What am I doing to help the poor?

What am I doing to help the poor? I say and think that I love the poor so much, but I do nothing to help them, so my love is just a feeling with no action behind it. There was a woman here at the restaurant who had turned in an application to work but had not heard back from the employer manager in a long time. She was getting the runaround. I wanted to give her $20, but I didn't know how. I missed a beautiful opportunity. My heart is sad.

Jesus said, the poor you have always with you. That, to me, means there is an opportunity to do good and minister to anyone who is poor anywhere, at any time. Poverty is the opportunity to show the love of God. It is an open door to minister. Without poverty and need, very few, if any would seek God. They would find their fulfillment in their success. But failure it is that makes us cry out to God for help.

MediaFire is Amazing! I Love it! MediaFire Express is so Sweet!

MediaFire is so Amazing. I Love MediaFire Express also!

I downloaded MediaFire Express. It is so easy to drop any file into the box on my laptop and it is uploaded immediately. Amazing! I also discovered a little bit about data harvesting today but I did not want to pay any money to buy a quality program to check it out. I was able earlier today to search all public .pdf Harvard.edu today with Google. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me. Great ways to search by specifying what website using the site: function and also typing in what kind of document you are looking for.

My website also has a new theme:
Five Amazing Sites in Every Category HERE - Must Bookmark and Visit Often!

Keywords: MediaFire & MediaFire Express

Be of good cheer - hakuna matata - worry for today only not tomorrow

I was quite anxious and worried yesterday, Monday. We are in finals week in our high school and I am a teacher there. I was getting very anxious about many things. 1. My son facing serious criminal charges for choices he made a few months ago with drugs. Will be get favor from the judge and the court? 2. Our black Labrador has spinal deterioration and is loosing function of his back feet. What will his end be and how long do we have with him? 3. What am I not getting done with the demands of school ending. Am I forgetting something. These questions and worries were all about today and tomorrow.

The words of Jesus came to me as a comfort: "In this world you will have tribulations, but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world." (John 16:33). Later yesterday I was also getting my wife worked up because of all the worry and stress in me. I had missed some after school appointments that I was not aware of and I was called to the office by an administrator to settle a grade dispute from a parent. Toward the end of the day, the phrase Hakuna Matata came to me as an encouragement to live one day at a time and not get to anxious about tomorrow.

Discover: The Habit of 5 

Amazing Potential behind pretending faces in high school

You cannot know what is behind the person that you see. You see their body and their attitude and their public face, but you cannot know what is inside unless you listen and ask the right questions. I am a teacher in a private high school and today I found out something amazing about a student's capabilities that I had no idea was there. This student is a girl that is overweight, always runs late to my class, usually has a poor attitude and acts likes she is unable to understand or complete the Spanish class assignments I give to her. Her outward person has said the same thing to me all year, "this is too hard for me-I can't do this work. Guess what I found out today? She has her PLAN test out looking at it and I asked if I could see her test results. She said, "sure." Wow! She scored in the 80th and 90th percentile in English and other skills. She scored in the 97th percentile in reading! All this time she was acting not so smart and she is one of the smartest people in America when it comes to reading and comprehension! That was an eye-opener for me. As teachers sometimes we feel compassion and even sorry for students who struggle but at the same time many, many students lie to us with their facial expressions and actions and try to get us to believe that they are incapable of doing the "impossible" tasks we are asking them to do. I am not saying that there are not those that genuinely do struggle, because there are those for sure. I am saying that every student who puts on a show of struggling and barely making it is not always telling the truth. They are communicating to the teacher their laziness more than their capability. Even the student's skills I discovered today, that student told me, point-blank that they are lazy. The lesson I learned is don't always believe peoples actions, attitudes and faces. There is amazing potential and capabilities under most of those acts!

Unbelievable Internet Resources HERE 

Surprises - Entrepreneur Rising - Writing Well - Zinsser

Selecting one thing I learned from today is a little tougher than it has been on some days. I did not get up early to read this morning before church as I had planned. Church was cool. It was the first time I attended church where I was not running the music show. It was quite relaxing. I wanted to go to show my support to the new people. We had a choice to go hear a guest speaker at another church that my son, Andrew, heard at a youth retreat and was really encouraged by.

I learned that getting 15 minutes of direct sunlight is not always easy. Sometimes clouds get in the way! I kind of wasted time trying to find a good outdoors place to read on my laptop.

I learned of a place called http://entrepreneurrising.com/ where local entrepreneurs rent desk or office space where they can still be around other folks like themselves to gain from the synergy of sharing ideas with each other instead of being isolated like so many small business people can be.

I read an incredible devotional by Oswald Chambers. Here is a sweet quotations from the April 29 reading:

Certainty is the mark of the common-sense life: gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness, it should be rather an expression of breathless expectation. We are uncertain of the next step, but we are certain of God. Immediately we abandon to God, and do the duty that lies nearest, He packs our life with surprises all the time.

Read some of William Zinsser's "On Writing Well." Many say it is the greatest book on writing ever. I totally agree. I discovered it when I hired a local writer to tutor me to improve my writing skills. After I read the first few chapters of this book, writing plainly started to make total sense to me and my writing teacher agreed when she saw my writing.

Highly Useful Knowledge-Eliminating Useless Fluff

Do Not Take NyQuil Tonight if You Need to Think Tomorrow

One lesson I learned today was to not take NyQuil when you go to bed at night unless you want to be a slow thinker the next morning. My brain was barely functioning this morning even though I got plenty of sleep last night. I missed having all my brain cells firing the right way today. I will probably think twice before I knock myself out with NyQuil again.

Research & Discover HERE! 

Sunlight Can Boost Your Mood Attitude and Possibly Fight off Depression

One lesson I learned today was something I noticed toward the end of this day. I had spent the day at the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans, Louisiana with a bunch of high school students. I spent about 2:30 taking pictures and videos of all the animals. When I got back home to Baton Rouge, I sat down on my computer to read. My mood was so good and I was so happy and I could not explain why. The only explanation I could come up with was the time I had spent in the Sun that day. My face was even a little read but I did not burn my skin much. Sunlight can be such a mood buster if taken in the right dosage. I rarely got sun most days previous to this day and my mood was not a totally positive one like I experienced at the end of this day. Pretty cool stuff. Lesson learned: Spend a few minutes each day in direct sunlight and soak in the rays. It will enhance your mood and your outlook on life.
-April 27, 2012