Christmas and Thanksgiving Resolutions Work Better

Christmas and Thanksgiving resolutions always work better than those generic ones made New Years Eve. This story illustrates why.

It was the first day of January earlier this year, and when I looked out the window that morning, there was this small fat child streaking in my front yard. It looked like the tyke was having loads of fun and beckoning me to join in. Well first of all, there are rules against streaking even in one’s own yard. In addition, it was freezing in Cincinnati and the thought of some body part or another icing up and falling off wasn’t very appealing.

 

Then I recognized him. Continue reading

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Life is a Moment Long

Life is a moment long.

Some claim it is the number of hours, days, and years between birth and death, but life is just a moment long. Some say it is a summary of the high and low points, accomplishments and failures, and gains and losses person accumulated over a span of time, but that is a description OF a life. Those events happened in a moment. Life IS a moment, nothing more. Continue reading

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The Most Costly Family Inheritance

Aunt Jo was dying, and we began calling the family to spread the news.

But some of us had hardly spoken a word to each other since Grandma died fifteen years ago. That’s when we got into a big fight over who was getting what of hers. How strange it was to see the unfamiliar numbers of brothers and sisters so long uncalled. Continue reading

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Is There Judgment for Christians Who Sin?

Atheists and people who have left the Fellowship of Believers often ask, “Is there judgment for Christians who sin?” It’s a very good question, but we’ll only get a good answer if clean up some murky definitions. Christians facing judgment for their sins is altogether different than Christians being punished for their sins.  And believe it or not, Christians get this idea confused just as much as anyone else. Continue reading

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An Anti Claus Christmas Story

What if someday Santa just snaps? What if he changes into Anti Claus, the “polar” opposite of everything he stands for now? Think it couldn’t happen? Read this really neat short Christmas story of how such an “altar-ego” might develope.  And warn the kids about making a wish list so long that it uses up a whole Christmas tree.

Here’s the link:

http://dncalkins.hubpages.com/hub/Blood-on-the-Snow

Here’s a recipe God uses to bake cookies.

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God’s Recipe for Baking Cookies

I wrote this hub (what www.hubpages.com calls a post) a few minutes ago. I didn’t try to keyword or SEO it, it was just something I felt led to write about. Of course not paying attention to keywords, Adsense stuck all kinds of cooking ads on the page. Probably will catch some flame from gals who wanted recipes but got a motivational piece instead. Continue reading

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How to Use Effective Keywords in Blogs

Some really great spiritual growth exercises will never benefit anyone, not because the author didn’t have an excellent plan, but because he or she wrote an unoptimized blog post. Failing to use effective keywords will help put your post on page 47 of Google. Continue reading

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Self Help Website Sets One in a Million Growth Accomplishment

Well, actually THREE HUNDRED million because that’s about how many sites there in the World Wide Web.  In just a few short weeks, this website has gone from “new” to garnering an Alexa rank of 763,991. I’ll save you the math- the Alexa website ranking service puts www.TheEffectiveLife.com as more relevant than 99.7% of all the sites on the web. Continue reading

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Effective Choices: The Life Road Not Taken

His interview comments show that Robert Frost was aware of the popular belief that the theme of The Road Not Taken was that learning to choose the less popular road is the key to success. Frost claimed that the poem was written from the point of view of a walking companion who had difficulty in choosing a direction when meeting a fork in the road. Frost said that at the end of the day, no matter which road his friend had chosen, he was always second-guessing his choices, worrying that he had chosen the wrong road.

The thought of changing directions is so intimidating that Continue reading

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Christian Gambling Undercover

The sermon was about the evils of gambling. Ohio had a casino initiative on the ballot, and our denomination’s state conference was working day and night to block it. As I was listening to the information about the rallies, emails, and big efforts to get the news out, I began wondering if this casino thing wasn’t what Jesus had already talked about. You know, the part where He said that the person who managed his money poorly would lose it to someone who managed it well. Continue reading

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