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.
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