Living in a coastal area that tends to be hurricane prone, events like Hurricane Earl always stir up lots of activity.

Everyone refers to the storm by it’s second name, as in “Earl,” not “Hurricane Earl.” and it sounds like they’re referring to a person: “Where’s Earl?” “Reckon Earl will get here before tonight?” “I hear Earl’s getting nasty.”

It’s a given that you can’t find bread or milk anywhere within a 50 miles of the coast. I guess people like to eat French toast when the barometric pressure drops dramatically. It’s also interesting that there are no videos available for rent; I wonder if that is connected to the same barometric drop?

Everybody goes around looking at the sky. I think they’re confusing hurricanes and tornados. When I lived in Missouri and the sky got dark, everybody did the same thing there; but they were looking for tornados.

Newscasters seem to get more tense. They tend to use more descriptive adjectives than normal like “massive” and “monster” (is “monster” bigger than “massive?”). I guess they’re upset at having to pull all-nighters if the storm arrives.

Now that it seems Earl isn’t going to make his appearance, I guess things will go back to normal.

Staying in a motel, the alarm clock in the neighboring room goes off. There is no one in the room and it doesn’t turn itself off, even hours later.

At first it irritates me but after awhile it disappears into the background and I only occasionally even notice it. I’m able to go about my business with the alarm furiously going off and it doesn’t even bother me.

An alarm is supposed to get your attention so you can respond. This one, though not mine, failed.

This got me to thinking.

I’ve been so busy that I’ve not been able to hear the alarm clocks going off around me. Oh, I heard them but, like my little alarm buddy in the next room, I got used to them and their insistent “alarming” faded into the background.

We all do this. I suppose the difference is if we take the time to do something about it, to “reset” our awareness.

That has become my top priority.

I’ve been trying to convince my wife that it is “legitimate” to use the word “cool” with a “k” instead of a “c,” especially using social media like Twitter.

She’s not buying it.

I told her that it makes her appear “with it,” “young” and “fun.”

“Why do I have to convince people that I’m all of that by speaking (or writing in this case) bad English? Is being stupid better than being correct?”

Ouch!

I think there’s something there that might preach…

There are times I feel so helpless that I could cry. I don’t particularly care for those moments and, admittedly, they are not common. When they come, however, they are intense.

Yesterday was one of those occasions.

I received an email from pastor Danilo in Ubajara, Brazil. Ever since he renounced the Igreja Mundial Renovada (Renewed World Church) two years ago, they have persecuted him relentlessly with the express purpose of destroying his reputation. They have issued written orders to use any means to destroy anything he tries to do and they have been single-minded in doing so. Yet, even in the face of that, Danilo has allowed himself to be used by the Spirit to glorify the name of Jesus in one of the darkest regions of the world.

The email described the new attempts of the Igreja Mundial to tear down the new work he has started in Ubajara. They are going house to house of everyone who attends the worship services and tell such incredible lies about him that I honestly don’t know how people believe them. But, they have had success.

I would love to be able to take these scoundrels on personally and I admit to having not-very-nice thoughts about them. But my heart breaks for Danilo and his wife Fatima because I love him like a brother and am unable to physically stand by him.

The odd thing is that Danilo will do just fine in this; in fact, the church will probably grow exponentially as a result of it. Danilo actually rejoices in all of this activity because he knows what the Spirit will do through it all.

I’m the one suffering… strange, isn’t it?

Funny, when you don’t have time to do anything is when you most need to do something.

Updating to the newest version of WordPress yesterday, I did the unforgivable — I didn’t take the five minutes necessary to back up my blog. I was in a hurry and even did the update as an after thought; I’d even put off updating for two weeks simply because I hadn’t backed up. I never update without backing up… until yesterday.

That yucky feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realize what has happened showed up almost immediately. When I tried to view the site and all I got was an error code made the feeling even worse. When I logged into the server and looked at my files, the big fat “0 kb” that was the file size made me even sicker.

More than a year of blogs simply disappeared into cyberspace, along with all the backup files. [Moral of the story: archive a copy off the server!]

Now I’m trying to rebuild everything and I have no time to do so. I’m busier than that proverbial one-armed paperhanger in a wallpapering contest. Frustration runneth high at the moment.

So bear with me; I’ll hopefully be back to full force –and be even better– relatively soon.

Technical glitch!

Blog crashed and burned, consumed everything. I’ll need to rebuild it all so please bear with me.