Christian – Instant Coffee Wisdom

WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN?

Protection for WHO?

You may not be familiar with the word ‘fomite’. A fomite is any object that, when contaminated with infectious agents, can transfer disease. One example of a fomite is a door knob or push handle. If a sick person with a highly infectious disease touched it, you might contract that disease through contact if you unknowingly touched that same object. Young children have a tendency to touch anything they see, or worse put it into their mouth. I’m sure at one point or another when you were younger your parents yelled at you ‘don’t touch that, you don’t know where it’s been!’, or a similar warning.

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The healthier you are, the stronger your immune system tends to be, and you can fight off infection easier. Health and personal hygiene go hand-in-hand. Good hygiene should always been encouraged from an early age, as habits formed during one’s youth tend to last a lifetime. Habits are easily formed through constant repetition until they become second nature. These go for both good and bad habits. It takes discipline and diligence to improve one’s life by forming good habits and breaking bad ones. As always self-improvement begins with SELF. No one can force you do what you are unwilling to do, short of passing laws with stiff penalties. Even so, laws do not stop people from completely disregarding or willfully violating them. It’s illegal to litter, yet people throw trash in the street. It’s illegal for people not to wear seat-belts, or safety harnesses while driving automobiles in 49 of the 50 US states, yet some people choose not to do so. There are over 30,000 gun laws on the books in the USA, and there is still crime committed with guns. We don’t need ‘better laws’, we need ‘better people’. The Bible is the ultimate self-improvement book.

The Ten Commandments which are the basis for most laws in the western world appear twice in the Bible, first in Exodus 20: 1-17, and then they are restated in Deuteronomy 5:6-21. Decent law-abiding citizens are kept in check NOT by the laws on the books, but by their internal moral code.

MURPHY’S LAW

When I was in high school, my one English teacher the late Mr. Jim Murphy introduced me to a couple of ‘dangerous’ books. These were intended for mature readers, and were definitely way over the heads of most teenagers. There are even ADULTS that wouldn’t be able to handle some of the Science Fiction stories in these books. I refer to the Science Fiction anthologies Dangerous Visions, and the sequel Again, Dangerous Visions, both edited by Harlan Ellison. One of the two stories I vividly remember to this day appears in the second volume and is titled Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon by Josephine Saxton. The story involves a perfectly healthy girl who was raised by her mother free of all illness and disease. Unfortunately that is against the law on Pergamon and she is arrested and forcibly restrained and examined by a hundred physicians who mercilessly poke and prod her everywhere.

Last month in mid-March most of the USA, as well as nearly every nation on Earth began shutting down EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE that was deemed non-essential due to the world-wide pandemic COVID-19, AKA the Wuhan coronavirus, sometimes shortened to just corona. COVID-19 is a highly infectious disease, and there are various strains, seven of which have crossed over to infect humans. According to WebMD:
Scientists have divided coronaviruses into four sub-groupings, called alpha, beta, gamma, and delta. Seven of these viruses can infect people. The four common ones are:

229E (alpha)
NL63 (alpha)
OC43 (beta)
HKU1 (beta)

The three less-common ones are:

MERS-CoV, a beta virus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)
SARS-CoV, a beta virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)
SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19

Scientists are divided over whether or not COVID-19 is transmitted by airborne particles or solely by close contact or by both. According to WHO, the World Health Organization, studies to date suggest that COVID-19 is mainly transmitted through contact with respiratory droplets rather than through the air. These droplets are too heavy to remain airborne. Only tiny air particles known as aerosols remain in the air for a brief period. This type of ejaculate of respiratory particles usually occurs when someone sneezes or coughs. If you’ve ever had someone accidentally sneeze or cough on you and felt a slash of wetness, you understand what I mean. It’s common sense. You cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze, and you quarantine sick people to keep THEM from infecting healthy people. If you suspect a person is sick, you avoid contact. If YOU are sick STAY HOME. If YOU have a weak immune system, STAY HOME.

As far as how long the virus can survive outside of a host in can live:

In the air: Up to 3 hours in air particles called aerosols
On copper: Up to 4 hours
On cardboard: Up to 24 hours
On plastic: 2 to 3 days
On stainless steel: 2 to 3 days

COVID-19 IS a ‘nasty bug’, BUT it is NOT a death sentence. HEALTHY people with STRONG immune systems may get sicker than they’ve ever felt before, but will generally make a full recovery with proper treatment and care. As of this writing there have been 2,329,651 cases WORLDWIDE resulting in 160,721 deaths. In the USA, there have been 740,557 cases resulting in 38,979. To put in on a much more local level, in my home state of Pennsylvania, there are 31,731 confirmed cases, and there have been 1,102 deaths. This is ‘about’ the same number as what’s showing in California which reports 30,811 and 1,148. By comparison, the area of Pennsylvania is roughly equal to that of the nation of England, and California as about the same size as Italy. New York is the ‘problem child’ and the epicenter of the US outbreak. NY is responsible for about 1/3 of the total cases and nearly half of all the deaths due to COVID-19 in the US. Those numbers from our fourth-most populous state are 241,041 cases and 39,015 deaths. (Pennsylvania is fifth in population. New York has 19,491,339 people, Pennsylvania has 12,813,969) These numbers CHANGE every second and will probably have increased slightly by the time you finish reading this.

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President Trump is desperately trying to re-open portions of the USA on a case-by-case basis as some states like NY have been hit much harder than the virus, than say Alaska. In a press conference on Wednesday, President Trump made his position clear that he wants to get the nation back to normal and re-opened very soon, possibly before the end of this month, but he would let each state make that determination on when it should, or should not re-open. People are out of work as a result of to the shutdown. Bills need to be paid, and that requires an income. This prompted an immediate retaliation from Democrat run ‘Blue States’ like NY, and PA to issue new mandatory face-mask rules starting by or before this Monday, and a promise to veto any attempts to re-open their states.

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Unintended consequences

When you lock away a sick person, it’s quarantine. When you lock away a healthy person because they MIGHT make YOU sick, you take away THEIR freedom and THEIR rights. There is little or no evidence to suggest wearing a surgical face-mask will prevent a healthy person from getting sick. If a person wants to wear a mask because it somehow makes them feel safer, I have NO problem with that. FORCE ME to do it, and we have a problem. So until this mandate is revoked, my freedom is severely being infringed upon. This is America, NOT Communist China, and I am NOT happy.

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And what those CIVIC-MINDED people who are wearing gloves and masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 doing with their used items? Why just throwing their potentially hazardous medical waste on the ground to blow around town like little coronavirus-tumbleweeds.

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And then there’s identity. Who’s behind the mask? Anyone, EVEN dangerous criminals and sex-offenders can now move about freely with their identity concealed behind a mask. If someone robs your essential business, how do you describe the criminal. He was wearing a mask. JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE IN THE STATE.

It was a running gag at the end of every episode of The Lone Ranger that some character would say “Who was that masked man?”. The Lone Ranger character was created by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker and first aired as a radio drama on radio station WXYZ in Detroit, Michigan, in 1933 running up until 1954. There was a movie serial in 1938, and then a television show that ran from 1949-1957. Clayton Moore Portrayed the Lone Ranger alongside Jay Silverheel’s Tonto. Moore often was quoted as saying he had “fallen in love with the Lone Ranger character” and strove in his personal life to take The Lone Ranger Creed to heart. He was never seen in public without his mask until a 1979 lawsuit forced him to turn in his mask. He donned sunglasses before returning to his mask when the lawsuit was dropped three years later. Doing what you love to do causes personal happiness, and Moore loved to be the Lone Ranger and wore his mask proudly, because he wanted to. He is forever synonymous with the character he portrayed. As always, I wish you success and happiness!

JUST ANOTHER DROP IN THE BUCKET!

What’s on your list?

JUST ANOTHER DROP

“Coming up with the list is the easy part, but ticking off the list is the challenge. I love a good challenge, which is why I strongly advise everyone to come up with a bucket list. It doesn’t have to contain out of this world tasks (although going to space is on mine). But once you have written down the list, screw it, just do it!”– Sir Richard Branson

Words have power. The power to shape lives, the power to alter destinies. Often the things we say to others live on long after we have said them, or forgotten that we said them in the first place. When I was in college, a well-timed conversation with a professor altered my entire life by his simply convincing me to sign up for a class I was intending to skip. That class was The Bible as Literature, and I became a Christian as a result. Years later when I was in a dark place after a personal setback, another caring friend took time to offer sage advice and words of wisdom. Once again a well-timed conversation was enough to provide the fuel needed to ‘keep me in the race’ when I was ‘Running on Empty‘.

“The most important thing is to try and inspire people so that they can be great in whatever they want to do.” –Kobe Bryant

Just as I owe a lot to that college professor Steve Miller, I owe an equal if not greater debt to my very good friend Lawrence M. Schoen for saying what I needed to hear when I needed to hear it. I spoke with Lawrence on the phone two weeks ago, and he called me an ‘inspiration’ because of my ongoing marathon training. I found this very ironic. Lawrence is currently undergoing chemotherapy for multiple myeloma and is in isolation in a hospital cancer ward. He remains upbeat and positive despite unimaginable pain and suffering as he fights to beat this terrible illness. That outshines any source of inspiration I can provide. I wish I had half his strength, and I pray for him every day as he battles this cancer.

“Live life , live life like you’re gonna die, because you’re gonna…” – William Shatner

Life is not fair, and there are no guarantees. Whatever life tosses at you, you must face it head on, with gusto! Everyone of us is dying, but few choose to ‘live’ life, choosing instead to merely exist. In the 2007 movie The Bucket List, two men from very different walks of life meet in a cancer ward. Jack Nicholson plays Billionaire Edward Cole, and scholarly auto-mechanic Carter Chambers is played by Morgan Freeman. An unlikely friendship blossoms between the two dying men as they set out to fulfill a joint bucket list. This fictional story has its fair share of both funny and sad moments, and if you haven’t watched the film I recommend it.

Carpe diem!

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Bucket lists are supposed to be filled with important life goals one wishes to fulfill before they ‘kick the bucket’, an old slang term meaning to die. Unfortunately many people never pursue these goals, instead choosing to live a bland existence discussing pipe dreams that they will do ‘someday’. ‘Someday’ has a nasty habit of becoming NEVER very fast. Today is the first day of the rest of your life, so TODAY is the day you need to live for. Goals are always worth striving for, but they don’t just happen. They take work and time. They take planning and persistence. They take dedication and resources!

Everyone of us gets the same 24hr day to live everyday with only two exceptions, they day we are born and the day we die. Every day we waste is a day we will never get back, and no person on Earth knows how many days we have. Only God has that answer.

If you are serious about achieving your goals in life, you only need the same three resources I have been stressing to you.

Health
Wealth
Knowledge

Your health is your wealth and your wealth is your health. Those two are intertwined. Knowledge takes time to accumulate, but once again the billionaire and the beggar were both born with exactly the same amount of knowledge. If you wish to do something, you need to learn everything about it that you possibly can, correct information from trusted sources. Your life and the choices you make are ultimately up to you. Some goals are individual ones, some require teamwork and the correct partners.

Set goals, and avoid the negative!

My personal goal for 2020 is to run my first marathon in November in Philadelphia. Today February 9th, 2020 I will be running my second 10K race of the year. My goal for today is beat last month’s time. I will be trying out my new Mud Gear runner’s compression socks. I started running in 2019 and my first race ever was a 5K last April 28th. I studied the literature on running, I trained in the gym beforehand, I got sage advice from wise council. My goal then was to finish that race, hopefully not last. Last year I was DFL (last) only ONCE when I ran my first 15K. Last year I ran a dozen races, the two longest were both half-marathons in the Fall. I completed every race I ran. This year I have a total of 23 races, and the longest will be my first marathon. My goals for 2021 are even more ambitious. The point is you have to start out small, take baby-steps, and work your way up to bigger and better goals. If I would have started my first race ever as a full marathon with no preparation what-so-ever , I would probably would have landed myself in the hospital, or worse, the grave. If the plan to achieve the goal isn’t working, you change the plan, NOT the goal. And when you reach your goal, you don’t stop. You set a bigger and better goal. You keep putting drops in the bucket one by one until you fill the bucket!

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Worrying about what could go wrong is often the fastest way to kill a dream. You will never be able to live a positive life with a negative mind. Negativity is a life-sucker! That which you manifest is before you, so seek out positive sources of inspiration.

The man who first started the running and jogging craze in the USA was James F Fixx, author of the 1977 best-selling book, The Complete Book of Running. Seven years later he died of a heart attack while jogging on July 20th, 1984. He was 52. Guess what? I know lots of runners older than him who are still running, including my friend Bruce who is 76, has a replacement knee, and is still running half-marathons. There are no guarantees in life! Kobe Bryant was 41 when he died last month in a helicopter crash only 100 feet from clear skies. If you worry about dying all the time, you are not living. You are living life when you are outside of your comfort zone. A comfort zone is a nice place, but nothing grows there. So go all out and live your life to the fullest! Make the most of every minute and remember that every second is precious! As always, I wish you success and happiness!

RUNNING ON EMPTY?

Do you have what it takes?

RUNNING ON EMPTY

There are different types of fuel offered at gas stations, and each type is meant for a specific type of automobile engine. Diesel fuel has more chemical energy than gasoline, but gasoline engines cannot combust diesel fuel, so the car would stop running. The reverse situation would be similar, and would more than likely destroy the diesel engine because the gasoline would combust at improper intervals. In either case both vehicles would be going nowhere fast.

Some people also live and die by their little gas gauge. Either they fill their tank only when it’s empty, every time it hits half-full, or always fill it only when they use it with just the pennies in their pocket which they hope will be ‘enough’. The last situation is often referred to as ‘running on empty’. Every now and then, you see one of these people walking to a gas station with an empty gas can, IF they even have one.

As you travel down the proverbial road of life, you are the vehicle that gets you to your final destination. Just as there are different types of car fuel, there are FOUR different types of fuel that keep you going. How far you go in life is determined by how much ‘fuel’ you have. Are you ‘running on empty’, or do you have what it takes to go the distance?

The one who eats everything must not treat with contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not judge the one who does, for God has accepted them. –Romans 14:3

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1) Physical Fuel (AKA food) – There are seven types of nutrients that every human being needs to survive. These are: Water, proteins, carbohydrates, lipids (fats), vitamins, minerals, and dietary fiber. Depending on your body type, age, and sex, you will need different quantities of the seven nutrients at different times of the day, in differing amounts. Eating too much of the wrong foods at the wrong times will have disastrous health implications. The same can be said of not getting enough of the right nutrients in your diet.

There is treasure to be desired and oil in the dwelling of the wise; but a foolish man spendeth it up. –Proverbs 20:21

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2) Financial Fuel – Taking care of yourself requires money. There is very little in life that is free. The reality of consumerism in a capitalist society is that you get what you pay for. The higher the quality, the more expensive the cost. Professional athletes may earn millions of dollars in their respective sports, but they also send far more on maintaining and improving their physical health. More money means a better quality of life, better food, and in some cases, less stress. Here is a real life example, today I paid $90 for three pairs of socks. Socks as in what you wear on your feet. I am a runner in training for my first marathon at the end of this year. These socks are high quality compression running socks from a trusted brand, MUDGEAR. Yes, you can buy socks at the dollar store for $1, but I guarantee you that they will not be good enough for professional running.

As iron sharpens iron, So a man sharpens the countenance of his friend. Proverbs 27:16

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3) Emotional Fuel – When you feel good about yourself, there is a special type of energy generated. There is no way to explain it properly. It just radiates outward, and people respond to it. Since I began training to become a runner, I started losing weight as a result of the combination of diet and exercise programs that I was adhering to. People noticed, and I started getting compliments and praise. This of course adds fuel to fire, and I felt even better. Some people have told me that I’m an inspiration. If my example has managed to fuel the fire of another person to improve their lives, then I count that as a win. Words have power, and the right word at the proper time can make all the difference in the world. When I ran my first 5K on April 28th, 2019 I told all of my closest friends where and when the race would be. I was excited about the race, and I was also terrified because I have never done anything like that before. It was my secret hope that my friends would take this subtle hint and make a point to cheer me on at the finish line. None of my friends did. What did happen was that other runners, and officials of the race encouraged and cheered me on. And I felt empowered as I crossed that first finish line. As I continued running in more events and for longer distances, I began to make new friends in the running community who share my passion. Now these friends are waiting for me at the finish line cheering me on, and I feel amazing!

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As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. – Psalm 42:1

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4) Spiritual Fuel – As the apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the church at Philippi, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13). The Holy Bible is the inerrant word of God and is a source of incredible strength and wisdom to everyone who chooses to read and follow it. I can honestly say that I am a far better man with Jesus in my life than I am without Christ. There is power in that book and I urge you to read it and discover the truth for yourself. As always, I wish you success and happiness!

A LONG WINTER’S NAP

Wrapping up 2019

A LONG WINTERS NAP

“A Visit from Saint Nickolas” is a well-known poem written by Clement Clarke Moore in 1823. Some people refer to the poem by it’s opening line, “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”. This traditional poem was written by Moore for his children, a fairy-tale to amuse them, and he originally published it anonymously. The eight line of the poem “Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap.” As we wrap-up 2019 and put a bow on it, this is perhaps the best piece of advice I can leave you with.

I started writing my blog http://www.InstantCoffeeWisdom.com over two years ago on September 10th 2017. This is my 113th article.

The vast majority of our troubles are wealth related. Improving our wealth situation is key to improving our lives to attain success and happiness. Wealth is not only about money and finance, there are three main components of wealth .

Money is the first thing people think of. It’s nice to have, but it’s just a tool. Like any tool if you misuse it, you will break it, or hurt yourself. You must learn to use it responsibly and skillfully.
The second is your health, and more precious than silver or gold. Investing time, money, and effort in attaining the peak of physical health will do wonders for your attitude.
Last but not least, is your wealth of knowledge. The more wise you become, the greater your chances of stumbling upon the solution to whatever it is that is holding you back from achieving your dreams. Oftentimes, it is a sobering revelation to discover the greatest obstacle keeping us from accomplishing our goals is ourselves.

In three days it will be Christmas Day. Six days later it will be New Year’s Eve. The year is more or less over. Aside from a few last-minute-gift shopping, and maybe wrapping some presents, it’s all downhill from here. The hard stuff has be done, or never will be at this point. If you busted your ass this past year, take the remaining days to rest. You’ve earned your long winter’s nap. Bask in the warm glow of your accomplishments as you look back upon all you did. You earned it. 2020 is days away and you need to rest-up so that you can achieve new heights in the coming year!

On a personal note, my greatest accomplishment this past year was training to run half-marathons, something which was greatly aided by the encouragement and knowledge shared by the running community. Yes, I DID THIS, I did the work and I ran the race, but I truly believe I could not have done it without YOU backing me. I ran eleven races, everything from 5K to Half Marathons. My ‘Twelfth race of Christmas’ will be the Kris Kringle 5 Mile Run in Leesport PA on December 29th 2019. In 2020 I plan to run twice as many races as I continue to train towards running full marathons, and eventually ultra marathons. A side effect result of my running is that I have encouraged others to do likewise. A year ago, I could not have done this, now I can. You change the world by your example, not your opinion. Be the change you wish to see.

On the flip side, if your had a lack-luster year, take a long hard look in the mirror. Don’t play the blame game, OWN IT. If you did little or nothing, YOU did little or nothing. The one thing we all get each day is the same 24hrs. The wealthy and the poor, the successes and failures, and the happy and the not. If you’re not an example, then you become a cautionary tale. Don’t be ‘THAT GUY’. We all have a ‘THAT GUY’, someone we know in life who did nothing with their life, and we can’t fathom why they ‘let themselves go’. Everyone wants to be around successful happy people. Their positive energy draws folks like a magnet. Like the angel Clearance reminded George Bailey in the film ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’, no man is a failure if he has friends. But don’t despair, God allows U-turns. Christmas Day is in three days. Enjoy the wonder and beauty of the season, and take a long winter’s nap. Rest up, in six days it will be New Year’s Eve. Pick yourself up, dust off your failures and start again. 2020 is a whole new year. Don’t waste it! Learn from your mistakes and try something different. If you don’t know where to start, I have written 112 other articles covering just about every aspect pertaining to self-improvement. The one thing have been doing ever January 1st for years is I read the Gospel of John. It’s one of the 66 books of the Bible. Christmastime is inseparable from Christ, and there are many sources of inspiration and encouragement to be found in the pages of the Holy scripture. I could not have reached the height I have attained without Jesus. God is good, always!

http://www.InstantCoffeeWisdom.com will return in January 2020 with new content. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and as always I wish you success and happiness.

SPARE TIME?

Living in the Moment!

SPARETIME

“We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.” – Charles Bukowski

There are at least two things that differentiate the highly successful individual from the unsuccessful crowd. Firstly, they handle their money quite differently than the average person. Instead of spending every cent the moment they receive it, they budget their money, save much of it, and invest. Secondly they do the same thing with their time.

You may be familiar with the old adage ‘time is money’. In a very real sense it is. When you work at a job, you get paid for your time. When you invest over time, you get a return on your investment. In fact, time is more important than money because money can be replaced, but time cannot. Every moment wasted is gone forever. Unsuccessful people usually whine about how unfair life is because they don’t have as much money as Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. Here’s the main point. Rich or poor, Successful or not, every single person on Earth gets the exact same number of minutes each year. 525,600 minutes each and every year, with two exceptions. The year we are born, and the year we die. How we spend that year is up to us.

When I started writing my weekly blog InstantCoffeeWisdom over two years ago, the first article was The 52 Week Challenge. It was a weekly savings plan to be done over the course of one year, the end result being $1350.00 saved to be used as you wish. Every year, I take a great vacation at the shore in Ocean City MD, that is my decision. I know many people who always whine that they never have money for vacation, so the first year I focused on microeconomics (personal finance) to help demonstrate ways to budget, cut expenses and hopefully achieve that goal set by The 52 Week Challenge. The second year, I focused on the bigger picture, exploring macroeconomics, and explaining how religion and politics are interconnected to economics, and why you should have a firm grasp of all three. Hopefully you were able to understand my points, see where I was leading you, and you were able to reach the same conclusions. As I embark on my third year of blogging, I’m going to focus on the topic of time. As I already stated, time is money, and we each have EXACTLY the same time each day, week, month, and year, despite financial disparities. How we spend our time is entirely up to us.

When I was a still just a young boy, the biggest time waster was the TV. I had family members whose entire lives were lived vicariously through the television. As a child, it was my ‘babysitter’. Plop me down in front of the set with a plate of snacks and I was good to go. My 77 year-old aunt does nothing but watch TV all day, or sleep. It doesn’t seem like much of a life to me, but she’s 77 and you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I got rid of my TV a decade ago. I’ve saved thousands of dollars over the years by ‘cutting the cord’. If I do decide to watch some program, almost everything is available online and I can watch it when it’s convenient. Although the letters TV are an abbreviation for Television, it should stand for TIME VACUUM because this activity is just a waste of time that can suck away hours of your life each day if you let it. Now the biggest waste of time and productivity is the mobile smart phone.

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The smart phone puts the sum total of human knowledge in the palm of your hands. You can load it’s memory with apps to help you track everything financial or health related. It is a tool that in the right hands can increase productivity and knowledge, and likewise can kill it in the wrong hands. In my youth, phones connected people. Now they divide people. The typical smart phone user touches his or her phone 2,617 time every day, according to a study by research firm Dscout. Extremely addicted individuals use it twice as much as that. The phone is NOT reality. When you spend your time looking at your phone instead of living your life, you are wasting your life. You are cutting yourself off from life and missing all the wonderful things the world has to offer when you bury your face in your phone.

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Human lives are terribly short. We live at best about 120 years, but that is not guaranteed. There are preemie babies that live a few hours, or a few days. My father died when he was 57. I missed out on all those great father-son moments growing up without a father as a result. We are ephemeral, a vapor, and but a blink of the eye of God. We live our lives moment by moment, stringing each moment to the next like pearls on a string. We should do our best to make those moments shine. Time cannot be replaced when it is gone, and neither can people. The greatest gift you can give a person is your time, and the second greatest gift you can give is your undivided attention.

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One of my close friends has cancer. I pray for him every day. I hope he beats it, but ultimately that’s in God’s hands, and worrying about it won’t change that fact. If God wants us here on Earth, it’s where He wants us to be. No man can know the mind of God, but He’s in control even if it doesn’t make sense to us now. It is up to us to use our God-given free will to be stewards of our resources, which includes not just money and possessions, but our time and our health as well. Make every moment count and interact with people instead of tuning out the world. As always, I wish you success and happiness!

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WHAT’S YOUR LEGACY?

Is the mark you make ‘spot on’?

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“To a father, when a child dies, the future dies; to a child when a parent dies, the past dies.”— Red Auerbach

Last weekend was Father’s Day in the USA. Honestly it’s not my thing. My father died when I was a young boy, and as yet I still have no children of my own. The commercial holiday to honor fathers and fatherhood is celebrated on the third Sunday in June. It was first celebrated in 1910, but not signed into law as a permanent observance until 1972 when 37th President Richard M. Nixon signed the bill into law.

One thing that irritates me to no end is when pet owners refer to their pets as their ‘babies’ or refer to themselves as ‘fur parents’. This form of self-delusion has been propitiated by various animal rights groups, environmentalist groups, and even pro-abortion groups as a way of discouraging child birth because the Earth is allegedly overpopulated by humans who are supposedly destroying the environment and killing ‘Mother Earth’. The Earth is NOT your Mother, and your pets are not your children. Pets can be valuable members of your family, and be loyal companions who display an unusually human level of behavior and intelligence from time to time, but they will never BE human. Humans are not evolved animals.

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We are all children of God, and by God I refer to the one true God, Jesus Christ, who created all of us in His image for His purpose. We were created to be fruitful and multiply. Children are a gift from God, and our children are a living legacy.

“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that you’ll do things differently.” — Warren Buffett

The word LEGACY can mean either money or property that you receive from someone after they die, or something that is a part of your history or that remains from an earlier time. In other words your birthright that is passed on to you, which you in turn will pass on to another after you have departed this mortal coil. Property is not just material goods, either but can also refer to intellectual property. When you write a book, paint a painting, film a movie, or teach a course you are passing on knowledge and inspiration to others. In the past, you really needed to shine bright to leave a mark in the history books and be remembered. Unless we are extraordinary leaders of men, every single one of us is about fifty years from being forgotten. When the last person who knew us passes on, we too are forgotten.

The higher you are held in regard, the further your impact will go, which is why your reputation is paramount. If you have a reputation for honesty and integrity, people will more readily believe you and follow your lead. Your enemies will do everything in their power to trash your reputation, but the truth will always be true no matter how many lies are told about it.

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. – Proverbs 22:6 King James Version (KJV)

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In today’s digital world, nothing is forgotten, but the amount of information being generated is staggering. Information can become buried and lost virtually forever until someone uncovers and shares it. As data ‘facts’ and fake news are spread like wild-fire in nanoseconds around the globe, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd. The important thing to keep in mind on is that both sides playing the game of kings for global domination want to influence you and sway you to their side. This is why fathers, and husbands, and the traditional family unit have been constantly being assaulted by the left. When you destroy the family unit, you can reshape society into any insane caricature you can dream up. This is why Christianity and Jesus and the Bible are all despised by the left, and all haters of truth. This is why President Donald J. Trump is constantly being slandered by the liberal media. Both parents (and fathers especially) play an important part in preparing the next generation and preventing them from engaging in stupid and self-destructive actions. Turning 18 may legally grant you certain rights held by adults, but it does not make you an adult. The next generation is the future, and freedom is always one generation away from extinction. If you love your children, teach your children well. As always, I wish you success and happiness!

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