Update on Sea Tree

Recently I purchased a laptop computer so that I could work on the novel on my lunch hours. I've been reading Steven's King's "On Writing" which is encouraging because the stumbling blocks I'm experiencing are normal for him - and he's certainly a success at writing and selling novels.

I've pretty much decided that Sea Tree is going to be a series. There are too many characters that I want to develop to put them all in one novel. The first book in the series will center around three main characters and how they find their way to Sea Tree. I'm taking the title for the first installment from this blog: Journey To Sea Tree.

As you may or may not know, Sea Tree is the product of a dream I had a few years ago. Life got in the way of turning this dream into my first novel. As with anything, if we wait until everything is perfect before starting something, we'll never get anything done. The first 50 pages of Sea Tree were lost when my hard drive crashed, so I started over and am back up to almost that many pages of very rough draft.

What kind of story is Sea Tree? I'm really not sure - and that's been one of the stumbling blocks in writing the novel. I don't want it to be something that is of interest to a narrow market, such as only Christians, or only fantasy fans. In my mind, it's a fantasy romance/action tale. The story deals with good and evil and with relationships. If it's done well Sea Tree should be a success, but it needs a lot of work. I will not be allowing anyone to read the first draft; and my second draft will probably only be read by my fiance and my daughter - two people whom I know will be gentle and not shatter my fragile ego. By the third draft I'll ask a few friends and authors to critique the book before trying to find an editor and publisher.

Time-wise, we're looking at another year to finish the first draft. I've got a lot going on with a wedding or two between now and the end of the year. The important thing is that I'm back working on the novel and every day I discover something new about the characters. It is fun discovering how these people ended up in my dream. The challenge will be to write how the dream ends, because I woke up before it was finished. It might be hard to believe in certain parts, but isn't that how our dreams are?


By the way - don't you love the paintings on the right? They are done by Rod Chase. You really need to see them in person to fully appreciate them. Hope he doesn't mind that I'm decorating my blog with his art. I'll let him sell Sea Tree on his website and keep the profit:).

Forwarded Emails

I got this one today. You might have seen it:

"DID YOU KNOW THESE FACTS?I SURE DIDN'T TILL NOW

Death is certain but the Bible speaks about untimely death!

Make a personal reflection about this..... Very interesting, read until the end.....

It is written in the Bible (Galatians 6:7):

"Be not deceived; God is not mocked: For whatsoever a man sow, That shall he also reap."

Here are some men and women Who mocked God :

John Lennon (Singer):
Some years before, during his interview with an American Magazine, he said: "Christianity will end, it will disappear. I do not have to argue about That. I am certain. Jesus was ok, but his subjects were too simple, today we are more famous than Him" (1966).

Lennon, after saying that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, was shot six times.

Tancredo Neves (President of Brazil ):

During the Presidential campaign, he said if he got 500,000 votes from his party, not even God would remove him from Presidency.

Sure he got the votes, but he got sick a day before being made President, then he died.

Cazuza (Bi-sexual Brazilian composer, singer and poet):

During A show in Canecio ( Rio de Janeiro ),

While smoking his cigarette, he puffed out some smoke into the air and said:"God, that's for you."

He died at the age of 32 of LUNG CANCER in a horrible manner.

The man who built the Titanic [no name provided and I don't have time to look him up]

After the construction of Titanic, a reporter asked him how safe the Titanic would be. With an ironic tone he said: "Not even God can sink it"

The result: I think you all know what happened to the Titanic

Marilyn Monroe (Actress)

She was visited by Billy Graham during a presentation of a show. He said the Spirit of God had sent him to preach to her. After hearing what the Preacher had to say, she said: "I don't need your Jesus".

A week later, she was found dead in her apartment

Bon Scott (Singer)

The ex-vocalist of the AC/DC. On one of his 1979 songs he sang: "Don't stop me; I'm going down all the way, down the highway to hell".

On the 19th of February 1980, Bon Scott was found dead, he had been choked by his own vomit.

Campinas (IN 2005)

In Campinas , Brazil a group of friends, drunk, went to pick up a friend..... The mother accompanied her to the car and was so worried about the drunkenness of her friends and she said to the daughter holding her hand, who was already seated in the car: "My Daughter, Go With God And May He Protect You." She responded: "Only If He (God) Travels In The Trunk, Cause Inside Here.....It's Already Full "
Hours later, news came by that they had been involved in a fatal accident, everyone had died, The car could not be recognized what type of car it had been, but surprisingly, the trunk was intact. The police said there was no way the trunk could have remained intact. To their surprise, inside the trunk was a crate of eggs, none was broken


Christine Hewitt (Jamaican Journalist and entertainer) Said the Bible (Word of God) was the worst book ever written. In June 2006 she was found burnt beyond recognition in her motor vehicle.

Many more important people have forgotten that there is no other name that was given so much authority as the name of Jesus. Many have died, but only Jesus died and rose again, and he is still alive.

"Jesus"

PS: If it was a joke, you would have sent it to everyone. So are you going to have courage to send this?. I have done my part, Jesus said "If you are embarrassed about me, I will also be embarrassed about you before my father."

You are my 8 in 8 seconds. I am not breaking this. No way!"

OK, I cleaned up the spacing but left the grammar and punctuation alone. My point is that I get these forwarded emails every day from people who love Jesus but who think that they're not serving Him if they don't forward these emails to everyone on their list - whether the facts have been checked out or not. Forget about whether these people did or said what they are purported to say. I'm focusing on the contradictions in an email such as this: God is an angry God and Christians need to be angry at the world too.

If I have to spend all this time condemning the world, I don't have time to do anything else. Sure, the world is a mess; but who's standards are we judging the world by? As evidenced in this case, we're judging the world through man's interpretation of scripture rather than God's view of the state of mankind. That sounds so much like the Pharisees in scripture; more worried about offending God than getting to know Him.

It's easy to condemn the drunk who drives the wrong way on the inner Beltline and runs head-on into another vehicle, killing three innocent people. If we know that the man was Hispanic and did not have a driver's license, he's double damned. We don't stop at condemning the drunken driver, we condemn the border guards who let him slip through. We condemn the government for not enforcing illegal immigration laws; the police for not apprehending him before he killed someone; the man's father for not loving him or beating him enough. We can go all the way back to Adam and blame him for causing all the troubles we have on Earth. And while we're at it, we can blame God for not stopping that man from getting behind the wheel or for not moving the innocent vehicle out of the way in time. There's plenty of blame to go around.

But have we stopped to consider how God sees this mess of a world? Has anything changed since the time of Adam's fall? Can we really comprehend how God can justify sending His Son to suffer and die on our behalf? Can we comprehend how God loves that drunken driver as much as He does the people who were killed? We certainly don't. Perhaps our problem is that we want a God who is made in our image; one who judges and condemns words, thoughts and deeds that offend us.

What if Jesus really meant it when He said, "For God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved"? What if instead of a judging God we have a redeeming God? What if we spent as much time focussed on loving people as we do condemning them and let God worry about whether they deserve to be punished for their sins or not? We certainly don't need to accept sin in our lives, but rather than focus on our failures and the sins of others, we focus instead on showing and telling people how much God loves them? How about an email that simply says, "Jesus wants me to tell you that He loves you - and so do I!"

How Many Days Have I Lived?

There's a neat calculator on my Google home page that tells me that I've been alive for 20,703 days. That's 20,703 sunrises and 20,702 sunsets as it's still mid-afternoon when I write this on May 27th, 2008. I suspect that there are about twice that number of bowel movements. Sorry if that's TMI. I'm just one of those guys who likes statistics.

The same calculator tells me that, based on a biblical standard of 3 and a half-score years, I've only got about 4,865 days to go; barring anything stupid that I might do to shorten those days. Less than 5,000 days...less than a quarter of my life remaining.

Today I received in the mail a book titled "One Month To Live: 30 Days to a No-Regrets Life" by Terry and Chris Shook. It's one of about ten books I'm reading simultaneously. It seems the older I get, the more urgent life becomes. I can't remember much of what I've done or didn't do in almost 21,000 days of existence; but there's a need to accomplish something in the time I've got left. Maybe that feeling we get as we age is just God's way of letting us know we've not yet fulfilled our purpose. I certainly hope that I will finish this life accomplishing more than 'living from one tragedy to another', as Jerry Falwell once observed as the meaning of life. And I suspect that God has a different view than Jerry did. As much as I embarrass and frustrate Him, I know that He finds joy in the way I've grown older. For 20,703 days He's supplied my every need, answered countless prayers, withheld His wrath countless times, and given me new dreams to replace those I let slip away.

I am presently on a high plateau in my life. I'm engaged, in love (the love came first), I have renewed hope for the future: it's just a more positive outlook than I had a year ago. Unfortunately, those 4,865 remaining days seems awful short now. How do I cram into those days everything I want to accomplish and still be the husband, the father, the employee, the friend, and the author that I want to be?

In The Shack, written by William P Young, Jesus tells the character that man lives mostly in the past; and when we do think about the future, there's usually fear involved because of our experiences in our past. But God is not a past tense or future tense God; He is a God of Now, a living, relevant, life altering God who wants to spend time with us in the Present. Jesus told the man in The Shack that His desire was not for the man to be like Jesus, but for Him to live through the man.

Before I die, in the 4,865 days more or less that I have remaining, I want to walk on water with Jesus. I want to talk to Him from a mountain top. I want the Holy Spirit to lift me up and let me fly wherever the wind takes me. In my dreams I often am able to fly; that would be cool to get to the place where I'm living in the present and that God is living through me. Perhaps eternity is really living in the Present with, not the presence of, Christ.

Promising Vaccine Prevents Alzheimer's in Mice

An article posted in the May issue of Molecular Therapy, the journal of the American Society of Gene Therapy is optimistic they're on the right track towards curing Alzheimers disease. My aunt had Alzheimers: she couldn't remember what she ate or how long ago. She couldn't remember how to button her blouse; but she could remember her wedding day and events from her childhood just as though they were happening right then. Alzheimer's truly is a cruel disease and a cure is needed, however sometimes the way science goes about finding the cure doesn't make a lot of sense; but what do I know - I skipped science in school.

When I see articles such as this one, I have a few questions. First of all, I didn't know mice had Alzheimer's. And if they do, do mice call it by that name, or do they call it something like Mickielucus or Minniejitis or Jerriatrics? My next question would be, "How does one tell if a rat can't remember something? Did they get lost in a maze and just sit down and zone out? As a fiscal conservative, I'm wondering why we're wasting money trying to keep rodents from getting old and forgetting stuff. Do we need them to remember where they hid the cheese or which holes will get them back into my house? I'd rather invest money in exterminating mice, not medicating them.

The article said that the mice who received the vaccine were genetically engineered to express large amounts of amyloid beta protein. So science can't cure Alzheimer's but it can reproduce it; sounds like what Lucifer did when he tried to improve on the Creator's design. Reading deeper into the article, scientists from the University of Rochester Medical Center used a herpes virus stripped of the viral genes to create the vaccine. That's just what I need, to get herpes and not have the pleasure of remembering how I got it.

Give me Dr. Victor Frankenstein. He didn't waste money on lab rats. If he needed to transplant an arm or a leg, he'd go dig one up and sew it on his patient. If he needed a brain, he'd go over to the local community college and whack a professor and shove his brain inside his patient's skull. If his patient had a bad ticker, he'd hook him up to a big ol' defribrilator and zap him with a few million volts. Frankenstein was more concerned with function than with form. His patient could always go to a plastic surgeon once the parts were all in place.

The article says that it will be several years before this vaccine is safe to use on humans. By then science will have discovered even more clues into how our complex bodies perform. Maybe they'll be able to tell me why my feet smell and my nose runs and, miracle of miracles, they'll come up with a blue pill that will make my weenie bigger all the time instead of just four hours - if I'm lucky!

We've Set a Date

My fiance and I have set a date for our wedding. Whoo-hoo! Aren't you just as excited as we are? Actually we're both amazed at all that God has done in the past year or so to bring us together. There have been too many coincidences for us getting to this point to be coincidental. We have goals and dreams like any other couple, but we also have a sense of peace that we're really meant for each other and that there is a purpose and a plan for us as a couple.

Sure, every couple feels this way in the beginning. But this isn't our first time walking down an aisle. For me it's going to be the fourth and fifth times. We're getting married out in Nebraska on November 2nd, and then we're coming to North Carolina to marry a week later. (Jimmy if you're reading this, please book November 9th to marry us).

For those who know us, you can expect us to change; we won't be the same person you know now. We'll be better, because we're going to be much happier together than we've been single. We're going to make decisions not for us as individuals, but as a couple. Where we go, what we do, how we get there - that's something we'll decide together and depend on God to guide us and keep us from getting into trouble.

My daughter and I have been blessed in the past to have been welcomed into the homes of my church family. In the future, Pam and I can invite friends and family into our home so that we can bless you. The changes that are happening may not be apparent right now, but in a year or two you're going to look back and see us in a new light. We feel it happening in us now. Just wanted you to know so you're not surprised. It's a positive change, and we're very excited about our future together.

I write this here because I hope you'll keep us in your thoughts and prayers. We don't need wedding gifts or receptions or parties to mark our official union. All we're asking is that our friends and family be happy for us. God will take care of the rest.