DiscipleGeek

This blog post is about my dear friend Myra.

This is what happens when you’re brainstorming for ideas during the yard sale your wife and Dave Ramsey insisted on. I was struggling with coming up with an idea and decided to ask the question aloud. The person next to me replied with no hesitation, “Write about me!”

I don’t think she was completely serious.

However, anyone one that knows me well enough should know better than to give me answers like that. Thanks to my unique sense of humor, I actually stopped and contemplated it for a bit. In that brief pause from concerning myself with selling my household junk on the side of the street to random strangers I realized her family would indeed be a great starting place for today’s post. Thus was born the decision to talk of Myra.

Here’s what you need to know about this Blessing the Lord has given me, the awesome family of Myra and Jason:

• Almost six years ago Jason was not a Christian.
• Despite this, Myra raised a son with a zeal and passion for the Lord that would put most of us to shame. In kindergarten he told his teacher he wanted to be a preacher. At age 9 he informed his mother that he had been bringing his bible to school because during snack time he was teaching his friends God’s word. He said, “Mom, I don’t want any of my friends to be lost. I have to help them.”
• God blessed them with Kylie and Addison. They were born premature and Myra was dangerously close to bleeding out. Thankfully she and the girls survived.
• Addison was born with special needs, but with what most would consider a tragedy, God created beauty and power.
• Jason is now a faithful Christian and a hardworking deacon in the Lord’s church and they have been married for ten years now.
• Since then they have had two more girls, and are some of the most dependable, selfless people I know.

The Lampo Group recently put several of their best selling books on sale for $10. I’ve been wanting to get a couple of these, but there were always seemingly more urgent things that our money was needed for. At this point, I don’t remember what they were, I guess they were urgent, but not important. My wife, remembering my interest in these books, told me to suggested strongly that I should purchase the ones I wanted since they were on sale.

I purchased them and immediately began reading Jon Acuff’s Quitter, a book about chasing your dreams without quitting your day job. The book uses Jon’s own experience chasing his dream job of being an author as the primary example. The similarities between his dream and mine struck a chord deep within me, and for once I actually feel like I can write a book and get it published.

He talked of murdering perfectionism and how to make time in our busy schedules to chase our Dreams. This is why Myra and Jason are the perfect topic for this post.

If you’ve been keeping score, you’ll notice that they have five children now. Jason has a full time job. His daughters Kylie and Addison go pretty regularly to a city over an hour away for specialist visits because of complications from their premature birth. His responsibilities as deacon include both the youth and our fellowship events. Yet he has managed to find the time to go back to school.

Myra’s full time job is taking care of their house and five children, one of which has special needs. If my two are any indication, five are more than a full time job’s worth of work. She also cleans other people’s houses and still manages to help decorate for weddings and other events the members of the church have.

But the kicker is that if you need their help, they are ready to jump in 100% and do whatever is necessary. Again managing to take care of you and their own household needs.

I’ve asked them how they find the time, how they manage to make it all work and their answer is simple: “You just make it happen because it has to.”

Myra and Jason and my other friends David and Erin set an example that has made me realize that I’ve just been making excuses. The last time I wrote on my book was almost two years ago. The excuses I’ve used for not writing since then have been: being a new dad, having an expecting wife, then having a newborn and a toddler at the same time. These pale in comparison to the responsibilities and accomplishments of my friends.

Jon Acuff says that if I want to follow my Dream of writing I must practice my Dream.

With these two thoughts, I’m making a change in my life.

The new blog design is part of this change. I’ve removed all the old articles from the main stream in an attempt at a fresh start. I didn’t want to just delete them, so I’ve put them out of the way under the Archives tab for anyone that might be interested in reading them.

My goal is to write every day, both for this blog, and for the books I’ve planned.

Every. Day.

What are your Dreams? Are you chasing them today? How?