Category: Blog

For me, writing has always been a two-fold objective. The first has been to help people. The second has been to make a good living writing. Over the course of my career, I feel I have attempted to do both to the best of my abilities. As time has passed and realities such as paying bills, life’s many responsibilities, concerns like retirement income, health cost, etc. has become ever more important causing the second objective to take on a much more important role.

For many, many years, I never lost sight of my first objective. Through the financial lean times, I reminded myself that being able to write at all and helping others with that talent would be enough…and eventually bring the second objective to fruition. In many ways, it has when money would trickle in with a check here and there for an article when I needed the extra money to make ends meet. But it never reached the heights which I had hoped.

And of course, there have been the jobs at newspapers as well. But in Oklahoma, these are not high salaried jobs like they might be in a large city such as New York, Los Angeles or Chicago. Like most of us who want something that seems to never come, we want it more as time passes without it. So what happens at this point? What do we do about it when the realization sets in that what we thought would materialize by now hasn’t?

We keep on trying to make money! That’s what I have done. So I must come clean here. This blog, like writing itself, has been a two-fold objective…the same two-fold objective in fact. The idea of this blog was to attract people to my writing in the hopes that they would discover the many works I have written over my career and to eventually create a revenue stream from those works. The other objective was, of course, to help writers who feel as frustrated and lost as I sometimes do.

 

However, as time has passed without the results I desired, my focus began to move toward pushing the financial aspects more vigorously. In other words, the helping people objective is still present but only in the back seat. This confession, if you will, has come from the revelation that I wrote about in my last blog. From that, I learned that the most important action I can perform is to write, regardless if anyone reads it or not.

 

I write often about faith and trusting in God, but I don’t always practice what I preach. Like most who live life, according to a faith, I sometimes fail when the pressures of life begin to force me down and keep me there. But no matter how hard I am forced down, I still have a choice to help others even knowing that there may be no financial upside in doing so. This I believe is the best lesson I can convey in anything I write.

 

Maybe God will bring money or maybe He won’t when it comes to writing. But we all have the choice to write something that helps others.  In future blogs, you will see a deviation away from the writing aspect of this blog and see it becoming more geared toward life. It is time to put helping others back in the driver’s seat. I hope you will continue to read as we head into a new direction of exploration and expansion.

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This week I had a revelation…and no I am not going to tell you what it is. What that revelation is, is not really important. But it’s effect on me…now that’s something to talk about. It has altered my belief system that has been in place for many years. I don’t call it an epiphany because it didn’t come down like a bolt of lightning striking me in the head, but more as digging a tunnel and finally breaking through to daylight.

This burst of daylight has forced me to look at things in my life from a different emotional perspective. Imagine that you view the world and how you interact within it a certain way. For example, you see yourself in the world as a fun, happy and positive person. That perspective causes particular insights and thoughts in your mind as a response to the image you see yourself putting out. Are you with me so far?

Now change that to image to a depressed, angry and negative person. What you see in your mind, that reflection coming back to you has obviously changed drastically. That type of altering in my belief system is the amount of change I experienced.

For reasons unknown to me, life will sometimes make colossal changes in our lives like placing a fork in the road of reason. Perhaps we are stuck on repeat mode listening to the same tune and God is tired of us listening to the same old song. Or maybe we are speeding off in the wrong direction and God pulls us over and writes us a ticket to allow us time to slow down and get the right heading.

Now let’s tie this revelation into my writing journey. My direction and where I wish to go as a writer has not changed. The importance to me of reaching my destination has not changed either. So what has changed? It is my position on understanding life that has changed. Simply stated, there is little understanding in this life. We are allowed bits of clarity as we grow, but never enough to make real sense of the big picture of life and existence as a whole. This fact has been a splinter under my thumbnail since I was a young adult.

I want to understand why things are the way they are! I want trials and triumphs to make sense! But it turns out that I am on a need to know basis with God…and God says I don’t need to know. Perhaps accepting the fact that the road I am on is a mystery is the understanding I seek. Perhaps the destination I long for is nothing more than a dot on the map of existence with little or no value. And if this is true and I knew it, would I work as diligently as I do to reach it knowing this? Or maybe, just maybe, reaching that destination holds no rewards at all because it was only a point on a cosmic map to give me direction so that I would know that God loved me enough to provide me with that point which allowed me a journey at all.

In conclusion, I suppose I have found that not understanding is the best definition for understanding. And acceptance of this supposition is the best revelation we will ever get to understand.

 

 

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I have referred several times within this blog series about this entirety of the blog is a journey. The interesting thing about a journey is that you end up in a different place than where you began. As such, I thought why not apply the same principle in each blog I write. This way, I take you the reader and myself to a new place during the course of the journey.  I feel like this experiment of sorts to be a learning experience where discovery becomes a teacher to both of us.

I mentioned a couple of blogs back about answers from God often being elusive to me. I thought in this segment that I would write about those elusive answers because this is certainly a subject in which we can all relate. I also hope that along this journey that I might come to understand those elusive answers.

I recently got news of a very good thing that happened to someone whom I consider to be very bad. I would bet money on the prospect that those who voted him for this honor do not know even a fraction of the negative things he did to me and to the dream I was building.  Nor did he care for any of those who were ultimately affected by the destruction of that dream. There were many who were, I can assure you.

The news was like a knife in my back. Actually, though I hadn’t given it much thought other than the initial annoyance upon hearing the news. However, while searching for a topic for this blog, I thought why not talk about those who are out to kill other’s hopes. Writers, I think, face the dilemma of attempting to keep their dreams alive at least some if not all their careers. I mean, after all, even the devil gets his due. At the time this man was wielding deceit and poison to harm my interests, I was in a position to use the words I love so much to sink to his level of treachery and duplicity. I had the reading audience and the trust of that audience to make anything I wrote about him stick like honey to bread.

I chose not to do it. I know that words are one of the most powerful tools that humankind is given. Words can destroy a man’s life or save one’s just as easily. I simply walked away in a graceful manner from everything I had built when I realized that in order to save it or win I guess it could be called, I had to become worse than the man I detested for using such tactics. I had to be as weak and shallow as him in order to defeat him. To me, there is no victory in that regardless of the positive outcome for me.

So why did this man get his desired outcome? Why did God allow him to win? I don’t know. I have formulated a theory as to those questions though. People who continue to delve deeper into dark actions to achieve what they desire, do so because they always feel that they can rise above those actions whenever they choose. What they don’t realize is that they are not ever going to be given that opportunity as long as they feel as though they have the right to control the dreams of others. They continue diving deeper in their efforts to destroy unaware that they already have the hook in their mouths. They believe that those deceitful measures worked once, they will continue to work. However, once the devil decides he has let them play with the bait long enough, he sets the hook. At that point, there is no longer that freedom to rise to the surface.

This is where that man is now…being reeled in and too ignorant to know it.

I may not get all the answers I want. But I have gotten one answer…one more important to know than why a man got an honor that he didn’t deserve which doesn’t affect me in the least. I learned that when the chips are down and I am attacked by those willing to sacrifice their morals for self-satisfaction; I will always choose to rise to the top; above those who are not smart enough to know that the deeper they go the further they get hooked into losing their own control to the devil.

 

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One main factor I considered when contemplating as to write this blog series or not was, will it help other writers.

I wanted my trials and triumphs to be able to give inspiration to others.

I wanted them to know that one can fight depression, work lousy jobs, feel as though their dreams will never reach fruition and still find hope in their desire to write. I laid the groundwork for this is the first several blogs.

I have been slowly transitioning into more constructive and positive aspects of my career over the past few blogs. I tell you this because having an end purpose in this endeavor is the same as having one in an article, short story or novel. In other words, without direction, one is simply driving around in circles and never reaching a worthwhile destination.  I want us all to reach our end purpose.

I am not a teacher of life or writing, but simply a man on a journey attempting to reach a purposeful destination while helping others do the same through my experiences. As such, I will often be driving around from topic to topic in what may seem an erratic fashion. However, as strange as that sounds isn’t that just like life. We all do this in our lives and in pursuit of our goals. There are always bumps in the road, potholes, fallen trees and branches, driving rain or some other type of hazard that impedes our progress.

We often feel as though we need to backtrack in order to find another way forward after a roadblock or running upon damaged debris in the road. At that moment it feels as though we are going backward, but if we look at the detour as simply finding a new way to continue moving forward, then we are not really backing up at all. We are still moving forward via new direction.

Like Thomas Edison said about the light bulb, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work,” we find 10,000 ways in which not to go again. There are countless ways to end up lost, but it only takes one route to discovery. The key is always knowing that there is a way to that discovery, to that fulfillment and success we crave as long as we keep moving forward.

I prefer to think in terms of winning and losing. Some days I win and some I lose. Perhaps I am just wired that way or maybe somewhere along the way it became a way of coping with life’s difficulties. Either way, it is what it is. I also tend to focus on the negative days a bit more than the positive. This may be God answering my prayers for humility which keeps me from patting my own back for my accomplishments. Or it may simply be the wiring again. The point I want to make here is that focusing on the negative can sometimes be a very good tool when it comes to the end dream.

When the road is littered with debris from a storm or some idiot is blocking my way, my resolve to succeed my way strengthens. Interestingly enough, I always find a new way to move forward. The message of support for you in this blog is there is always another way to move forward. The only true loss that can never be reclaimed as a writer is not reaching your end goal. Ahead of every bad day is the potential of a good day. You just have to keep moving ahead to reach it.

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Unlike being a writer cramped up for hours in a room meshing ideas to create a novel with characters made up in their heads, a journalist gets to be a bit closer to reality. In this blog, I thought I might tell a story about one of the hundreds of interesting people I have met throughout my career.

It all began with a phone call at my office when I was working for a small newspaper. I answered my desk phone to a voice that informed me of a man on a bridge riding a mule while leading another one trailing behind him. The person said that the man might make a good story. I was intrigued.

I jumped in my car and headed for the location of where the caller said the man was located. I ran into the mule man approximately a mile from where the caller said he had been riding. My initial thought as I approached him was more of curiosity than interest. Why would anyone be riding a mule anyway in this modern age, I thought and then asked him. A few words of small talk and I became very intrigued as he began answering that question.

It turns out that the man was on a journey of faith after finding his world shattered. After his wife left him, he loses his job only days later. He comes home to find her and many of his belongings gone. It was a wake-up call that it was time to find out what his life was really all about. Looking around his aging home in need of repairs in south Texas, he felt an emptiness which prompted him to act. It was an idea I think many of us have at times in our lives…to just walk away from everything and start fresh. He acted on it though.

He gathered up what few items of value he still had left, including his work truck and sold them. He then contacted a man who had mules to sell and purchased one to ride and one to haul the few items he would need to survive on his journey. The only modern convenience he took was a cell phone in case of an emergency. He left his home in early spring with very little money and as much food for him and the mules that the mules could carry.

When I asked him how he planned to survive. He simply said, “God will provide all my needs”. Indeed God had! When I met him it was mid-summer he had already been traveling a few months. He had never gone hungry or grown ill, but the miracle is what he told me next.

Motorists everywhere along his journey were always stopping him and asking about his journey. To the modern world looking at him, he must have seemed to step out of the Twilight Zone from another period in history. Once he explained that it was a journey of faith, they were all eager to help. Many would give him money, though he never asked for it. If they were to ask what he needed, his reply was always a prayer.

The incredible outpouring of roadside assistance, if you will, overwhelmed him. People would open up their homes to him for a good meal and a hot shower. Others would see him on the road and then wait in town for him to pass through where they would give him supplies, food, and even clothes. Some would even charge his cell phone and then return it to him. He was not a beggar as he did not ask for anything. He simply allowed God to work in the hearts of others for his benefit. Everything that was done for him without him asking was another example as to why God should be glorified. He was learning day by day that God never forsakes His children. Even when our current world falls apart, He is there to help us build a new and better one for ourselves.

He was trekking it up to one of the states around the Great Lakes area (I forget which one) to visit his mother. He was hoping to make it by Thanksgiving to surprise her. I would find out later that he did make it but not before the holiday deadline. He called me after reaching his destination. He gave me his mother’s address and asked me to mail him a copy of the paper since he had to be moving on before it published. He relayed to me that he had a feeling to call me upon his arrival and let me know he had made it. I had wondered often over the following several months after meeting him if he had completed his journey. Tired and sore, he had made it. Only now he had a much brighter perspective on people and a great found respect for the Creator.

I chose to tell this story in my blog because I too feel that writing this blog is a journey of faith. Like the man on the mule, I am also searching for answers to questions that are elusive to me. And like him, I have found that there are people inspired by God’s grace to interact with what I write. Although I am still on this writing journey, the destination becomes ever so clear as I now know that I am guided by faith. Sometimes God speaks to us from a mountain and sometimes from atop an ass.

 

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Success in writing or anything else for that matter is a relative term. We all define success our own way. We set goals and criteria which we believe when met will make us successful.

As such, we give ourselves achievements to work toward. When those goals are not met in the time frame we want then the success is still a dangling hook in the water waiting for a nibble.

This is how I interpret the definition. Yours may be different.

It was recently pointed out to me that what I perceive in my head as to that interpretation may be very different than the perceptions others possess about the same subject. Oddly enough that never occurred to me. It intrigued me as I pondered on that revelation. The conversation in which this was made known to me was about the negativity of my previous blogs.

A friend asked me what it was that I needed to consider myself successful. It was at that point that I realized where he was going with his question.

In other words, why did I not consider myself successful at the times in my career when I had achieved great accomplishments. There has always been an ultimate goal for me I told him.  I then realized that it has been that one goal that has been elusive to me, not the dream. Some can be knocked over with a feather, others it takes a sledgehammer. I felt a headache coming on.

Having written this revelation now, I suppose the theme of this blog could be called ‘Know Thy Self’. I have written several times during the course of this blog series that writing for me has been a journey. It is that because I never know where it’s going to take me or what comes from it until I have moved on from one destination and onto another. It is only when I look back that I know where I have been.  That sounds like a line from an old country song, doesn’t it? But you catch my drift.

My point is simply this; there have been many successes in my career and many more downturns, but to forget about the mini successes is to lose the beautiful scenery along the road on the journey. My friend explained something else to me as well. He said that regardless of where I am on my journey to success, I am one step ahead of those who have not experienced what I have. That, he said, is how your blog helps others. He is right!

Nevertheless, this blog will not always be rainbows and unicorns because that is not how life works. However, it is not my intent to discourage others from pursuing writing. It is an opportunity to help those who are one step behind me. It should also be said that every disappointment in my career has made me a better steward of words and made me work harder to achieve the ultimate goal.

As I move into the next phase of this series, I will begin writing about some of the wonderful experiences that writing has provided me. This series is just another adventure in writing. I had never done it and thought it might be interesting to see where this path leads. And like any good story, this story of my journey will have a happy ending.  Thanks to my friend who reminded me that success has always been there, I just needed to allow myself to see it.

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Part 1

I have never found the expression, ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways’ all that comforting. Basically, this is the person saying it telling me that they don’t know why the hell things are the way they are.

See…not that comforting. This is not to say that He doesn’t work that way. It’s just really not an answer when people are seeking them.

This, I think, has been my greatest struggle on my journey to writing as a career. Every single time in my adult life when something didn’t work out, I was always reassured by friends and family that it was because God had something better in mind.

Hearing that is a big pill to swallow after graduating from TCC plus having two years of journalism experience and cleaning up puke in the K-Mart bathroom as a stocker while in my mid-thirties.

This was the exact same thing I had heard in the past when things didn’t turn out the way I wanted or felt they should. This would become a pattern in my life. Let me give an example; Before the K-Mart days when I was in my early twenties, I worked with a group of guys in a manufacturing plant.

I liked the job and the people I worked with.

We worked very well together and had a great working rhythm. We were night shift and also had a competition for tonnage with the day shift. We consistently beat them and even set new plant records. This went on for quite some time.

Like most of those types of job situations, there are several different areas to work within the plant. Some of those jobs paid better than mine and well money is the name of the game.

I certainly didn’t go for the atmosphere.

When an opportunity arose for one of those jobs I applied.  I come into work a couple of weeks later and there is a new employee in that job.

I was young and nervous about finding out what happened, but I was also angry and I wanted an explanation. So when the big boss over our shift walked by my work area, I seized the moment and asked why I hadn’t gotten the job.

He blatantly replied, “I am not going to break up a team as good as this one!”

I replied by asking him why a new person was hired over me for a higher paying job when I had been there longer and proven myself to be a good and reliable employee.  He simply reiterated what he had already said and walked away.

Obviously, this did not sit well with me.

Being in the throes of depression and fighting that constant feeling that I should be somewhere else doing something else, only exacerbated the battle already raging inside me.

Little did I know that the small battle inside would become an all-out war in which I am still engaged.

Again, I was told that the Lord works in mysterious ways and that He had something better for me.

Perhaps cleaning puke off the floor at K-Mart for less money ten years later was better. But it sure as hell didn’t feel like it!

The fact that I had gone into debt for school and could not find a job that I could easily have gotten without that piece of paper showing that I had achieved a higher level of education, made me feel as though I had been robbed.

Now, this is where it gets deep, so hang on. As parents, we do our very best to teach our children to have hopes and dreams, but to achieve them, they must sacrifice and earn those dreams. We want them to aspire to whatever it is that makes them happy while also teaching them that faith, integrity, work ethic and determination are the key elements in reaching their goals. It’s at this point in the blog that we must ask, just how does the Lord work?

how does the Lord work?

How does He work when the world is such an unfair place? I felt as though I deserved that job at the plant as did my immediate boss and co-workers.

I had done the right things by working hard and paying my dues, but I didn’t get it.

Did the Lord block that from happening or did man?

And if it was man, then why didn’t God step up and make it happen anyway?

I believed at the time it was because God had something better…or maybe He didn’t.

Ten years later and after a very toxic working relationship with my father, I was working at K-Mart and making less money than I had since I was a teenager.

It would be another ten years before I began to realize that it wasn’t that He works in mysterious ways as much as it is that He and I have different goals.

The second part of this blog will publish in my next post.

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The first few posts of this blog series have contained a lot of negative such as depression, feeling of failure and the chasing of an elusive goal. But this is a journey as I mentioned in my last blog. This means there are good and bad things which occur as in any journey.

In this post, I would like to share something profound which obviously had a great impact on my career.

By my mid-twenties, the bulk of the bad depression had subsided and the depressed moods would come and go but it was no longer a constant darkness as it had been.  As a result, my writing habits had also changed. Instead of the bleak and dark poetry, there was something new that had magically evolved out of misery into something much lighter and optimistic. These would later become the foundation for my columns Mindset which has been published multiple times in several different formats over the last 16 years.

Since I had chosen faith as my drug of choice to help me through the dismal times, it allowed God to work inside of me and alter my perceptions from the inside out. What I mean by this is that I believe by using drugs, alcohol, gambling or some other sort of negative outlet for escape, we, in essence, tie God’s hands by choosing something else over Him to get us through the bad times. In turn, He can’t or won’t guide us to enlightenment until we choose him first.

This is not a Sunday school lesson but simply how I choose to see how faith works. Each person must find their own peace and understanding with God.  At any rate, early in my career, I was writing for a small newspaper in Tulsa. I wasn’t making much money, but it did allow me to gain exposure. This, as any writer knows, is critical in building a career.

The publisher allowed me to publish my Mindsets. It was a great opportunity and I was grateful for it. A few months after I began running them in the paper, I get a call from the lady who did the layout and design for the paper. She was my contact for submissions, though I had not met her. She relayed to me that she had just received a phone call from a lady who had asked to speak to me.

She told the caller that she was not comfortable giving out my number, but would take a message and pass it along to me. It did not take her long to realize that this was not the type of message that one could write on a sticky note. She later told me that she rested the pen on her desk only seconds after the caller began speaking.

The caller conveyed how she had recently lost her son in a tragic accident. Although she was a Christian woman, her faith had not comforted her that much. This poor woman had fallen into an abyss of despair and was desperately searching for any light to help her see a way out.

While out one day she noticed the free paper and something told her to take a copy even though she did not normally read it. She said that the Mindset I had published in it had made her cry because, for the first time since the loss of her son, she felt a sense of peace. The words I wrote, she said, somehow reassured her that God was with her and that He was with her son.

She felt compelled to tell me that.

Two things happened because of that Mindset. One was that a suffering woman was given a sense of peace because I had written something. The second was that I had been given a new sense of inspiration to keep writing. I don’t remember what I wrote or even what I was thinking about when I wrote that particular Mindset.  I do remember that phone call though. And I remember that I made someone’s life a little better that day.

 

There have been many great experiences over the years. Some were great ego boosters and some were invaluable learning opportunities. But when I think back on my career as a writer, that memory is the one incident that sticks out above all.  I earned no money from that Mindset nor did I receive any awards for it.  I simply helped a very sad person feel a little bit better because God wanted me to help me become a little bit wiser.

 

I have always believed that one person can change the world. What I hadn’t realized until that moment was that each person lives in their own world. Each time we speak or write words with hope, love or compassion, we change someone’s world. We give them a new mindset and with that they change someone else’s world.

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In my quest to write this blog, I find myself all over the page, if you will. Like all lives, mine is connected from the prior day and so on.  However, for most, their lives are basically connected in short terms to their past. In other words, they are probably not that connected to their distant pasts as it pertains to their present. For me though, writing has been a constant thread needling through my life since I was a teen.

So my tapestry of blog creation may seem like as if I had a few stiff drinks before planting myself in front of the computer. My point being that it is difficult to write in a chronologically organized manner as it pertains to my pains and triumphs in the field of writing.

It is my objective to create an image of my experiences that you can relate to. In order for me to do this effectively, I will be rummaging through my mental attic, unpacking old memories and intertwining them with my life today.  Since we are already on the subject of a single thread extending the length of my life thus far, it seems like a good place to start unraveling.

Someone once told me that when a person wakes up thinking about something and goes to bed thinking about the same thing, then that is what that person should be doing in their life. Although I assume one can take this literally, I actually believe it to mean that which is most thought of in one’s life. Another person once told me that if something brings you peace and happiness, then why would you want to do anything else.

These are bits of information that sit on the back burner of my brain sometimes stewing, boiling at other times but at the very least simmering at any given time.

This means that today is intrinsically linked to a night when I was 19 and walking outside at night dreaming of becoming a writer someday like Stephen King. It is linked to a day ten years ago when I was a reporter for a weekly paper looking for my next story lead. It’s also linked to the day a few years ago when I started my own newspaper, to the day I finished a short story that didn’t get accepted for publication and to every other day of my existence since I was a teenager.

It’s the same thread. It never breaks and seems to be on a spool that lasts the length of this life on earth. There have been times I was so angry because of the difficulties of succeeding as a writer that I hacked at that thread with an ax. I would soon learn that the ax handle broke before I could hack through that thread. As I wrote in an earlier blog; it’s difficult to be the proverbial jack-ass always chasing the carrot but only rarely getting a nibble if even a bite at all.

Some of you may recognize the title of this blog segment as the title of a Neil Young song. I like the song because it elegantly expresses the desire of a junkie to chase the high at any cost…even unto death. It’s poetic and real. I equate the desire for me to write to the junkie longing for the high. Although I would not kill or steal to achieve the high I desire, I do certainly understand the chase to gain that high. The only difference I believe is that they and I experience different types of needles.

“I’ve seen the needle
and the damage done

A little part of it in everyone
But every junkie’s
like a settin’ sun.”

~Neil Young

In closing, I would like to emphasize that this entire blog series is a journey. It’s a journey where I have used faith and hope to guide me for over 30 years. It is not just a story of the negative and positive aspects of my experiences to becoming and being a writer and the outcomes which have resulted. This is about sharing a life experience with you involving both of these elements.

God has all the secrets and He’s not one to reveal them easily or gossip. However one receives this blog and what they get out of it, is one of those secrets. Sometimes what we need to hear the most is in the words of others. I believe this is why I am so passionate about writing. Have you ever considered how enlightened you have become because of the written word? How many times has the Bible, a poem or a story of triumph affected or even changed you? It is my hope that this blog series speaks to everyone who reads it. And if it does, it is not because of me, but because God gave me this opportunity to write about faith and hope and its importance in all of our journeys within this life.

 

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