Handling Life's disappointments

URL: Managing your Disappointments

Yes indeed, life is full of disappointments isn't it? I am 43 years old and even though I try not to compare myself to others around me I can not help but feel like somewhat of a failure. How said is that? I am my own largest disappointment. I know that other people have disappointed me on occasion. However, I have no control over what other people do other than the occasional opportunity to sway folks one way or the other with regards to decisions that affect your life. What I do have control over is decisions that I make and how I react to those things that happen to me. Life happens and not all of it is pretty you can rest assured of that. How we respond to what life throws at us defines who we are and how successful we are in being victorious in our endeavours. I guess that you could sum this up by saying that as I reflect on the past and where I am now I am disappointed in the fact that I am not in a better place or a better person. I wish that I could have applied 10% of the knowledge that I did have to my life and I would have been in a better place or a better person.
I suppose that all of us can find fault if we look hard enough. There is always someone smarter, cuter, healthier ,stronger, more popular than us. So, what do I do? I try to learn from my mistakes and look to the future to other opportunities to do the right thing and make the right choices. I have to give my disappointments over to God and ask him to forgive me for being such an oaf and to help me to overcome the consequences of my bad decisions in years gone by. I have to learn how to be content in HIM in the mean time. When I compare myself to you or the rest of the world it is easy to see what a miserable failure I am. However when I understand that God is not finished working on me I understand the true meaning of mercy and grace. In God's eyes I am not a failure. I am a workmanship that is in progress. God is my creator, molder and strength. I will chose to leave all of this in his capable hands.

Frustrated parents are us

I have two children who live with me and my wife. One daughter who is 12 turning 13 soon and one son who is 9 working on 10. I seriously doubt that either one of them are going to make it to the next year. LOL... KWIM??
No matter what I do or say my children have decided that they are going to do what they want. When they are confronted about this or that they lie about it. For instance, last night my wife and I come home from date night and I know that someone was sitting at my desk because the keyboard to the computer and the phone are all out of place. I asked them why they could not keep things in their place when sitting at my desk and they both begin to lie about not having been anywhere near my desk. I wanted to kill them both. Why are they lying about such a simple thing. I told them that I did not care about them using the computer because they both have been using it with our permission. However I do expect them to leave my area the way they found it and not messed up. I dont think that is an unreasonable expectation.
The other day Katy, my wife goes outside and calls the children. They are no where to be found. We start calling the neighbors and find out they are across the street in her house. We get the children back home and we tell them for the one millionth time that they are NOT supposed to go into someone's home without asking our permission and letting us know where they are going to be at all times. Our expectation is that we will know where they are at so that we can be aware of what is going on at all times. For whatever reasons our kids just do not seem to care what we say.
I have tried everything that I know to try to communicate to the children that obedience is expected. They know that they know that if they insist on lying to me or their mother that they will be punished. I know that I am not alone in these struggles. How do you deal with lying and outright disobedience? I told my wife the other day that I need to get a prescription for Prozac or something that will just keep me happy all the time and not care about what is going on anymore. It would be so much easier for me to be like a lot of parents that I see that just ignore what the kids are doing and let them just have a free reign in the home. However, I just can not tolerate their decision to just do what they want despite our having set up simple rules and expectations here in our home.
Our desire is that our children will grow up to be responsible, God fearing (respectful), obedient, productive members of society. I think that every parent desires this and that we are not alone. We ask our children to do chores around the home like most parents. One reason is so that they can learn responsibility and another is so that they can contribute some help to our family unit since we both work three jobs between the two of us. Why do we constantly have to stay on them to get them to do the simplest of tasks?

This is me hiding behind the new sound booth at the back of the church while the Pastors wife tells me something. We will be putting a covering over the outside of the booth this week so it will look better.  

Grace Fellowship Church Goose Creek SC, a picture of our new sanctuary.  

Those BLASTED FLYING TEETH 

Flying TEETH are BACK

It is apparent to me and several places on my hands and arms that the blasted "Flying TEETH" are back. Well, that is what I call the dreadful insects that are as tiny as a flea. Flying teeth that look as small as a flea but can fly. The following URL will give you a look at the "noseeums" that I am talking about here.
www.marsci.uga.edu/gsg/Noseeums.html


The blasted Flying Teeth are BACK. I discovered this FACT when I stood outside talking to my partner tonight and felt that irritating sting that accompanies the arrival of the BLASTED FLYING TEETH. I managed to make it back indoors where I am safe for the time being.

My friends, the FLYING TEETH are alive and well because the weather is no longer FREEZING and things are warming up a bit. I was just commenting to someone about how NICE it would be for things to warm up around here. Well, that is what I get for thinking folks. Bite marks and lots of em.

Today has been absolutely gorgeous outside today. It was around 70 degrees with very little humidity and the winds were not ripping through the state either. This would have been a PERFECT day to walk the dogs , take the family to the beach or just about anything you can think about. Of course, if you do think about doing this you NEED to remember the BLASTED FLYING TEETH. LOL... Just remember that Skin So Soft by Avon works wonders. Those little monsters HATE the smell of that stuff. I tell you what, you put that stuff on and you stink for a coons age but atleast the BLASTED FLYING TEETH leave you the heck alone. LOL My next door neighbor , Troy, aka: Paul Bunyon LOVES it when he and I are outside together. No, this has nothing to do with the fact that I might be excellent company or that I might be able to be of any help to him in his many "real man" adventures. He likes the fact that I am a walking insect attraction. I walk outside and the entire insect world thinks that a FREE chinese buffet on stilts has just entered their sector and they all converge on me at once. I can not tell you how many times I have FORGOTTEN about the BLASTED FLYING TEETH and the blood sucking mosquitos that SURROND my house and I will be talking to Troy (Paul Bunyon) and look down at my legs to see that they have turned into a vertical runway for the BLASTED flying teeth.

Today at church I found out that I had FORGOTTEN to ADD about 8 scriptures to the Song Show Plus program that I had built for projection. The pastor was reading off of the back screen and things were going along just fine when he says "Ok, I see that we just ran out of scriptures, let me go to my hand written notes while they work out the technical problems in the back." OOOPSIE... Imagine my surprise when I compare the SSP program scripture list with the MS Word document and found out that indeed there were several scripture left out. If you go to www.songshowplus.com This software allows me to project multimedia content to two digital screens on both ends of the sanctuary. One screen is for the viewing pleasure of our congregation and one is for the viewing pleasure of the pastor and praise team so that they can see information on the back wall of the church. Yes, you could say that I am in technogeek heaven back in the sound booth. Toys toys and lots of toys to play with. Wahooooo, my propeller is starting to rotate faster just thinking about this. LOL.

Song Show Plus allows you to create Slide Shows for announcements and you can also project songs, scripture, video and more. You can also import and use other application data such as MS Powerpoint etc. During our first service in which we used this new software I just created several different MS Powerpoint slides to project on the "Big Screen". As time has gone on I am getting more comfortable with the software and now I know how to use the slideshow creator to create the announcement slide shows etc. We are using Online Bible at www.onlinebible.org and the NRSV translation which our pastor likes to use when he is preaching.

Are you reading this ? LOL. Sitemeter delivers to me via email a status report of how many hits I get on my blog , when folks are reading, how many times per hour and how long they stay. The report in and of itself is pretty nifty because I know that I know that someone is peering at what I am babbling about. However I am noticing that folks are only reading for about a minutue or less and then they are moving on. That tells me that I am not keeping your interest. Hummmmm What to do and what to say now. What can I say other than I am who I am and what you see is what you get. I will try to be as interesting as possible, well as interesting as someone can be who lives in Duck Ditch USA and has FLYING TEETH to contend with.