Future Plans

An old saying goes: If you want to hear God laugh, make plans!

A dizzy spell woke me up at 3:30 Saturday morning and stayed with me throughout the day; this curtailed plans I had to work on the car. I felt leery of taking the radiator apart if I might not feel well enough to put it back together again, so I stayed inside working on my manuscript all day.

While Ginny disassembled Christmas decorations, I wrote out a work plan for the coming year. This meant trying to realistically examine what I hope to accomplish and evaluating whether or not it’s worth doing.

Sometimes yea and sometimes nay.

On some level I do want to be 100% at the disposal of Jesus Christ and available to fit into His plans; on another level, I have my own ideas that I want to push through come Hell or high water.

I’ve pretty much decided to let other people take care of the young man dying of cancer, yet I’m trying to stay open to the work if I see I’m really needed. I’ve looked at my motives for wanting to be involved (being with a group of insiders, wanting to impress folks with my hands-on piety, and crap like that) and I see my motivation is a great deal less than love. On the other hand, I realize that a person in need doesn’t give a damn about the motives of the helper – the soup tastes just as good to him even if I cooked with paternalistic motives.

At any rate, I decided not to help in this instance but I’m not satisfied with my decision and I’m open to changing my mind.

During break times from our work, Ginny and I sat together smoking and recounting various things we have to be thankful about in 2005. We accumulated quite a list. Things have gone very well for us. We also nosed about things, good and ill, to anticipate in 2006. We’ll take those as they come.

She also advised me about some formatting problems I’m having with the current manuscripts. As a writer, I used to envision a special niche in hell where editors would thrash around in flaming piles fueled by manuscript pages they had rejected.

Now that I’m editing my own copy, I can see that editors may have suffered a bit in the here and now already. Their job is not as easy as it looks.

I did get a pleasant stroke when an e-mail arrived from a young historian asking permission to quote from Crackers & Carpetbaggers, my book on Jacksonville history,. He’s writing his own book on J.E.T. Bowden, a politician in the 1880s, and wants to quote me as a source.

I couldn’t be more flattered!

I’m putting together a response with some tips so he can avoid some of the bogs I got stuck in as I wrote my own work.

Another happy thing is that about 4 in the afternoon I received my very first New Year’s Greeting from Jellyhead, a young lady in Australia – where it was already the New Year. Her blog address is http://jellyheadrambles.blogspot.com/ . That was certainly a lift.

Jennifer and Pat hosted a New Year’s Party at their house with pizza, videos, and milk shakes, with a trip downtown to see fireworks at midnight. Ginny & I planned to stay home and watch tv – but I fell asleep about 9:30 and the New Year managed to arrive without me.

Reuters News Service reports that in Palu, Indonesia, a New Year’s Eve bomb exploded in a Christian market killing 8 people and mangling 53 others. The bomb was packed with nails to maximize damage.

According to the wire:

Central Sulawesi has been plagued by religious violence and tension since the late 1990s. Fighting between Muslims and Christians from 1998-2001 killed 2,000 people, mainly around the Muslim town of Poso….

While a peace accord halted the 1998-2001 bloodshed in Central Sulawesi, violence has erupted sporadically.

In one of the worst incidents, three teenage Christian girls were beheaded near Poso last October. Bombings last May in the Central Sulawesi Christian town of Tentena killed 22 people.

Inter-communal violence has killed thousands in Indonesia since the downfall of longtime autocrat Suharto in 1998.

The nation of 220 million people has experienced several major bomb attacks on Western targets as well, mostly blamed on Jemaah Islamiah, a group seen as al Qaeda's Southeast Asian arm.

In addition to such violence, Indonesia is experiencing an outbreak of polio, and bird flu still looms on the horizon.

If you're inclined to pray, please ask the Lord to help my little book on prayer honor Him in this troubled place and time.