Wisdom, Success, and Happiness?

Recently I was asked the questions; “            What is wisdom?”  “How can I be successful?”  and “How can I be happy with all the problems and pain that I have?”

I really didn’t realize that anyone viewed me as wise, successful, and happy. 

After retiring from my position with the Federal Government I became a stay at home dad with two grade school age children that I home school.

My income is modest to say the least. I don’t have any close long time friends that I stay in touch with.

All of my blood relatives live two thousand miles away so we seldom see each other.

I have chronic pain and nerve damage resulting from a fight I lost with a rattlesnake.

I have major pain and fatigue daily and I struggle to do even simple tasks in my life.

So, why are these people coming to me and asking how to be wise, successful, and happy?

Recently, our family was visiting my wife’s relatives who live nearby.

Some of her family members who were going though a crisis asked her, “How is your family so happy and care free all the time with all the problems you have?”

The answer to these questions in my opinion, are answered by Jesus in the Holy Bible.

Jesus said, “I am the truth, and the life, and the way.”  He wasn’t just trying to be poetic when he said this. He was stating that he was the true way to wisdom, success, and happiness.

Jesus was God born into flesh, who came to teach us how to live and to also save us from Satan and ourselves.  And I didn’t just make this up. Jesus said it himself.

Not everyone agrees with this, but because he said it himself, and because he said this that leaves us with only two possible points of views. 

We have to choose, one, that he was God in the flesh aka, “The Son of God.”

 Or, two, he was a raving lunatic, and the greatest con artist that ever lived.

So if God loves us and wants the best for us why do we have so much pain and problems in our lives?

Well, Jesus said to rejoice when we have problems because it is an opportunity express out faith and trust.

Why do we want to express our faith and trust?

Because it shows God that we really believe he exists and that we want him to intervene in our lives.

God loves us and desires to bless us in every way, but because we have been given free choice in our lives we have to ask him to intervenes in our lives.  

So how we view problems and respond to them either “Makes us or breaks us.”

The way we decide to look at our crisis determines whether we will be happy and successful or defeated and depressed.

We have been blessed with the freedom to choose.  It’s all up to us. 

We can choose to have the point of view that God loves us and that he is working for our happiness and success.

Or we can choose the point of view that only we are in control of what happens and only we can change it.

Again, God offers his help to us, but we have to ask him to come and intervene in our lives.

And when you have that kind of connection to that kind of “power” how can you not be happy?

Praying For A Computer?

OK, update in Paradise. The Apple computer has stopped working again, after we spent over $200 upgrading the memory. Now everybody has lost their faith “again”.  Well, me anyways. Actually, the wife and kids are still dancing around singing, laughing, and just flat out being ecstatically happy.

I mean, I don’t get it?  How can they always be so happy all the time. And the worse the “tragedy is the happier they are. What am I doing wrong?

I mean, I have peace, but I just can’t seem to get to that “shout to the heavens for joy” thing.

They think the bigger the problem, the bigger the blessing is that’s on the way. (And their always right). 

I’m singing, “I think it gonna rain”, and their singing “children, don’t stop dancing”. -      

Am I defective, demon possessed, psychotic?  What is it about my legalism and basic common sense that keeps me from crossing over to that kind of belief?  

Why can’t I be the one that “Steals the Sun from the Sky” and the one to “Fly from the inside”?

OK, I’m calling a Priest tomorrow to come over and straighten this thing out.  

Or, maybe I’ll follow advice I one heard in a song, “He’ll break open the skies to save those who call out Him name”.  “The one the wind and the wave obey is strong enough to save you”

If anyone is reading this, all ideas and opinions are welcome. 

Meanwhile, it’s back again to Paradise until the next exciting episode.

Love & Peace, Always……

Jamesf569

Lessons We Learn From Children:

We had a major catastrophe in our home recently.  My wife’s precious Apple computer stopped working (lol).  Well, it was a major catastrophe for her.  She teaches graphics, web design, animation, and a bunch of other stuff, but it’s over my head.

Anyways, she had taken the computer to school to have the support tech. division look at it and gotten some bad news. They said the hard drive was scratched and some other things that I don’t really understand, but in short, the computer was trashed.

I tried to console my wife with “Maybe God has a plan. Good will come out of this.  You know, the useless things men say when their trying to fix a problem, but we usually make it worse.

Then my 14 year old son says to me, “Dad, why don’t we just pray and ask God to fix it?” I explained to him that God would love to fix our computer for us be he has given us a brain, the ability to reason, and talent so we can do it ourselves.  I told him, “In a way he does fix it by giving us everything we need to do it ourselves.

So days went by while the wife and I used our talent, logic, and our great ability of our minds to try and fix the computer, but as the repair tech. had said, “It was trashed.”

So, we gave up, and moved on to other priorities that needed our attention.

That evening, our 14 year old came to us and said, “Your computers fixed mom, if you want to use it.” We looked at each other and then slowly walked to our office room. And there it was, booted up and working like it was brand new.

I asked my son, “What did you do to fix it?” “Nothing” he said.  “I just prayed that God would fix it for mom as a mother’s day present. Then I just turned it on and it worked.”

Lesson 1 to dad: God cares even about the little things in your life.

Lesson 2 to dad: “For nothing is impossible with God.” (Luke 1:37)

I began immediately looking for my favorite fishing reel that had broken down and quit working, but then I heard a voice in my head say, “Don’t test me!”

Got "Pain" Anyone?

To anyone who’s reading this post, hello, it’s nice to meet you. I just felt like there is someone out there who is going through some tough times with pain, and I wanted to write this to you. So if your that person, I hope this little unknown blog helps a little.

 I know when your going through bad days, bad weeks, bad months, ultimately it turns into bad years, you just want to “Curse God and Die.” 

If I may, I’d like to share a story that helped me a bit “during one of those could die days.”

During the last 10 plus years I’ve been cursed with chronic pain, I have done a lot of “soul searching.”  Reading the Bible, reading every book, every study done on pain, you name it and I’ve probably read it. But some books, scriptures and writings have been lost, cut out or hidden for thousands of years and we are just now finding some of them.

One of these “lost books” is the Gospel of Thomas, which is the book this story comes from. 

There was a woman who had the disease of leprosy since she was born. She had heard about Jesus and so she went on the search for him.  She finally found Jesus and she fell to her knees begging him to heal her. Then, Jesus asked her, “What have you learned from your sickness and pain all these years?”  She answered, “What did I learn? I have been sick and in pain since the day I was born. I have had no friends, no teachers, no anything, because people flee as soon as they see I have leprosy. Even my own family has kept me hidden and cut off from the world because they are so ashamed of me. I have never received a kind word, never been shown love, never had a day that I haven’t cried from the pain that tortures me each day. I don’t even look human any longer. How can you ask me “What have you learned?”

Then Jesus replied, “Then I will not heal your infirmity now. Not until it has served its purpose.   

Can you imagine being this girl and hearing Jesus say this to you?

Well, Jesus said the same thing to me before I had heard this story.  So you can imagine my shock and reaction when he confirmed it through this story.

During the last 10 or so years that I’ve been ill, I have died a couple of times, weighed almost 500 lbs, weighed under 100 lbs, been confined to wheelchairs, been fed through tubes connected to bags I had to carry around in a backpack, (you get the idea) and the only answer to Jesus question that I can come up with is, “It’s not about me.”  A hundred people could come up with that answer and each person mean a different thing. 

To cut this long story short, I’m still on that quest of trying to break it down and define exactly what “It’s not about me,” means to me.

The last time I died, I fought not to come back.  Heaven is beautify and more importantly painless.  But I was told there were things I needed to do before I get to retire there. That’s when I was told “It’s not just about you.” If it was all a hallucination, it was a hallucination meant to help me cope.  But all other evidence tells me otherwise. 

And even though I think I know what I have learned means, I still haven’t applied it to my life yet. (Cause I’m still battling within my on whether I’m just crazy or blessed.

Hope I didn’t freak you out too much. 

And I hope it helps.

We all love you here!  And we’re all cheering and rooting for you.

Hang in there……..you’re not alone.

Just Another Mother's Day in Paradise

How do you really show honor and gratitude to a mom, wife, lover, best friend, the list can go on and on.  

My kids decided to surprise mom with a different, non-traditional kind of mother’s day gift. What did they get her?

They surprised her with a brand new deluxe hard shell guitar case, for her hello kitty electric guitar, (which they got her for Christmas).

I wish I had been ready with a camera so I could have taken a picture of her face when they presented it to her.

Mom acted gracious and thankful, as always, but I could tell we had missed the point completely.  My feeling was confirmed when mom returned from work that day with a bouquet of flowers she bought for herself on the way home.  

Sometimes men (often) and children can totally miss the point.

The kids and I had a secret conversation/meeting, and decided from this day on we would stick to the traditional gifts, such as making homemade cards, writing poems, songs, or letters, and giving lots of hugs and kisses from now on.  

And I learned a valuable lesson.  You can’t show love and gratitude with high priced gifts and “things” the world shows value for.  The true gifts of precious value are things you can’t see with your eyes.

To make up for our insensitivity, we all voted to go a cook out at the in-laws house which we always hate.  But for mom’s special day, we would do anything, because mom is our whole world.

Nothing or no one could ever replace mom.  She is the air we breathe, and we know God sent her to us from heaven above.  

Jesus is the center of our lives and mom sits right below him.  As a matter of fact, if God ever sent a female Jesus to earth, she would be just like mom.  And that’s not just our opinion. All of her students at the college where she works and all of her co-workers say the same thing.  

Maybe it seems that way because she lets Jesus live through her so freely.  

Whatever it is, we don’t want it to change.  

We love you mom! 

We adore you mom! 

Please don’t ever change!

The Brain Fog Express

About 10 years ago I got into a fight with a rattlesnake while working on my back yard here in Houston, TX.  Well, I may have won the fight, but I lost the battle.  Because of that fight I ended up retiring early from my job and becoming a stay at home dad. 

 The results of the bites has caused severe chronic pain, CFS, neurological  damage, fibromyalgia and extreme “brain fog”(among other things). 

 Yeah, I have some bad brain fog also.  But for me it's kind of a blessing. Sometimes when I get anxious, the kids are loud, the wife is yapping, I'm tempted to shout out some (not nice words). But because of my brain fog, I lock up and can't remember those bad, hurtful, words that I used to shout out.  My brain gets locked up.  Then when I'm trying to come up with something bad to say, I get tickled and begin laughing.  Soon, the whole family is splitting open laughing (even though the may not know what their laughing about).  Does God know what he does or what.  Yeah, things are bad here, but God knows how to take a bad thing and make it good (if we will let him).  

We may be disabled by the worlds standard, but we can be more enabled to do things even better than before out disability(s), if we let Him.