James 4

Friendship with the World

¹Why do you fight and argue with each other? Isn’t it because you are full of selfish desires that fight to control your body? ²You want something you don’t have, and you will do anything to get it. You will even kill! But you still cannot get what you want, and you won’t get it by fighting and arguing. You should pray for it. ³Yet even when you do pray, your prayers are not answered, because you pray just for selfish reasons.

⁴You people aren’t faithful to God! Don’t you know that if you love the world, you are God’s enemies? And if you decide to be a friend of the world, you make yourself an enemy of God. ⁵Do you doubt the Scriptures that say, “God truly cares about the Spirit he has put in us”? ^[a]6In fact, God treats us with even greater kindness, just as the Scriptures say,

“God opposes everyone who is proud,

but he is kind to everyone who is humble.”

⁷Surrender to God! Resist the devil, and he will run from you. ⁸Come near to God, and he will come near to you. Clean up your lives, you sinners. Purify your hearts, you people who can’t make up your mind. ⁹Be sad and sorry and weep. Stop laughing and start crying. Be gloomy instead of glad. ¹⁰Be humble in the Lord’s presence, and he will honor you.

Saying Cruel Things about Others

¹¹My friends, don’t say cruel things about others! If you do, or if you condemn others, you are condemning God’s Law. And if you condemn the Law, you put yourself above the Law and refuse to obey either it ¹²or God who gave it. God is our judge, and he can save or destroy us. What right do you have to condemn anyone?

Warning against Bragging

¹³You should know better than to say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to the city. We will do business there for a year and make a lot of money!” ¹⁴What do you know about tomorrow? How can you be so sure about your life? It is nothing more than mist that appears for only a little while before it disappears. ¹⁵You should say, “If the Lord lets us live, we will do these things.” ¹⁶Yet you are stupid enough to brag, and it is wrong to be so proud. ¹⁷If you don’t do what you know is right, you have sinned.

Source: BibleGateway.com (Contemporary English Version)

It’s not easy for some to be content with what they have. The desire to keep up with friends and family can consume us. Especially when those same people continue to succeed and are able to afford to live such lifestyles … OR when they can’t really afford it but rely on credit cards making it appear to others that they can. But that’s beside the point. The point is that we think, for some selfish and covetous reason, that we need such things in order to be happy and content.

We should just be still and realize that we can be content with much less. We truly can be content with fewer and less elaborate possessions. Homes don’t need to be decorated like display homes. Yards don’t need to be adorned with beautiful gardens. While visually pleasing, that shouldn’t be what we desire as a means of happiness and self-fulfillment. To live life believing that having such things proves your worthiness of living among a certain “class” of society is a such a falsehood. If that’s what it takes, then I’m not so sure I would want to live among that class.

In search of the humble and content class!

I still don’t know what label I wore. I think (and others will probably have different opinions) I was pretty generic. I didn’t hang out with any one type of person. While I wasn’t close friends with people in any specific clique, I did get along with all types of people – still do.

The character, Brian Johnson, from The Breakfast Club said it best:

Saturday, March 24, 1984. Shermer High School, Shermer, Illinois. 60062.Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was that we did wrong…and what we did was wrong, but we think you’re crazy to make us write this essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us… in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at seven o’clock this morning. We were brainwashed.

(That date was my 17th birthday, by the way!)

As we get older, we don’t so much use the labels we used in high school. However, the labels are still there. We see one another in terms of “types”. We are working parents, stay-at-home parents, executives, multitaskers/over-achievers, even hermits. Deep down, we’re still brains, athletes, basket cases, princesses, and criminals. Some of us learn to coexist and get along. Some still can’t (won’t?) associate with anyone other than the same “type” as themselves under any circumstances. I’m still the one who will associate with any “type”. I’m sort of a chameleon that way.

What type are you? What type were you in high school?

There are so many things I need to get done. One might think that just because you have time off work, you must spend all of that time doing personal things that need to get done. I protest! I think it’s important to spend at least half of your time off doing things you enjoy doing as well. I enjoy being lazy resting. I just worked 11 days in a row, including 50 hours in the past six days. I think some rest is not only well-deserved but downright necessary!

I have a couple of movies I bought for $1.99 each at a nearby Blockbuster that’s closing. I plan on watching at least one of those. I also must give my seriously neglected camera a workout. I long to create a new piece of jewelry, too. However, you can’t force creativity to happen in a small window of time. So that may not happen … unless I watch movies at the same time. I do enjoy multitasking!

The main things I need to do are office related (including taxes). After working so much, personal office work is the last thing I want to do, though.

Nope! Twenty-three hours is just not enough time! Once a new manager is in place and the new staff is put on the weekend schedule, I think I might press for a full 4×10 work schedule so I can have my Sundays back. Having a full two days off in a row is more important to one’s mental well-being than I realized.

Vive le weekend!

I feel that it is arrogant of you to expect us to place our rubbish cans perfectly for you to make it easy for you to do your job only to have you place them lazily in the street behind the very cars that you don’t want blocking the cans in the first place. That’s just rude!

I saw that you almost skipped picking up a neighbor’s trash this morning because her car was blocking it. The poor lady came running out of her house waving her arm and yelling, “I’m moving it!” Yet, two weeks ago, you placed our cans so that they completely blocked our recycling bins from view of the recycling truck. Therefore, we were overlooked and have almost twice as much recycling out this time. I say almost because we ended up tossing a lot of recycling in the normal trash the last two weeks because our bins were full!

For the record, no, I don’t feel your job is easy or unimportant. However, when you show such little respect for us, how are we to show respect for you?

Sincerely,
A Homeowner Tired of Your Laziness

Here is what they do with rubbish cans when they’re done (and yes, I like saying “rubbish”)

There is room on the wide sidewalk on the other side of that mound of snow you see.

OK – so maybe not this much snow is coming, but it’s supposedly a slow-moving system, which makes predictions extremely difficult. Currently, they predict 6-12 inches by us and 12-24 inches over the plains.

It seems unbelievable right now, though. I was just out braving the grocery store (not because I was in a panic with a nearly bare pantry – I just wanted sushi, soda, and some snack foods), and it’s a mild 42 degrees. Due west and northwest, the mountains are beautiful. Mountains to the southwest are a different story … obliterated by snow clouds.

What will tonight and tomorrow bring? Who knows! As usual. We could get a manageable 6 inches, or we could be buried under a foot or more. Our neighborhood is on the line between Winter Storm Warning and Blizzard Warning. I’m ready! I’ve got plenty of work, movies, games, and food to keep me busy.

Experiencing that feeling made me want to rethink my goals and schedules. To get everything done, I generally multitask or switch gears quickly several times per day. My goal of five blog posts per week is now ridiculous in my head. I mean, who am I posting for? Why is it important to gather “followers” to my blog? What self satisfaction do I really get from that? I’d like to think that someone out there finds helpful information in some of my posts, but often, I post to ramble. So my goal is now modified to three posts per week. My weekly photo self assignments has been modified to at least twice per month.

Finally, I’m still pushing for a modified work schedule. The 4×10 (four ten-hour days) schedule is becoming more popular and has been mentioned as a possibility for the department I work in as well. Since I work two half days per week, I’ve suggested a twist on this for myself: 3×10 + 2×5. So five hours on Sunday afternoons and Wednesdays, and ten hours on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays with Thursdays off. Then I would still work the first Saturday (ten hours) of each month in exchange for the preceding Monday off. Ten hour days may sound like a lot to some of you reading, but I’d rather get work out of the way like this and get an extra day off to relax and feel more like this…

P.S. I clocked in today to find that we now have mandatory overtime of TEN hours overtime this week. It’s a good thing I already worked an extra two hours on Sunday.

]]> http://zachner.me/2012/01/31/rethinking-goals-and-schedules/feed/ 1 zachner multitasking Relaxed Monkey http://zachner.me/2012/01/27/patience-perseverance/ http://zachner.me/2012/01/27/patience-perseverance/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:37:49 +0000 zachner http://zachner.me/?p=1830 Continue reading →]]> Good things come to those who wait. I usually doubt that or at least wonder exactly how long we have to wait for those good things to finally come. The statement came true for Josh yesterday. He had been searching for a used car and saving money. There’s this one dealership that’s great for working with all sorts of credit (even lack thereof), but the one car he thought about test driving wouldn’t even start on the lot!

So we went across the street to a Mazda dealership to check out their used pre-loved cars. It turns out that they have a first-time buyer program. Who knew?! After some tense phone calls the next morning, they finally gave in and met his price. He finally has his own brand new car – a Mazda 3. He actually has TWO cars now. We have to figure out how to arrange everything in the garage to get the MG Midget to fit until he figures out what to do with it. The HOA will only be so patient, I’m sure! Plus, I want the driveway space back since there are so many cars on the street by evening taking up parking already. :O

Me today…

Here are some good reads to arm yourself with knowledge:

Phishing: how to outwit the fraudsters
How Not to Get Hooked by a ‘Phishing’ Scam
After Epsilon: Avoiding Phishing Scams & Malware

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about phishing.

If you have to contact the company that you thought sent you the email with the link, please don’t harass them and accuse them of being at fault. They are trying to help you. A simple “thank you” will do nicely.

Some readers may choose to assume they know what triggered this thought process. I doubt they’d be right because my mind is a complicated place. I’ll never tell!

1/22/12 UPDATE:

After thought … Often times, a person is fully aware of the consequences that may follow a choice they make. Yet, for reasons only they need to understand, they make the choice anyway often causing consternation among observers. So observers, take heart! For it is the chooser’s choice to suffer the consequences and work through whatever they need to work through to get to their ultimate goal. Sometimes it’s beneficial for a path to a goal to be longer.