RAGU
December 15, 2020
As
the seventeenth anniversary of my death and retirement from the
working class approaches, I have to wonder why I am still here. Have
I lived this long to die of Covid. The last five years I have taken
care of my twin great grand-daughters five days a week. Actually the
epidemic has given me back my life.
Sometimes
I like to take a look back and see what I have done in the past. As
the New Year approaches I realized I will be entering my tenth year
of sharing stories on my blog. I like to think my writing has matured
a bit. From March 2011 when I started till the fall of 2015 my goal
was quantity. To put out as much as I could put out. A severe battle
with a case pneumonia changed my attitude. I really wondered if I was
going to make it. It was during that episode that I had a chance to
sit down and reflect on my writing. I decided quality was a more
important issue.
I
never pictured myself as being a Hemingway or a Mark Twain, but their
styles influenced how I tried to write. One other writer challenged
me with his style. Will Rogers had a down to earth type of writing
that said it like it was. That has been my goal. I want to tell it
like it is, and share the experiences from my life that might help
someone else avoid my mistakes in life. It had been my goal to share
those experiences in a book. Recently I realized over the last ten
years I had unintentionally written the book. It is contained in
forty-five posts on my blog. There are a total of two hundred seventy
posts on my blog.
My
goal now is to make a blog post with links to all the stories. Right
now I would title the book Ragu, it is in there. So if something
happens to me before I get that done, the stories are in my blog.
When I started I wrote a lot on how to survive hard times
financially, trucking stories, political views and opinions, and how
my faith had guided me through life. So if you skip the first three
topics and search out the remaining stories you will get to read my
book.
In
May of 2012 I went to my
first writers conference. It was the Blue Ridge Mountain
Christian Writer’s Conference and I literally stumbled onto it on
the internet.
For
years I subscribed to Writer’s Digest. Each month I scanned the up
and coming writers conferences across the USA looking for one I felt
I would be comfortable going to. I finally found one that appealed to
me. It was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I got to the point I had a
couple weeks in May left to mail in the deposit for the June
conference. That is when I found the BRMCWC. It was only a week away.
It had a lot of benefits that outweighed the Wyoming conference, It
was less half the drive and it included meals, room and classes for
less than Wyoming wanted just for the conference.
It
meant I had to hustle to get my stuff together to go, but I got it
done and it was a Blessing and a half. I ended up going their in
2012, 2013 and 2014. I learned a lot and really
enjoyed the conferences, but in 2015, The link will take you to the
story of how that turned out.
In
2015 I became convicted that while I loved going to the conferences,
that was not what God was calling me to do. It was when I read 1st
Timothy, Chapter 5-Verse 8… “But if any provide not for his own,
and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith,
and is worse than an infidel.”
The
word infidel threw me as I did not know what it meant, but upon
looking it up, it opened my eyes. It is a person that does not know
God. While I had always professed that I did, I was not living it. My
twin
great-grand-daughters
mother was having a hard time finding a job and living in government
housing. She could find a job, but the fees for babysitting took most
of what she made and it was cheaper to stay home. Being convicted by
the Word, I volunteered to take care of the girls. My wife said I was
nuts, but my heart told me it was the right thing to do. We
have been through head start, kinder-garden and now are in the third
grade.
Everything
had gone smooth till today. Even when mywife
went to Texas for a month at a time, somehow everything always seemed
to work out. This morning on the way to school my 2004 Honda gave up
the ghost. On the
highway right in front
of the school.
As I was parked in the highway in front of the school I had the girls
walk the final one hundred yards thru the grass to school. A sheriffs
deputy and a school guard came and helped me and they
towed my van off the highway and into the school parking lot. Finally
ended up calling a
wrecker. The
driver was really nice
bought me back to my
house and here I sit.
With
everything happening in the world today, or should I say yesterday.
The first vaccine, the Electoral College, Barr stepping down and the
Covid death toll reaching the three hundred thousand mark. I decided
to make this post and at least those who follow my writing would know
there was a method to my madness. Will anybody follow up and try to
find the forty-five stories I don’t know. As
I write a lot on the end times,
based on sixty plus years of reading the Bible. I just discovered
that the Star
of Bethlehem is supposed to be visible on the 21st
of December.
If
you read my testimony, I have always thought I would be here for the
second coming. If I am not I realize it doesn’t matter. At several
points in the last six years I really wondered if I would make it. I
even went through a three year period of being on insulin as a Type
II diabetic, but changing my diet and loosing weight gave me a new
lease on life, or at least made it more enjoyable.
The
last three years have also seen me become addicted to a new hobby,
raising Koi fish. My last vacation centered around going to fish
farms and seeing how they are grown and kept. YouTube provides me
hours of entertainment. My pond is already dug and now it is just a
matter of waiting for warmer weather to put in the liner. It has
gotten so out of hand I had to build a small pond to make more room
in my aquarium for the fish I bought anticipating having a pond.
So
Lord Willing my next post will be to put links to the forty-five
stories all in one place.