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Thursday, September 29, 2016

Why the Title?

Why the Title, How to Manage Your Monkey?


The title does seem a bit unusual.  We have all heard the expression 'having a monkey on your back'.  Sometimes we cannot pinpoint what exactly is wrong in our lives; we just know that something, perhaps everything, is off kilter.

In reality, most of us have many monkeys on our backs and just plain do not know how to deal with them.  There are so many monkeys; we really do not know where to start.  This course is all about getting all of those monkeys under control and developing a plan to handle all of them.

Some of the monkeys you may run into are spiritual monkeys, emotional monkeys, financial monkeys, family monkeys, and a whole host of others.  Many of these monkeys work together to drive you crazy.  

The way to get these monkeys under control is to take them one at a time to start with and then work as a group once you get the ball rolling.

There is an age-old adage that asks, “How do you eat an elephant?”  The answer is, “One bite at a time”.  This is how you should go about handling your monkeys.  Choose an area that needs work and take it “one bite at a time”.

In the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Franklin discusses how he chose thirteen different areas of his life that he wished to improve.  He would take one area of his life he wished to improve and focus on it for one full week.  Then, he would move to the next area.  By choosing thirteen areas of his life, he could focus on each area four times per year, once each quarter.  In time, he saw drastic improvements throughout his life.

We whole-heartedly suggest reading the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin early in this course.  You can obtain the eBook free from Amazon in the Kindle Format or you may wish to read it free from the Gutenberg Library.

Throughout this text and many of the suggested readings, we find a concept discussed called “Life Balance”.  Even though we may use this term in this course, it is really sort of a misnomer.  If something is balanced, things are in equal proportions.  There may be some things in our life that demand more attention than others. 

Some would say that we should spend more time working and less time on family life and recreation.  That is just backwards.  Work will always be there.  In fact, at least one company has suggested that by shortening the workday, they get more productivity out of their workers[i]

Instead of life balance, life is really like a recipe.  You don’t normally have equal amounts of all ingredients.  You usually have a certain amount of each ingredient, but normally all of these ingredients will not go into the dish in equal amounts.

What kind of cake would we have if it had 2 cups of flour, 2 cups of sugar, 2 cups of baking powder, 2 cups of salt, 2 cups of vanilla, and maybe 2 cups of eggs?  It probably would not come out of the oven looking or tasting much like a cake at all.

Therefore, instead of the term Life Balance, from this point forward, we will try to use the term “Life Recipe”.





[i] CFO Magazine July 2016 www.cfo.com Human Capital Productive Idea: A Five Hour Workday?  By David McCann Pages 20-21




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Thursday, September 22, 2016

What We Are Going to Study

What We Are Going to Study


We will be reading from several different books along the way.  It is not required that you read these books, but they are highly recommended to accompany this course.  You do not need to purchase them.  If fact, we whole-heartedly suggest you borrow them from your local public library if they are available through them.

If not, you may wish to borrow them from a friend or buy them used.  Otherwise, you can find them available online at Amazon.com by following the links we have in this document or on our A store at Amazon.

We will study a proper life recipe.  There are many aspects to a good life recipe.  The first step to creating a good life recipe is to develop a strong prayer life and daily Bible reading.

The term life recipe is all about getting things into their proper perspective and keeping it there.  This is not easy and it is not always possible.  There will be times when the forward progress you have made is diminished by one of life’s curves or another.

We have a friend that says she could stop smoking if she could just get rid of all the stress in her life.  The problem is that there will always be stress in one form of another.  The idea is to minimize the stress as much as possible and to deal with it as best you can, with God’s help and the help of your family and friends.

There is an old saying that goes “There is no time like the present”
We will study:
  • ü Prayer life and Bible Study
  • ü Organization (getting home, work, and vehicle organized)
  • ü Personal Finance
  • ü Goal Setting
  • ü Minimalist living (downsizing)
  • ü Budget Meal Plans
  • ü Family Life
  • ü Positive thinking/ Relaxation/NLP
  • ü Time Management

We hope you will stick with us through to the end.

This course is written from a Christian perspective.  If you are a Christian, you will find that you may actually grow in your faith while taking this course.  If you are not a Christian, we hope that this course will get you to thinking about giving your life to Jesus. 
Please Visit My Child Bride Suzanne's Blog



Please be advised that all the information in this course is provided to educate, enlighten, and broaden your views in life.  The information provided is not a substitute for medical, legal, dietary, financial/accounting, or religious professionals.  Always consult a professional before you act on any of the information you find in this course.  

Do you have a frugal recipe?  Please e-mail it to me.

Help us reach 1,000 YouTube subscribers. Please watch some of our videos. If you like them, please subscribe. Also, please share our YouTube information with your friends. We thank you so much for all your help.

Thursday, September 15, 2016

David's Testimony

David’s Testimony


Very often we will be sitting in a church and the pastor will ask if anyone would like to share a word or two of testimony.  The problem I have with doing that is limiting it to a word or two.

God has done so many wonderful things in my life that it would be impossible to tell it all and impossible to stop telling it once I got started as well.

I never had a knee crawling to the altar experience.  I am jealous of those who did. But I do know the Lord and I do have a story to tell. When I was about nine years old, my sister decided to give her heart to Jesus.  At that time I didn't know exactly what that meant. 


But, I could answer yes when the pastor of New Pisgah Baptist Church in Inman, South Carolina (now First Baptist Church of North Spartanburg) asked me did I believe that Jesus was the Son of God. And, yes to did I believe that Jesus died on the cross to save me of my sins. I was baptized shortly after that. I was raised in Sunday school and going to church most Sundays, so I never really questioned anything about God.

In the summer of 1976, I went to North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with the youth group from First Baptist Church of Iva.  While on that trip, diabetes decided to make itself known to me. I was 300 miles away from home and very sick.  I really didn't know I was that sick until the last night we were there.  I was in such pain I couldn't sleep, so I sat out on the front porch of the beach house we were staying in and asked God to let me die.  I knew I would be in heaven and I knew that Jesus was there for me.


Thanksgiving of 1997 looked like it was going to be pretty sparse.  I sat at my desk balancing the checkbook and trying to rob Peter to pay Paul, but Peter had hired a bodyguard and just wasn't budging.  The money just wasn't there to have a Thanksgiving dinner.  We would have had sandwiches or something like that to eat, but no real Thanksgiving dinner.

I breathed a quick prayer "God Please".  Only a few seconds later came a knock on the door.  Ken, a man from a church we sometimes visited, was there.  His daughter had to leave town unexpectedly and had some perishables she wanted him to throw away for her.  He decided that he should give them to someone and he thought of us.  Ken brought lots of things.  When he left, I said a thank you prayer, but God wasn't through yet.

Shortly after that, the telephone rang.  It was Charlotte “Granny” Madden.  She said, "Bird", which was my nickname to all my friends when I was growing up, "They gave away turkeys at the place where Doyle (her son) works today and there was one left over and I thought of you."  I thought, "Wow, God had this all taken care of."  But, God wasn't through yet. 

About an hour later, we had just gotten all the things Ken had brought put up in the cabinets when the phone rang.  It was Mrs. Harris.  Mrs. Harris is the mother of one of my very best friends and like an adopted grandmother to the kids.  From time to time, she would call up and say "Bird, I got something for the kids. Can I bring it over?" Usually it was Ice cream or freeze pops.  On this day, she said she had some things to bring over for the kids.  I thought, "Well, God has taken care of dessert, too." 

Well not only did she bring dessert, this lady had bought a whole ham, a large turkey, fixings for any type of casserole you could ever imagine, things to make pies and cakes and banana pudding, as well as hot dogs for later, and more.  When she left, there were boxes and boxes of food all over our kitchen and living room.  We said a prayer of thanks to God and told Him we couldn't store any more food.

Jesus walked everywhere He went. However, God realizes that this isn't practical in today's world and has constantly performed miracles to show us He is here for us.  Like:

We had a station wagon.  It was on its last legs, but somehow it managed to get us where we needed to go.  One day, the poor thing had gone as far as it could go.  It broke down in front of a used car lot.  The man at the business next door observed my wife, Suzanne, and the kids get out and start walking down the road to find a telephone. He offered to let her use his telephone.

In the course of events, he offered to tow the car off the street for her since he had a tow truck.  My wife said she wasn't sure about that, but he said he could do it then and he and I could work out the details later.  When she told me about this, a red flag went up.  When someone won't give you a price like that it usually means you can't afford it.

Well, the next day he called first thing to tell me what WAS wrong with the car was that it needed a fuel pump and to have the carburetor adjusted.  I cringed since he had already fixed it.

I asked him what the cost of the repair would be.  He told me he would call me back with the total. Soon he called back and said that every time he went to figure the bill, the Holy Spirit told him not to charge me anything. He said he tried to figure and he kept hearing the clear message not to charge anything.

So, he said that he could have his employee run the car home if my wife could bring him back.  On the way back, he told my wife that the place would be closed when he got back and could she just run him on home.

He then said he noticed that she didn't have much gas and offered to put gas in the car.  He put ten dollars’ worth of gas in the car.  Not only did God provide a repair, but almost a tank of gas, too.


Finally, that station wagon could no longer be fixed. We had been taking our children to AWANAS at Temple Baptist Church. I wrote a letter to the church to ask them if they could provide a ride to the awards night ceremony since the kids had worked so hard to earn the awards.  They provided rides for us.

The assistant pastor showed up a few days later with a man named Ronnie Wright.  He said Ronnie thought he should take a look at the car and see what he could do. They towed the car off.


Ronnie said that it could not be fixed.  The motor was blown and the car just wasn’t worth putting a motor in.  Well, we prayed about a car but had no money to do anything.


Meanwhile back at the church, a man, George, went to trade his van for a new one.  The dealer told him what he would allow him in trade for the old van.  George said he would give the van away before he would take that for it.

George made the deal for the new car without a trade.  On the way home, he heard a voice that said “Did you mean that, George?”  George said, “Yes, God, if you show me someone who really needs this van, I will give it to them.”

George, who was in charge of game time at AWANAS, pulled into the church to get things set up and began talking to the assistant pastor.  The assistant pastor told George about us needing a car.  George and his family gave us the van.

A few years later, we were driving that van to Jubilee.  This was a special revival service.  Well the transmission fell completely out of the van.  Just behind us was the preacher’s son.  He pulled over and got us to church. 

Well, Pastor Joey at another church we had visited (the same church Ken with the food went to, Lakeside Wesleyan Church) heard our story.  He found a used transmission and his church paid for it. 

He drove to Roebuck, South Carolina, to pick it up. He brought it back and it did not work.  He tooe it back and got another one.  Ronnie Wright installed the transmission both times and only charged $100, which was the cost of a seal and what he had to pay a man to help him.

Well, Ronnie said that the transmission would get us going for a while, but not to plan to have that van too much longer. We began to pray.  I got an E-mail from a lady in North Carolina named Sherri Griffin. 

She and her husband Shawn had to move with their seven children from North Carolina to Washington State.  She said they had several things they would like to give us.  One of them was a van.  That van was the 1995 Ford Aerostar we drove until March 4, 2011.  All we had to do was get to Charlotte to pick it up. 

Later, her husband Shawn called and said he had a problem.  I thought that maybe for some reason they were not going to be able give us the van.  The problem was that he had two collector cars that would cost too much to move across the country

Shawn told me that, if I could find someone with a rollback wrecker, he could give us both of those.  One was a 1972 Roadrunner Clone and the other was a 1970 Satellite Station wagon.  So, we needed one van, prayed for it, and got one van and two cars.  God is good.

Lest you think that the only reason that I believe in the power of God is because what He has provided for me, let me tell you that Jesus is my Lord and personal Savior.  I know that Jesus died on the Cross to save me of my sins.  Our God is an Awesome God.



Please Visit My Child Bride Suzanne's Blog



Please be advised that all the information in this course is provided to educate, enlighten, and broaden your views in life.  The information provided is not a substitute for medical, legal, dietary, financial/accounting, or religious professionals.  Always consult a professional before you act on any of the information you find in this course.  

Do you have a frugal recipe?  Please e-mail it to me.

Help us reach 1,000 YouTube subscribers. Please watch some of our videos. If you like them, please subscribe. Also, please share our YouTube information with your friends. We thank you so much for all your help.

Friday, September 2, 2016

How to Manage Your Monkey Promotional Trailer

Promo

I would like to tell you about a great course in life recipe.  You have heard about life balance.  That is sort of a misnomer.  In your life, there are all sorts of different areas.  Life balance would imply that each area is always equally important and that you would spend equal amounts of time and effort on each and every aspect of your life.

If you are going to make a cake, you add each ingredient in proportions that are correct for that ingredient.  You do not add one cup of eggs, one cup of sugar, one cup of salt, one cup of flour, and one cup of vanilla.  No, you have each ingredient in the proportion that is right for that ingredient.

The same is true for your life.  You have to have time for your family, friends, church, work, and other activities, but not all in exactly equal amounts all the time.
This course is primarily about your personal finances, but it is also about much more than that.  Your personal finances are only one ingredient in your life recipe.

We will also discuss: prayer life, organization, goal setting, minimalist/frugal living, budget meal plans, positive thinking, and time management, among other things.  We will throw in a little about credit repair and related issues.

Come join us.  The course is Christian-based.  Even if you are not a Christian, you should be able to get a little something out of it.
We’ll see you soon.

Please Visit My Child Bride Suzanne's Blog

Help us reach 1,000 YouTube subscribers. Please watch some of our videos. If you like them, please subscribe. Also, please share our YouTube information with your friends. We thank you so much for all your help.