Life goes on

I'm no longer updating this blog because I left teaching in 2010.

book planning

Musings about writing a book. Musings directed at the LORD, God Almighty, and the Son of God, and the Comforter.

The starting place: God, the Three, so loved the people of the world that the LORD gave His Son as a sacrifice to atone for the rebellion of the people, and whoever truly believes that this is a fact will not experience eternal death.

When choosing to spend time on writing, one must write what is uppermost in the mind's priority list. What is most important to spend time writing about? As I consider this choice now, because I must, I realize that by testing my thoughts for their relative importance, the fact of Jesus' sacrifice hits the top of the list. I must write about this first because in the constant human search for meaning, this fact is the one that all questions of meaning depend on. It is the only fact that contains unalterable and reliable meaning in this world.

As a fact by itself, unsupported by its context, the sacrifice of Jesus' life doesn't deliver meaning to human understanding. The context is a story, with a main plot and a myriad subplots. The life of every human being is a minor, but ever present, ever important subplot of the story of Jesus' sacrifice. The movements and developments of human groups, so difficult to define in history but remembered anyway, are the major subplots. The exposition of the story begins outside of this world and before its human history, and it ends outside of this world and after human history.

The story begins in "the heavens."

Howard's End

Sitting in the dark, watching Looney Tunes on YouTube, my fingernails need trimming. It's Howard Hughes all over again.

Lead, Follow, or Let Go of the Windshield Wipers!

I stole these bumper stickers

"Hokey Pokey Anonymous: a place to turn yourself around"

"Honk if you have poor impulse control"

"Guns don't kill people. Monkeys kill people."

My days -- just like the stock market's performance

You know what the graph of the daily ups and downs of the stock market looks like. It's a spiky line. In my Mac dashboard widget, I can look at the spiky line for the day, the week, the month, six months, a year, and two years. What I would like to track is the quality of my days in a spiky line.

Of course, one has to choose a factor or a group of factors to index every day, and I have contemplated what kind of data I am most interested in tracking. Is it the phenomenon of having great variations in sociability, or the variety of physical states of well-being (and absence thereof), or the sense of self-confidence going up and down? Is it the gross daily time management data, on a numerical scale? Perhaps the ratio of sleep hours to one or more of these factors? And then there may be an aggregate of all of these and more, melded into a mental well-being index. That would be exciting to follow.

What to call it? The Tim Lale domestic average? The Tim Lale Mental Health Exchange index? The Ooltewah Loonie count?

The long-term effect of collecting the data and graphing it will be similar to the historical data of the stock exchange. It might tell something important, but no one really knows what it is. But for some reason, I like looking at it. I look at where I've been and how the days have gone, and I think to myself, Yep.

daily 3

The Lord bless you and keep you.
The Lord make His face shine upon you and give you peace forever.

If any of you lacks wisdom, ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault.