Do you suffer from a "Drug Problem?"

There must be a sea of ink written about the true meaning of Christmas in newspaper columns by now. I am going to resist my natural inclination to continue this tradition, and instead write about investing. Not a 401K or an IRA account, but the investments we make in ourselves, in our relationships, and the currency for this type of investing, your time.

If your IRA is anything like mine, the past few years have seen the balance in my account go up and down, and down, and then down some more. But what about your spiritual account? How is it doing?

If you have not thought about your spiritual account in a while, or even contemplated having one, you may want to use this Christmas season to do a little internal audit.

In your daily life, how often do you think about spiritual matters? Are you making any deposits in your spiritual account? Is your spiritual account overdrawn? I know mine can be. It seems when I get up in the morning, I immediately start thinking about my problems, or things at work, or even looking forward to the weekend ahead. My mind starts grinding away in the here and now. Don't get me wrong, there are some here and now issues that do take careful consideration and events that need planning, but if I spend all my time wrapped up in these worldly matters, where does that leave my relationship with God?

Wouldn't it be better to start your day, everyday, with a spiritual jump start? I'm not talking about an hour on your knees in prayer, although the benefit of that one hour would be paid back ten-fold if we would make that big an investment, but let's start small. Let's start with that walk to the shower, or pouring that first cup of coffee, or whatever makes up your normal routine. How about this as a very small, first step. Give thirty seconds of your time to acknowledge God, and the blessing in your life. Then another thirty seconds to pray for the coming day, and for the insight and direction in facing the day. That's it, just one minute, about the time it takes to make toast, but that minute could make a tremendous difference in the way you go through your day.

Once you start investing into your spiritual account, even in a small way, you can start looking at investing a little more currency in your account. How about an hour or so on Sunday? That's right, I'm talking about church. Okay, I know I am going to lose many of you right there, but stay with me, there are many wonderful churches in our area. Find a place that meets your needs, a place where they teach the Bible in a relevant way, in a way that speaks to you. Find a church with music you like and friendly people who you would want to get to know. If the first one you check out doesn't feel right, check out another one.

This weekly, corporate worship, meaning large group worship, is essential to your spiritual growth. The personal relationship you have with God is the most important, but being part of a larger group of believers, people you can lean on, learn from, and serve with is a big part of developing your faith. In many local churches, they have small-group Bible studies, they can be a great way to dig into your faith. I love my small group, they are wonderful folks who have become great friends to my family.

I know, I know, some of you have a "drug problem," you were drug to church every Sunday as a kid and hated every minute of it. It can leave a bad taste that last a lifetime. I understand this, but please, give church another chance. You may be surprised what you find there. Hey, they let me in, and if they let me in, they will let anyone in. It's not about being perfect, or about judgment, or guilt, it's about second chances and third chances. It's about love and grace. God's love and grace.

In this Christmas season, I would like to remind you that while the world likes to measure our success by our bank statement, the size of our house, or the car we drive, these things are purchased with cash. They can come, and they can go just as easy. The investments I am talking about, these spiritual investments, grow in a direct correlation to how much time we invest in them. I think spending time with God is the best investment you can make. It makes your faith stronger, it makes the relationship with your family stronger, and it keeps you focus on the things that truly matter.

Time is our greatest currency, and no one knows just how much of it they will have. How are you spending yours?

Here is hoping you and yours a very, merry Christmas.

When the world won't stop

Tomorrow, the sun will rise. Just as it has for eons, just like it did today. The world will awake to another day, and people will stumble into their routines and their busy lives as if nothing happened. People will walk from the parking lot to their offices, check their email, say hello to their co-workers and finish that second cup of coffee. Just as if nothing happened. How could they know, how could they know this is not just another day?

For you, this has been the day that you never thought could come. It is a day that doesn't seem real, but it is, it is all too real. It is the most painful day you have ever experienced. The most painful thing you can even imagine. The loss of a child.

Your world, as normal as it ever seemed just a few days ago, is gone. Gone forever. It has been replaced with sorrow, anger, doubt, and an empty feeling in the middle of you that you cannot seem to fill. In that void are phone calls you never thought you would have to make, and decisions you never thought you would have to decide.

Friends and family want to help, but they can't fix what needs fixing, they can't heal what is hurting. No one can make this right, not this. You feel like you life will never be right again.

All you want is for the world to stop turning, for time to stop, just for a few days, just for a few hours, just until you can get your head around this terrible thing. But you can't, you can never understand this. Why? Why now, why him, why so young? There are only question, no answers.

People will say that as time passes, the sorrow will slowly go away; and it will, to a certain point. That deep, immediate sorrow will diminish over time, only to be replaced with a longing for what could have been, what might have been. A life that touches yours at such a base level, at such a elemental level, will stay with you forever. This will be the day you measure ever other day against.

Every joy, and there will be joy in your life again, will be measured against this terrible low. Every low, and you will have your share of those too, will also be measured against this day. But that is for another day. .

Forgive the sun for rising today, it does not understand. Forgive the world for going about its day, the world does not know about your loss. Forgive you friends and family for not knowing what to say, or what to do to help you. Forgive God, this was not His doing.

It may not seem like it right now, but you will get through this, even when all you want to do is cry. So go ahead, we will be crying alongside you.


For Rendell and Jasmine, in memory of Esius.

Hide the decline

With the UN's Copenhagen climate change summit fast approaching, how about this for an inconvenient truth, the "settled science" of man-made global warming is unraveling because the scientist have been cooking the books.

How many times have we been told in the past decade if we don't act today, not next week or next year, we will have gone over the tipping point and the earth would be irreversibly destroyed by global warming? We should be cooked to medium-well right now if these predictions were accurate, but they are not. Just in case no one has told you, and it is a pretty fair bet they haven't, the global temperature has actually gone down in the past decade.

How is this possible? China is firing up two power plants each week, and building them for nations all over Asia. Eighty percent of China's power comes from coal, and coal is evil, right? Didn't I read in Tom Friedman's Hot Flat and Crowded, that when we put carbon into the atmosphere the earth gets warmer, and that is indisputable? Hmm.

Did we all stop driving cars 1998? Did we stop burning coal, cutting down rain forests and all go vegan in the late nineties? It must be Bush's fault somehow; he hates polar bears you know.

For all the "settled science" out there, have you noticed that in the past few years the new buzzword for the environmental crowd is now climate change, not global warming? The high priests of environmental science had to stop using global warming as a means to scare us. It is pretty hard to scare people when your global warming conference has to be canceled due to a blizzard.

So why has the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) been hiding the decline in global temperatures and destroying the raw data? Cold, hard, cash. Your cash. If you haven't figured this out yet, the whole climate change scare is a money play, plain and simple. Carbon credits, carbon taxes, Cap and Trade, if you just listen to the folks at the forefront, they want to use global warming to create the largest redistribution of wealth in history. The idea of carbon trading was created with the help of Ken Lay. Remember Ken Lay, from Enron?

Many smart people, with good intentions, have been snookered into believing that driving your car, mowing your yard with a gas powered mower, buying a new HDTV, and using incandescent light bulbs are equivalent to drowning polar bear cubs with your bare hands. Don't worry, there are actually more polar bears on the earth today than there were 30 years ago, but the global warming crowd suppressed that information too.

So where do we go from here? Good question. First, let us get scientific with our science. In science, I was always led to believe you go in with a few assumptions, and you let the data lead you to the facts, whether they support your assumptions or not. However, climate change science seems to have become more of a religion than a scientific pursuit.

Hey, let's invent the "carbon footprint" to make people feel guilty about living their lives and ignore that gigantic ball of burning gas at the center of our solar system. Let's not talk about the reduction in solar radiation in the past decade, we can't tax the Sun, we can only tax people.

There is an unlimited amount of grant money, publicity, Academy Awards and Nobel prizes out there for anyone who can write a research paper claiming humans, and more specifically Americans, are causing the earth to warm. If you produce a study saying the only way to fix this mess is some type of Cap and Trade scheme, well then, you get on CNN and the Today show. If you actually follow the data and find there are many other factors that affect the global temperature, then you are labeled a climate change skeptic.

Look, I believe the earth's temperature could start warming back up this year. It could also decline for another decade, or another century. The only truly settled science is this; the earth has been much warmer than it is right now, and it has been a lot colder. The earth's climate changes, and it will continue to change, no matter how many awards Al Gore receives.

Black Friday

Thankful for Thanksgiving

In the days when personal computers were the size of an American Tourister suitcase, I remember taking one of the first online personality tests. My friends answered the questions on my survey first, and the results did not reflect my personality at all. So I answered the questions, and we all agreed that the personality profile was much more accurate. The ability to be honest with one's self is important in many aspects of life. We have such an ability to deceive ourselves, as well as the rest of the world; it's amazing we are able to function at all.

Of all my quirky personality traits, and I know it sounds strange, but I am grateful for my sense of gratitude. I am not sure how much of these traits are learned behavior or if it's just how we were made, but I think it must be a bit of both. I remember back in my younger years, I took many things for granted. I expected that things should always go my way and I would become upset or depressed if things did not work out the way I planned. The more success I achieved, the more I thought I deserved, and the more I wanted.

It is so easy to become complacent with our current situations in life. Our job, our spouse, our children, our health, everything that makes up our life right now, as mundane an unglamorous as it seems, are the very things for which we should be grateful. Don't believe me? What if they were all taken away from you tomorrow? Somewhere, maybe just down the street, someone is going through that very situation right now.

How many of us just expect to have our job waiting for us when we show up? How many of us have walked into our place of employment only to be told that we need to go home because our job had been eliminated? Been there, done that, walked out with a cardboard box with my personal belongings. Talk about a bad day.

Now you may be thinking, I wish I could get away from everything in my life. I hate my job, my spouse, my kids are brats and if I could walk away, I would. The world is full of people who have done that, only to find in a few short years they are stuck in another job they hate, with a new spouse they can't get along with and kids that are driving them nuts. Maybe the problem is they can't look past their problems to see the blessing in their lives.

As I sit down with my family this year for Thanksgiving, if I begin to complain about anything, I hope someone will give me a kick in the pants. I have a great family, a good job with co-workers I consider friends, a roof over my head and most importantly, a relationship with a loving God.

From a personal standpoint, I am still a mess. But I keep working on many aspects of my personal life, trying to become a better husband, father, and certainly a better Christian. For all the faults I still possess, ingratitude is one I am working hard to eliminate.

I know that the blessing I enjoy right now have been the result of so many people in my life who have helped me, stuck with me, believed in me, encouraged me, gave me a chance and even a second chance when they didn't have to. Thank you, one and all, and thank you Lord for putting these people in my life.

Happy Thanksgiving.

A place for everything and everything in its place.

Having been out of town for the first serious storm of the year, I missed a few things. I hear the October storm was a bad one, with strong winds and almost two inches of rain in a few hours. While we need all the rain we can get after three years of drought, the first rain always brings some surprises. I find that the first good rain serves as a wonderful memory jogger. This is how it plays out at my house.

Did I bring any firewood up to the house or is it still in the woodpile? Did I leave those bags of redi-mix concrete outside the barn or did I put them away? Did I leave my bucket of fencing tools on the ATV trailer? Did I move the BBQ under the eves? Did I roll the windows up in the truck? Where is my rain gear?

You get the idea.

A transition must take place between the end of summer and the onset of fall. Some people plan this transition. They have a checklist of things they must put away, store, cover, and protect before the first storm clouds peek over the horizon. I hate these people.

These are the same people who have the pegboard wall with all the tools outlined in felt pen, like some sort of hardware crime scene. They probably have cutting boards marked for vegetables, poultry, beef, and "other." They are the people who have the original box that everything they have ever purchased came in, and they put it back in that box when they are done using it. Cmon', where is the fun in knowing exactly where everything is?

These people will never know the excitement of dashing through house trying to find your camera when you are late for your flight. They will never learn how to make a slip-n-slide out of a blue plastic tarp and a hose because you can't remember where you stored the real one.

No, they will always have everything in its place, but they will never know the thrill of chasing the patio umbrella across the back yard on a dark, windy night because you forgot to take it down in October. It's a shame, I mean really, what a dull existence.

I may try to find some sort of happy medium between these two extremes. This year I am going to break with my own personal tradition and put up the Christmas lights right after Thanksgiving. I will not put it off until the week before, like I normally do. I will also use the next sunny weekend to cut a load of firewood. This year I may, and I shudder just thinking it, have all my shopping done, the tree up, and the decorating done by the first week in December.

Yes, this year I will get everything done early. On the other hand, I might just relax and go shooting.

Now where did I put my .308 ammo?

An early Thanksgiving

Is it just me or have the major retail stores skipped over Thanksgiving this year and have pushed straight on into Christmas? It seems I was just watching my daughter carve her jack o lantern last week and now I am supposed to be whittling down my Christmas shopping list? Is it too much to ask for, taking one holiday at a time?

Can we have the chance to celebrate Thanksgiving, please? It is one of my favorite holidays. Okay, so I love turkey and pumpkin pie, but there is much more to Thanksgiving than a big meal with family and friends. It is a time to take account of all the things in our lives we are thankful for. There is even a 30 days of thankfulness going around on Facebook, and I am glad to see people counting the blessing in their lives, even if it's on a social networking site.

In that spirit, there is a special event coming up this weekend I wanted to share with you. This Sunday, November 22nd at Bayside Church of Woodland, they are holding their Heroes Weekend service. It is a chance for our community to give thanks to all those who serve us the line of duty. There will be special presentations, music and as a way to say thank you, each department will be receiving a donation to their favorite charity.

The Woodland Police Department, Yolo County Sheriffs Department, Woodland Fire Department, California Highway Patrol and the emergency dispatch center, these are the people who come to our aid when trouble hits. It's not very often you get a chance to say thank you to these folks, and this will be a wonderful opportunity to do just that.

If you have children, this Sunday will be a very special time. Barring any major disasters or events, all the departments bring out a few squad cars, mobile command units, fire trucks and this year, it sounds like we will have an actual Black hawk helicopter land out by the football field at Pioneer High School.

If you only make it to church on Christmas or Easter, you should try to make it out this Sunday to the Pioneer High School Theater for Heroes Weekend. The first service is at 9:15AM and the second service is at 11:00AM. Come out and say thank you to the people who put their lives in danger everyday to serve us and our community.

Walt goes Inside the Actor's Studio

Tonight we have a special treat. Tonight the Actor's Studio turns its spotlight away from film and Broadway to look at a very unique individual. Father, husband, writer, rancher, musician, lay pastor and amateur demolition expert, Walt Lucas.



Thanks James, this is unexpected indeed. I'm still not sure why you are here to be honest.




We do not limit our search for talent to Hollywood and New York. Inspiration is where you find it, Mr. Lucas. As Allen Ginsberg said "inspiration is just a feeling of heightened breath or slightly exalted breath, when the body feels like a hollow reed in the wind of breath."



.....Okay, whatever you say James. Please, call me Walt.



Let me start out with the usual questions. At what age did you feel the call to perform?



Um, I don't really know, I guess I have always felt like I could perform in front of people.




Do you feel at home in the spotlight?



No, I am actually quite nervous just before I speak or play music in front of a crowd.




And you never caught the acting bug?




No. I did play Bob Cratchit in a Christmas play in elementary school, but that was it.




Most of us know you through your writing, your blog and the guest opinion pieces you write for the local newspaper. How did that start, the writing?



I don't know really. I love to read and the more I read, I began to appreciate good writing and good writers. When I would read an article in the paper, I would get upset at the dumb things people would write. I thought to myself, heck, I could write a better piece than that, so I started my blog. It was fast, easy and free so I began to write at The Roughstock Journal under the name of Yolo Cowboy.




How did you come up with your nom de plume?



My what?




Your pen name, Yolo Cowboy.




Pretty easy James, I live in Yolo County and I am, or at least have been, a cowboy for a living.




Splendid.




........




Where do you see you writing taking you? Is there a novel in your future, a screenplay perhaps?




Uh, I don't think so. I usually just write about what is happening in the world around me, what is going on in my life and try to pass along some of the lessons I have learned the hard way. I figure even if I don't learn from my mistakes, maybe someone else can.



How magnanimous.





.....



We will close tonight by asking the questionnaire made famous by the Frenchman, Bernard Pivot.




.....



What is your favorite word?



Colloquialism. It just sounds cool.




What is your least favorite word?




Multiculturalism.



What turns you on?



Passion.



What turns you off?




People who won't bother learning the facts when they argue with you.




What sound or noise do you love?




I love the rhythm of a horse's hooves and the creaking of the saddle when you ride. I also love to my kids sing when they don't know I am listening.


What sound or noise do you hate?


Nancy Pelosi's voice.



What is your favorite curse word.


I hope my mom doesn't read this James. I try not curse, but if I do smash my thumb or drop my keys into lake Berryessa, again, I would probably say - Horse$#it.



What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?


I have always loved music, I would like to produce music in a studio.




What profession would you not like to do?




Press secretary, for any politician. Lying for a living would kill me in a month.




If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?



Well James, I do believe Heaven exists and when I arrive I would like God to say, well done my good and faithful servant, but He probably won't. He will say, it's a good thing you are a friend of my Son, because without Him vouching for you, it wouldn't be pretty.



Thanks for sharing with our students.