Tag: growth

Interviewing my favorite undertaker: Caleb Wilde

I’ve appreciated Caleb Wilde’s blog for quite a while now. It could be my own experience with grief, suffering, and the dying process that makes Caleb’s sentiments on death and unique perspective a kind of solace to me.

If death and dying has touched your world, I think you’ll feel the same way about his blog. If it hasn’t, at some point it will. That’s just the facts.

Speaking from experience, I suggest purposefully familiarizing yourself with the inevitable issues of mortality (your own and your loved ones’) before they arrive without warning and manage to capsize your world, crush your faith, or in some other way batter you. And for purposes of minister and soul care it’s quite helpful too.

This is part one of our chat. Check back this week for part 2.

(click for video)

Read my Guest Post on “Confessions of a Funeral Director” blog (Caleb Wilde)

Thank you so much for stopping by today.

It’s a really big day for me, for at least 3 reasons…hold up! 5 Reasons. (I just found out it’s The Year of the Dragon starting today AND National Pie day. Eating pie like a dragon seems like the proper thing to do and Very exciting!)

Here’s 3 more reasons.

1. Author Shawn Smucker’s interview is now live, it’s awesome, and it’s the first of two parts (see the previous post).

2. Doomsday debunker and writer of a bunch of books, Jason Boyett, posted the pre-lease of his interview with me about his fun (yes I said fun) Doomsday book. For now, it’s only available at his site, here, (and it’s unlisted on youtube until that goes live, on January 30th to the general public).

Since it’s time-sensitive info…go ahead and get the word out! (We might only have 11 more months before ultimate doom and annilation, so be a darling and help some people not freak out, k?)

3. I have a guest post at Confessions of a Funeral Director. No, I’m not a funeral director, but it is a kind of confession.

Please stop by and read my deathly guest post at Caleb’s poignant site. He’s, by far, my favorite undertaker. And I mean that!

And check back for a fascinating Ninja Interview with Caleb which will be up soon.

5 Reasons You can’t Fix People

creative commons photo. click for attribution.
  • (#1) Sorry to be blunt, but it’s just not your job. It never was.
  • (#2) You’re pretty crappy at fixing yourself.
    If you were good at fixing yourself, you would’t want to fix other people.
    In them (the “un-fixed”) you see yourself.
  • (#3) You don’t have that kind of power. It’s inappropriate to think you do.
  • (#4) People resent the condescension, so even if you try to be kind in the fixing it’s counterproductive.
  • (#5) People are supposed to have some unfixable spots.
    I write about “broken jars” here.

What are the alternatives?

  • Walk with people
  • Be a good influence
  • listen more
  • love more
  • learn more
What are some reasons or alternatives for you?

5 Ways to Get Whatever you Want

1. Shun Meaningful Relationships

  • The problem with interpersonal intimacy is that it diminishes one’s ability to hone self-centeredness. Once others start to matter you sometimes have to take them into consideration. Two Words, people: Lone Wolf.

2. Don’t Get Married/Stay Married

  • One of the first things you learn, and then continue to learn repeatedly through the years, is that marriage puts your selfishness under a looming, bright, hot spotlight. There is no need to build those skills of negotiating compromise, because unfettered selfishness is crucial to consistently getting what you want.

3. Don’t Be A Good Parent

  • From birth children are needy. Constantly, one must put his children’s welfare ahead of his own. Even one’s ambitious and preferences routinely are relegated to second priority, or much worse. All this practice of deferring weakens you, so you hardly ever get whatever you want. I’ve seen this happen a ton of times.

4. Don’t Commit to People or Ideals

  • Believing in something, or being loyal, severely compromises your abilities to get whatever you want. One minute you’re doing something nice for someone, or some cause, and the next minute your going well out of your way. Talk about getting derailed!

5. Don’t Grow Compassionate

  • As people elicit your pity, or draws you into some sort of endearment, it lights the fuse on the bomb that will eventually explode your efforts to get whatever you want.
If you can avoid all these trappings, you will probably grow expert at getting whatever you want. Of course don’t expect anyone to like it, or like you. As a kind of plague to those in your world, you will continue to seek meaning, but only find it rarely; and even then it will be fleetingly.
Have you been harmed selfishness?