Fly Like an Eagle

 

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Dan Miller's 48 Days Eagles Community helps driven, smart, creative individuals like you who are willing to take action to break free from monotony, find your true purpose, and create not only work, but a full life you thrive in.

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A Merchant of Time

“Time flies. It’s up to you to be the navigator,” quipped Robert Orbin.

The freshman year of college is a big learning curve in knowing how to be disciplined and organize yourself and your schedule. With all of the new freedoms, a lot of freshmen either get way too overcommitted in activities and social engagements, or they seem to major in vegging and hanging out.

Dr. Jack Presseau, my freshman adviser, shared a nugget of wisdom that remains with me today. Perfect for that role, Jack was accomplished enough to earn my respect, thoughtful and pastorly enough to emulate genuine care, and thorough and disciplined enough to challenge a young eighteen/nineteen-year old.

He gave a chart to me with the instruction to write down what I did every half hour of every day for one week. It made me begin thinking in terms of time management and learn to see my time in terms of short segments. Since then, I've learned to think of an hour as four segments of fifteen minutes, and many tasks can be completed in a fifteen-minute segment. It was also a good exercise to begin appreciating the power of keeping tasks and appointments written down. As Adrian Rogers said, "The weakest pen is greater than the strongest mind."

Our Private Worlds

Several thousand books have come through my library the past thirty years. Some stayed. Others found another life via Goodwill. A few helped change my life. One of those in the latter category is Gordon MacDonald's Ordering Your Private World. 

MacDonald shares his experience as a young pastor with lots of talent and a great personality. For most of his latter twenties he rode the wave of those two assets, while ignoring the guardrails of habitual disciplines.

After hitting an emotional-mental wall one day, a sobering reality struck him head-on: he could not coast the rest of his life and ministry on what had made him attractive and outwardly successful in his twenties. His gifts and natural charm would not enable him to be successful over the long haul of life.

He had to learn discipline.

MacDonald writes, "There came a time in my own life when I wanted to make sound decisions about the budgeting of my time, and I wanted to be free of that frantic pitch of daily life in which one is always playing catch-up." 

He learned nine symptoms of disorganization that characterize his life when disorder rules: 

1.  My desk takes on a cluttered appearance. 

2.  The symptoms tend to show themselves in the condition of my car.

3.  I become aware of a diminution in my self-esteem.

4.  There are a series of forgotten appointments, messages to which I failed to respond, and deadlines I have begun to miss.

5.  I tend to invest my energies in unproductive tasks.

6.  Disorganized people feel poorly about their work.

7.  Disorganized Christians rarely enjoy intimacy with God.

8.  The quality of my personal relationships usually reveals it. I may become irritable.

9. When we are disorganized in our control of time, we don’t like ourselves, our jobs, or much else about our worlds.

That first year of college I read Charles Hummel's book The Tyranny of the Urgent, digesting the concept that the use of our time will always include two conflicting needs fighting to become our master. Those two conflicts are important things versus urgent things. 

The disciplined person learns to get important things done. The undisciplined person is always a slave to urgent matters.

 

MacDonald’s Laws of Unmanaged Time

Macdonald writes, "Time must be budgeted!  We must resolve to seize control of our time.  The disorganized person must have a budgeting perspective of time."

In his chapter on time management, he shares four laws about unmanaged time.

 

Law #1:          

Unmanaged time flows toward my weaknesses.

Law #2:          

Unmanaged time comes under the influence of dominant people in my world.      

Law #3:          

Unmanaged time surrenders to the demands of all emergencies.

Law #4:          

Unmanaged time gets invested in things that gain public acclamation.


The struggle of wisely investing our time knows no age limit. I recommend MacDonald's book to anyone.  I read it again every two to three years. But I especially commend it to anyone age twenty-five to thirty-five. 

May we heed the warning of Hummel, who said, “Your greatest danger is letting the urgent things crowd out the important.”

And may we be found faithful with our time, echoing the words of J. H. Jewett: “The disciple of Christ is to be an expert merchant in the commodity of time.”

Pictures courtesy of Pixabay.

 

18 Benefits of Working Remotely

It's called "The Great Resignation,” and it’s affecting the North American workplace. For many American knowledge workers, the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown showed us we could fulfill 100% of our work responsibilities without leaving the comfort of our dens.

In December 2021, 4.3 million American workers resigned from their jobs. Yes, some of those are due to freeloaders who choose to get a “government check,” and others result from people leaving their jobs due to vaccine mandates. However, many of these resignations result from people seeking remote opportunities that better fit their lives.

CBS' Sixty Minutes recently reported that remote work has grown from 1 of 67 jobs to 1 of 7.  One author shares, "We are rapidly moving toward the time when only 50% of the American workforce will be 'employees.' The rest will be independent contractors, temps, consultants, contingency workers, freelancers, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and more."

Online job sites advertising remote jobs keep increasing, like FlexJobs.com, which recently shared on their site, “The landscape of remote work will be permanently changed as a result of COVID-19. Instead of ad hoc use, we've seen the full deployment of remote work across many organizations. Most surveys find that companies are organizing remote work as a long-term strategy. 69% of large-company CEOs plan to downsize their office space. And about 80%of CEOs say they expect a more widespread remote workforce as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.”

For three years, I drove 500+ miles a week commuting to and from my office job. Writing for a large organization, I enjoyed my creative co-workers and the excitement of working for a multi-million dollar institution. Though I admired the organization, I greatly disliked being tied to a cubicle. I found the cubicle environment to be terribly draining rather than life-giving. For the first time in my working career, someone else told me when to sign in and sign out (which inevitably means telling me when to get up and go to bed), how many weeks to take off a year, and faithfulness to the job was at least in part tied being paid for time and not just productivity.

Our organization sent us home during 2020 for a couple of months. I lost weight, ate healthier, slept more, enjoyed face-to-face time with my family, and got all of my work done for my fulltime job. No commute. No eating out. No cubicle.

About a year ago, I intentionally began investigating, analyzing, and delving into remote job possibilities. I absorbed podcasts, articles, and books from career coaches like Dan Miller and the Ziglar Corporation. I read Freelance to Freedom by  Vincent Pugliese, Richard Bolles’ What Color is Your Parachute?, and other motivational positive materials. Many of those materials helped me begin thinking differently about work, shifting from a traditional view of work to a modern one. Actually, modern job writers like Seth Godin argue that our "traditional" view of work did not come into being until Henry Ford and the Ford motor company. What we are seeing today, a return to being paid for productivity, not time, is a return to a real "traditional" work model.

I discovered the American Writers and Artists Institute (AWAI), took their ground level course The AWAI Method for Becoming a Skilled, In-Demand Copywriter, signed up for their magazine The Barefoot Writer, and began exploring their extremely helpful site and other related resources.

I thought and prayed a lot, and I created a plan. That plan included creating several streams of income and learning to think very non-traditionally about work, employment, and income.

In January, I made the leap with the full support of my wife, resigned from my “secure” position and came home, leaving my cubicle and moving into my private office at home. In the past six weeks, here are benefits I am experiencing:

1. Enjoying lunches with my 16-year-old son. I can text my son, “You want to grab lunch?” and run out for a face-to-face meal. We’ve done it five or six times since I came home. We are currently reading Dan Miller’s 48 Days to the Work You Love together.

2. Sleeping 7-8 hours every night. Sometimes more! Waking up without an alarm clock. Marvelous.

3. No traffic stress. Commute is less than 0.1 miles. Sometimes I even walk! Ha.

4. A private office with a door that closes. I wholeheartedly agree with writer mentors like Stephen King and Eva Shaw, who say the most important tool a writer needs to succeed is an office with a door that closes. Writing in a cubicle with people walking back and forth regularly and engaging in conversations all around me was a stressful way for me to work. My mind is much clearer and more productive in an isolated, quiet space.

5. I can have a creative space to work that I create. I enjoy color and lots of mementos around me reminding me of things I like. My first two days of independent working, I created a great working space in my church office, complete with an electric desk that I can raise to stand or lower to sit, lots of pictures, wall hangings, and memorabilia, and plenty of books lining the walls.

6. Not worn out at night/weekends. The commuting life left me exhausted by 5pm Friday and worn out most of the weekend. Now, I’m enjoying much more energy and alertness over the weekend.

7. Eating healthier and losing weight. I said goodbye to fast food breakfasts eaten in the car and big lunches, which were often a stress release. Working from home, I’m able to eat healthier with smaller portions several times a day. So far, in six weeks I’ve lost five pounds.

8. Exercising 3-4 times a week. It’s easy working from home to incorporate a brisk 20-minute walk inside or outside or a push-up and sit-up routine in the middle of my day.

9. Able to be more present with my wife. Priceless.

10. Can work, stop, and restart as I choose. I can work best at my natural cycles of productivity. And I can break during the in-betweens. That means I can use that time to run to the post office, pick up groceries, take a walk through the woods, do a house chore, or go get some gas for the car.

11. Uninterrupted time with the Lord and positive input at the rudder of the day. I can spend unhurried time in prayer and Bible meditation as the day begins. And I'm taking career coach Dan Miller’s advice: “Years ago I made it a practice to spend at least two hours daily listening to, or reading, positive materials. That practice has given me access to the greatest thinkers in the world and an ongoing education that is current, practical, and profitable.”

12. Spending less money on gas and eating out. Not commuting and eating out daily, according to gas prices in 2021, saves me between $4000-$5000 a year.

13. More mental energy to focus, plan, and set goals. I purchased the Ziglar Corporation’s Performance Planner and spent about fifteen hours the first two weeks I came home thinking through life goals. I recorded forty-eight short-term, intermediate, and long-term goals and am using the planner to help me stay on track. I’ve already completed three of them, including finally submitting my completed first book manuscript to a publisher.

14. Time for productivity. Since coming home, I’ve completed my own book, was almost immediately hired by another organization as their part-time, remote, writer, have begun work on two different book projects as a ghost, and am talking with another party about a completely different book editing project. I'm also working on redoing my own freelance writing and ghostwriting promotional materials. And I’m just getting started.

15. More time for education and instruction. I’ve completed AWAI's Build Your Freelance Website in Four Days webinar, started Ray Edwards' Profitable Copywriting Business, and begun Nick Pavlidis' Ghostwriter School in the past six weeks. And in audio helps, I'm currently listening to Earl Nightingale's Lead the Field, Zig Ziglar's The Goals Program, and Nightingale-Conant's Goals and Vison Mastery Course. I've also read Ruth Soukup's Do it Scared and Wayne Cordiero's Leading on Empty since coming home.

16. Am able to take days or vacation time off when needed, not according to a benefits scale. Entering my last job at age 46, I received two weeks off the first two years. With three teenagers and one in college, only taking two weeks off a year was quite challenging. Now, I can take off what I need and want, assuming that I’m hustling enough when I am working to make the income we need. This also offers more time to visit my now two children in college and my octogenarian mother. And it puts me in the driver's seat.

17. I’m learning to plan my life first and then my work to fit that life. 

I wish someone had drilled that into my head thirty years ago. The traditional American concept of work is to
choose your work and then plan your life. However, modern wisdom shares, “To have real success you must understand yourself and plan your life first, then plan your work to embrace the life you want” (Miller).

18. In essence, and somewhat as a summary benefit, I’m much better able to order my world from the inside-out rather than playing catchup from the outside in.

Gordon MacDonald, in his excellent book Ordering Your Private World (which I am re-reading for the sixth time since 2002), writes, "Those who brought their lives into discipline or . . . intentionality would, more than likely, go on to long-term lives of fruitfulness, and their best years would be in the last half of their lives when discipline and depth paid off. . . . The ordering of my private world is an inside-out matter, not an outside-in matter."

Wayne Muller writes, “The busier we are, the more important we seem to ourselves and, we imagine, to others. To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know that the sun set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single mindful breath, this has become the model of a successful life.”

And Dan Miller writes, “Henry Ford once said he didn’t want executives who had to work all the time. He insisted that those who were always in a flurry of activity at their desks were not being the most productive. He wanted people who could clear their desks, prop their feet up and dream some fresh dreams. His philosophy was that only he who has the luxury of time can originate a creative thought.

Wow! When was the last time your boss told you to quit working and do more dreaming? Unfortunately, our culture glamorizes being under time pressure. Having too much to do with little time is a badge of ‘success.’ Or is it? . . .

Andrew Carnegie would go into an empty room for hours at a time – not allowing any interruptions – as he was ‘sitting for ideas.’ Thomas Edison would go down to the water’s edge each morning, throw out his line – with no bait – and then watch the bobber for an hour until he was ready to think for the day. . . .

If you are feeling stuck, your solution may not be in doing more, but in taking a break from the ‘busyness’ of life. Want to be more productive – try doing less. Go ‘sit’ somewhere for a while!”

Today's changing landscape presents multiple opportunities for those who will seize them.

Pictures used by permission from Pixabay.

 

My Updated Website

 

I've recently updated my personal business website. Check it out here at rhettwilson.org.

18 Benefits of Working Remotely: the first six weeks

It's called "The Great Resignation,” and it’s affecting the North American workplace. For many American knowledge workers, the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown showed us we could fulfill 100% of our work responsibilities without leaving the comfort of our dens.

In December 2021, 4.3 million American workers resigned from their jobs. Yes, some of those are due to freeloaders who choose to get a “government check,” and others result from people leaving their jobs due to vaccine mandates. However, many of these resignations result from people seeking remote opportunities that better fit their lives.

CBS' Sixty Minutes recently reported that remote work has gone from 1 of 67 jobs to 1 of 7. One author shares, "We are rapidly moving toward the time when only 50% of the American workforce will be 'employees.' The rest will be independent contractors, temps, consultants, contingency workers, freelancers, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and more."

Online job sites advertising remote jobs keep increasing, like FlexJobs.com, which recently shared on their site, “The landscape of remote work will be permanently changed as a result of COVID-19. Instead of ad hoc use, we've seen the full deployment of remote work across many organizations. Most surveys find that companies are organizing remote work as a long-term strategy. 69% of large-company CEOs plan to downsize their office space. And about 80%of CEOs say they expect a more widespread remote workforce as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.”

For three years, I drove 500+ miles a week commuting to and from my office job. Writing for a large organization, I enjoyed my creative co-workers and the excitement of working for a multi-million dollar institution. Though I admired the organization, I greatly disliked being tied to a cubicle. I found the cubicle environment to be terribly draining rather than life-giving. For the first time in my working career, someone else told me when to sign in and sign out (which inevitably means telling me when to get up and go to bed), how many weeks to take off a year, and faithfulness to the job was at least in part tied being paid for time and not just productivity.

Our organization sent us home during 2020 for a couple of months. I lost weight, ate healthier, slept more, enjoyed face-to-face time with my family, and got all of my work done for my fulltime job. No commute. No eating out. No cubicle.

About a year ago, I intentionally began investigating, analyzing, and delving into remote job possibilities. I absorbed podcasts, articles, and books from career coaches like Dan Miller and the Ziglar Corporation. I read Freelance to Freedom by  Vincent Pugliese, Richard Bolles’ What Color is Your Parachute?, and other motivational positive materials. Many of those materials helped me begin thinking differently about work, shifting from a traditional view of work to a modern one. Actually, modern job writers like Seth Godin argue that our "traditional" view of work did not come into being until Henry Ford and the Ford motor company. What we are seeing today, a return to being paid for productivity, not time, is a return to a real "traditional" work model.

I thought and prayed a lot, and I created a plan. That plan included creating several streams of income and learning to think very non-traditionally about work, employment, and income.

In January, I made the leap with the full support of my wife, resigned from my “secure” position and came home, leaving my cubicle and moving into my private office at home. In the past six weeks, here are benefits I am experiencing:

1. Enjoying lunches with my 16-year-old son. I can text my son, “You want to grab lunch?” and run out for a face-to-face meal. We’ve done it five or six times since I came home. We are currently reading Dan Miller’s 48 Days to the Work You Love together.

2. Sleeping 7-8 hours every night. Sometimes more! Waking up without an alarm clock. Marvelous.

3. No traffic stress. Commute is less than 0.1 miles. Sometimes I even walk! Ha.

4. A private office with a door that closes. I wholeheartedly agree with writer mentors like Stephen King and Eva Shaw, who say the most important tool a writer needs to succeed is an office with a door that closes. Writing in a cubicle with people walking back and forth regularly and engaging in conversations all around me was a stressful way for me to work. My mind is much clearer and more productive in an isolated, quiet space.

5. I can have a creative space to work that I create. I enjoy color and lots of mementos around me reminding me of things I like. My first two days of independent working, I created a great working space in my church office, complete with an electric desk that I can raise to stand or lower to sit, lots of pictures, wall hangings, and memorabilia, and plenty of books lining the walls.

6. Not worn out at night/weekends. The commuting life left me exhausted by 5pm Friday and worn out most of the weekend. Now, I’m enjoying much more energy and alertness over the weekend.

7. Eating healthier and losing weight. I said goodbye to fast food breakfasts eaten in the car and big lunches, which were often a stress release. Working from home, I’m able to eat healthier with smaller portions several times a day. So far, in six weeks I’ve lost five pounds.

8. Exercising 3-4 times a week. It’s easy working from home to incorporate a brisk 20-minute walk inside or outside or a push-up and sit-up routine in the middle of my day.

9. Able to be more present with my wife. Priceless.

10. Can work, stop, and restart as I choose. I can work best at my natural cycles of productivity. And I can break during the in-betweens. That means I can use that time to run to the post office, pick up groceries, take a walk through the woods, do a house chore, or go get some gas for the car.

11. Uninterrupted time with the Lord and positive input at the rudder of the day. I can spend unhurried time in prayer and Bible meditation as the day begins. And I'm taking career coach Dan Miller’s advice: “Years ago I made it a practice to spend at least two hours daily listening to, or reading, positive materials. That practice has given me access to the greatest thinkers in the world and an ongoing education that is current, practical, and profitable.”

12. Spending less money on gas and eating out. Not commuting and eating out daily, according to gas prices in 2021, saves me between $4000-$5000 a year.

13. More mental energy to focus, plan, and set goals. I purchased the Ziglar Corporation’s Performance Planner and spent about fifteen hours the first two weeks I came home thinking through life goals. I recorded forty-eight short-term, intermediate, and long-term goals and am using the planner to help me stay on track. I’ve already completed three of them, including finally submitting my completed first book manuscript to a publisher.

14. Time for productivity. Since coming home, I’ve completed my own book, was almost immediately hired by another organization as their part-time, remote, writer, have begun work on two different book projects as a ghost, and am talking with another party about a completely different book editing project. I'm also working on redoing my own freelance writing and ghostwriting promotional materials. And I’m just getting started.

15. More time for education and instruction. I’ve completed one copywriting online class, started another one, and started a ghostwriting one in the past six weeks.

16. Am able to take days or vacation time off when needed, not according to a benefits scale. Entering my last job at age 46, I received two weeks off the first two years. With three teenagers and one in college, only taking two weeks off a year was quite challenging. Now, I can take off what I need and want, assuming that I’m hustling enough when I am working to make the income we need. This also offers more time to visit my now two children in college and my octogenarian mother. And it puts me in the driver's seat.

17. I’m learning to plan my life first and then my work to fit that life. I wish someone had drilled that into my head thirty years ago. The traditional American concept of work is to choose your work and then plan your life. However, modern wisdom shares, “To have real success you must understand yourself and plan your life first, then plan your work to embrace the life you want” (Miller).

18. In essence, and somewhat as a summary benefit, I’m much better able to order my world from the inside-out rather than playing catchup from the outside in.

Gordon MacDonald, in his excellent book Ordering Your Private World (which I am re-reading for the sixth time since 2002), writes, "Those who brought their lives into discipline or . . . intentionality would, more than likely, go on to long-term lives of fruitfulness, and their best years would be in the last half of their lives when discipline and depth paid off. . . . The ordering of my private world is an inside-out matter, not an outside-in matter."

Wayne Muller writes, “The busier we are, the more important we seem to ourselves and, we imagine, to others. To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know that the sun set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single mindful breath, this has become the model of a successful life.”

And Dan Miller writes, “Henry Ford once said he didn’t want executives who had to work all the time. He insisted that those who were always in a flurry of activity at their desks were not being the most productive. He wanted people who could clear their desks, prop their feet up and dream some fresh dreams. His philosophy was that only he who has the luxury of time can originate a creative thought.

Wow! When was the last time your boss told you to quit working and do more dreaming? Unfortunately, our culture glamorizes being under time pressure. Having too much to do with little time is a badge of ‘success.’ Or is it? . . .

Andrew Carnegie would go into an empty room for hours at a time – not allowing any interruptions – as he was ‘sitting for ideas.’ Thomas Edison would go down to the water’s edge each morning, throw out his line – with no bait – and then watch the bobber for an hour until he was ready to think for the day. . . .

If you are feeling stuck, your solution may not be in doing more, but in taking a break from the ‘busyness’ of life. Want to be more productive – try doing less. Go ‘sit’ somewhere for a while!”

Today's changing landscape presents multiple opportunities for those who will seize them.

Pictures used by permission from Pixabay.

 

The Importance of Handwritten Notes

Last weekend, I cleaned out our filing cabinets. For the first time in eighteen years of marriage, I thoroughly purged our many files. I spent about four hours going through loads of paper and ended up with more than a laundry basket full of paper to throw away. I found receipts from every pregnancy, doctor visits for babies, paperwork for every vehicle purchased, and invitations to our wedding. It’s fun to see it all, and it is fun to throw most of it away.

But it was also a great reminder of a tradition we need to preserve for our children.

You see, tucked in between the items to discard were treasures. No, they can’t be sold and won’t bring any money, but their worth is priceless. I found letter after letter written by family members, loved ones, and friends. Some of those people are no longer on this earth.

Those treasures include the following:

• Birthday and anniversary cards from our grandparents, all of whom are now in heaven. My wife and I remarked in recent years how the mailed birthday cards decreased. My grandmother always sent us a $50 Red Lobster gift card on special occasions, along with a hand-written note.
• Long, hand-written letters of encouragement, thanks, and sometimes exhortation from my mother.
• Letters to our children from my great-aunt, who never had children of her own but took great interest in ours.
• Notes from church members, who occasionally took time to express their love, assure us of their prayers, or send a gift.
• The only letter I ever received from my father. I was struggling over a life-decision in college, and he mailed me a very short note that read, “I am praying for you. Love, Dad.”
• Love-letters between my wife and I from our days of courtship, which is now two decades ago.
• Simple notes and pictures that our children have written us during the years for birthdays, Valentine’s Day, and Father and Mother’s Days. Though often misspelled, they are treasures, like the one I have taped on my wall that says, “DIER DADDEY; I HOP YUW HAVE A GUD HAPPPEYE BERTH DAYA.  I LUV YUW DADDEY.”

Because of our digital age, we live in a day when we are losing the craft of writing letters. People text and email habitually. And there is nothing wrong with those inventions. They make life simpler in some ways, and they are convenient when I need to send a quick word.

However, texting and emailing does not adequately replace the personal note or letter—and they don’t leave treasures behind for us or our children.

BIOGRAPHIES AND LETTERS

I enjoy reading biographies. One of the main ways we learn about historical figures is from their correspondence: the letters they sent and received. We read the letters and journals of great political statesmen like George Washington, Samuel Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, of seasoned missionaries and pastors like Hudson Taylor, Mary Slessor, and George Mueller, and of outstanding thinkers and achievers like C. S. Lewis, Benjamin Franklin, and Elisabeth Elliot.  If Martin Luther King, Jr., had lived in our day, I guess his famous book would be titled Texts and Emails from Birmingham Jail. 

Donald Whitney, Professor of Biblical Spirituality at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says that most of his students say that, other than for special occasions, they have never in their life received a personal hand-written letter. Whitney says that a hand-written letter is “the height of personal touch today. It has a personal touch to it that an email doesn’t.”

An email from your mother and your bank, printed out on your printer, look the same. There is nothing personal about the white paper and black ink.

However, a card that was picked out to send just to you, or a piece of someone’s personal stationary with a note that is hand-written or typed and then signed by the sender carries personality. It’s a touch of care, concern, and love from the sender, in a way that can never be accomplished electronically.

If you don't have good handwriting, then do what I do. Type a letter and then sign it with a short handwritten note.

CREATING TREASURES

Let’s get back to writing letters and notes on cards. And let’s keep the ones we receive so our children will someday have memories they will treasure. Let’s teach our children the value of hand-writing a birthday greeting, thank-you note, or a congratulatory expression, so that they can bless the lives of others.

I still have some letters and envelopes sent to me by loved ones years ago.  When I pick them up, I remember that their hands touched that paper, wrote on it, and signed it with their pen. For the ones now in heaven, I can’t see them.  But I still feel loved by their handwritten notes sent years ago.

Today would be a good day for you to write a handwritten letter to your child. He or she will treasure it one day.


Pictures used by permission from Pixabay.

Symptoms of Disorganization

Gordon MacDonald shares the symptoms of disorganization in his helpful book Ordering Your Private World.

There came a time in my own life when I wanted to make sound decisions about the budgeting of my time, and I wanted to be free of that frantic pitch of daily life in which one is always playing catch-up. 


Symptoms of Disorganization

1)         My desk takes on a cluttered appearance. 

2)         The symptoms tend to show themselves in the condition of my car.

3)         I become aware of a diminuition in my self-esteem.

4)         There are a series of forgotten appointments, messages to which I failed to respond, and deadlines I have begun to miss.

5)         I tend to invest my energies in unproductive tasks.

6)         Disorganized people feel poorly about their work.

7)         Disorganized Christians rarely enjoy intimacy with God.

8)         The quality of my personal relationships usually reveals it.  I may become irritable.

9)         When we are disorganized in our control of time, we don’t like ourselves, our jobs, or much else about our worlds.

Time must be budgeted!  We must resolve to seize control of our time.  The disorganized person must have a budgeting perspective of time.

MacDonald’s Laws of Unmanaged Time

Law #1:          Unmanaged time flows toward my weaknesses

Law #2:          Unmanaged time comes under the influence of dominant people in my world:    

Law #3:          Unmanaged time surrenders to the demands of all emergencies

Law #4:          Unmanaged time gets invested in things that gain public acclamation

Warnings for 40-Somethings

A great fear has been at work in my mind and God has used it to arouse me to prayer.  I came across a man whom I knew years ago, a mighty man of God, and now ten years have gone and I meet him again - garrulous and unenlivened [shallow and superficial].  How many men seem to become like that after forty years of age!  The fear of sloth and indulgence has come home with a huge fear and fairly driven me to God to keep me from ever forgetting what I owe him.  - Oswald Chambers

We have observed that most people cease learning by the age of forty. By that we mean they no longer actively pursue knowledge, understanding, and experience that will enhance their capacity to grow and contribute to others. Most simply rest on what they already know. But those who finish well maintain a positive learning attitude all their lives.  - Bobby Clinton, Connecting, p. 222

Bowling for Children