is now nothing to fear, and no reason to hide, I think most of the reasons for Paxil would disappear. I think every reason for us to wear masks would evaporate. I think for all of us, most our lives would be spent being just who we are, rather than trying to be someone we are not.

TIP OF THE DAY NUMBER SEVEN

Tip of the day:


Although lighting a single branch of a pine tree on fire can be an awesomely spectacular thing, you probably shouldn't do it while in the midst of a forest of pine trees. I don't know why. I just thought I'd say that.

It sounds pretty good, though, doesn't it?

TIP OF THE DAY NUMBER SIX

Tip of the day:


Do you know how when you stick your fingers into a moving fan belt on an automobile, oftentimes when you pull your fingers out, you're missing a couple?




Yeah...don't do that.

TIP OF THE DAY NUMBER FIVE

Tip of the day:

Working blindfolded with a tablesaw may be hazardous to your health.

Talk amongst yourselves.