Shoulder Pain and Thanksgiving

Well, it appears my Thanksgiving will be coming a bit sooner this year..  this weekend to be exact. Normally, we'd all head up to Springdale to stay in or around my Uncle Kevin and Aunt Shirley's house and meet most of the family there...  this year, it looks like everyone is being pulled in all different sorts of directions and that won't be possible.  Thankfully though, I'll be able to sleep in the Friday after.  :)

So...  that's the Thanksgiving part, now for the shoulder pain part...  wow.  I haven't hurt this bad in ... ever.  I don't know what I did to it, but it's like someone twisted my shoulder around three times and then popped it really good with their fist.  It feels a bit like a constant neck pain, like the kind when you sleep wrong and wake up not able to turn your head one way..  Well, this has gone on for several days now and it just doesn't look like there is any relief in site.  I'm sure there is, and I'm sure, like everything else, this will pass.. c'est la vie.

I'm sure this isn't the wise, learned, thoughtful commentary you've been expecting to hear tonight.  You pull up a blog to read some deep statement and you get a health report.  Well, let's see.  Let's see if I can start right now and throw something profound in here off the top of my head.

So, I was thinking about this shoulder pain thing for about five seconds and... well, honestly, I don't know what I realize but I'm going to keep typing and just show you what comes out.  There is no forethought to any of this, only what my fingers type.  I literally don't even have sentences formed when I'm typing.  I see the very next word in line and hope it creates a complete thought when included with the one behind and before.  Hm.. that worked.  I have no idea how I can make some sort of parallel between my aching shoulder and some point of order in the universe...  and I'm sure some of you.. or maybe none of you, will comment and say, well, you could see it as pain that you suffer through and it's indicative of the things we labor through even when it hurts to reach those things we really desire.. and all that... but I'm looking for something really deep.

Did you know there are only 1,000 tigers left in the wild?  That saddens me, that we've taken some of the most beautiful creatures and destroyed them...  wiped them out.  It sort of draws me to the conclusion that we're regressing.  We've become so adept at technology, but can anyone solve a calculus problem without pulling out their calculator?  There were those in the early 19th century who could..  We have computers to spell for us, figure things out for us, we have Google to ask for definitions, synonyms, antonyms (and no, I spelled those all myself ;)  )... we have GPS because it seems no one can remember directions anymore.

When was the last time someone told you, "You're going to turn left on this street, then pass four houses and then..." before you interrupted them and said, "Oh, I have it on Google maps, just give me your address.."  When was the last time you just opened the door and walked into a relatives house...

One of my fondest memories is walking into Mam-maw and Pap-paw's house while they were gone.. feeling like we lived there.  We didn't do that at anyone elses.. I do it at my parent's house now.. so I guess it's the same thing.  But as a kid.. it was so much different... there was a red crayon jammed into the door lock from goodness knows when for probably as long or longer than I've been born... and they never bothered to change it (it's been changed recently) and we would walk in and there was always this faint smell of cooking.. or apples.. or pears.. fresh.  Like they'd just been picked out of the tree.  We seemed to usually arrive on Wednesday nights or Sunday nights, and they were at church when we got there. No matter how tired I was, I always wanted Mam-maw to cook me a little hamburger.. those were THE best... I wish I could cook one like that.

I remember being half-asleep, helping, or not helping, to make the bed then doing the prayer in the middle of the living room all together, with Pap-paw praying out loud... I almost always finished before he did, but even since the first time, even when I didn't know for sure, I always knew.. you waited for Pap-paw to finish before you moved.. and he'd finish and then we'd get up and go on to bed.  On summer nights, he'd walk around and spray stam or some sort of mosquito repellent on the windows... and you'd lay there awake and listen to the weird sounding bugs or frogs outside.

We're so closed off now.. we have our privacy fences and our garages.  Most people I know, pull into the driveway, open the garage, pull into the garage, close the garage and get out.  They never even talk to their neighbors.  My mom does.. but I'm not sure if that sort of neighborhood will ever exist again once my parent's generation stops.

I want to add that to my bucket list.. but I don't want to do 101 things or it'll look cheesy like.. 101 things to do when you're bored..  but my 100.0 thing to do would be to know my neighbors.  Know their kids, their kid's birthdays, their birthdays, their ups and downs... ins and outs..  I want it to be said of me when I die that I brought everyone together.  That I pulled for everyone to win.  I want two people to be able to look at each other and say.. "If it weren't for DeJuan, I'd have never met you and now you're my best friend.. "

I don't know how to start that.. actually, I don't know how to start most of the items on my bucket list... I can't read all 100 books tonight.. I probably won't finish them in 10 years... (well, at the rate I'm going now, maybe 10 months..)  but it's just a step in that direction.

And if you want to do the same.. stop rushing about so much.. talk to someone next to you on the bus, train, grocery line.. introduce yourself.. they will probably look at you funny..  but it's not because it's weird.. it's because it's uncommon!  Be an uncommon person.  Be a person who takes the moment and lives it... Let's not settle into out robotic modes of life.. that isn't living at all.

I'll close now.. but with a quote from one of my all time favorite movies..  Meet Joe Black.  It's a quote about REALLY loving someone but I think it can be applied to almost anything in life..

"Love is passion, obsession, someone you can't live without. If you don't start with that, what are you going to end up with? Fall head over heels. I say find someone you can love like crazy and who'll love you the same way back. And how do you find him? Forget your head and listen to your heart. I'm not hearing any heart. Run the risk, if you get hurt, you'll come back. Because, the truth is there is no sense living your life without this. To make the journey and not fall deeply in love - well, you haven't lived a life at all. You have to try. Because if you haven't tried, you haven't lived."

1984 -- George Orwell (2)

I don't really know how to describe this book.  I guess I could do so in several different ways, but I think I'll aim in two, just to narrow down the focus.  Hmm.. that word coming from me in that way..

Politically, it seems almost as if this book is slowly materializing, or has already and maybe always has been materialized in and among anyone sitting under any form of government.  Most governments, however well they hide the secret of the fact, devise some means to control the thought processes of those under its rule.  In the book, a quote that stuck out to me (among hundreds of others) was one O'Brien says while Winston is being tortured:

"In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was 'Thou shalt not'. The command of the totalitarians was 'Thou shalt'. Our command is 'Thou art'."

It wasn't so much punishing for the doing and stopping the doing, or forcing the doing, but causing some sort of change within the man to make him be the doing. If success is found here, there is nothing else that needs happen. If a power could change the world-view of its subjects, it would be able to remain in power indefinitely as shown in the book. During the course of the book, facts were added and changed frequently, and through a process called doublethink, the populace believed the new fact as if the old had never existed.


I can see this going on in society as a whole now. There are entire populations of people, maybe not gathered into one place (though in the age of the Internet does it really matter?) who say the Holocaust never occurred. We know it occurred. We can go and look at photographs, we can walk through the remains of the concentration camps and there are huge storylines of people who came through it and passed down the tale to their families. But for reasons as varied as the people who tell them, there are those who believe the factual occurrence never happened. And they don't say it because they want to believe it didn't happen, they believe it didn't happen. At that point, the person is an atheist in that particular belief and their world-view shapes the framework of their believing so that even in light of incredible evidence, they will stand against it.


This could be much longer, but I've already posted a few things about the book as I read, so I'll keep it short and head on to the ratings portion of the program.


Flow - 8 (I sometimes thought I'd missed a page when new chapters started. That's why I didn't give it a 10)
Believability - 9
Suspension of Reality - 7
Message - 10
Intrinsics - 8
Total - 42 of 50


Back in high school, I'd played the part of O'Brien's servant in the school play, though the screenplay of this seemed far different than the actual novel. Now, thinking back, I imagine it probably wasn't, though I'm a little older now and understand quite a bit more than I did then about the subtle meanings and differences placed in the books. I even now understand what happens after the "The End". He tells you if you read carefully enough.


So for now, barring any masterful performances by other novels, I'll place this one at number 2. I'm sure something will pull a 45 out of 50.. but I'm trying to be strict in my ratings and have an actual reasoning to give it the numbers I do.

1984 -- George Orwell... the spiritual point of view

If we look at this spiritually, we can see the same thing happened to the Pharisees who stood against Jesus in the councils and even after he rose from the dead.  They knew something had happened beyond their control and even though they saw the miracles and even had firsthand accounts from the soldiers who guarded his tomb, WOULD NOT believe in the face of unimaginable evidence (they of all people who quite possibly had the most of any single group).

And as the Bible said, it wasn't that they didn't want to believe..  They were the religious group.  They were the ones who wanted to turn Israel back from its secular leanings of the time.  They were the ones searching the hardest for the Messiah.  It wasn't that they didn't want to believe, they couldn't believe.  They'd attached their minds so strongly to a particular position and a particular world-view that there was no room for anything skewed from their standpoint.  As Isaiah 6:9 says:

"And He said, 'Go and say to this people:

'Keep on hearing, but do not understand;

keep on seeing, but do not percieve.''"

More and more my eyes have been opened to the importance of the Godly world-view.  A world-view isn't something that changes with laws and rules and decisions and thoughts.  It is that thing, even deeper than a thing.. it is the foundational basis, behind every law, rule, decision and thought we follow or do not follow.  It is what is there after every other thing is stripped away.  It is the device against which we as human beings have no power to fight.

More than ever, and I apologize for my lack of eloquence or coherence, I believe the Bible to be the blueprint from God, for man, containing the way to superimpose the correct world-view over the one we've come to follow without question.  It is a world-view rife with faith, love, hope, mercy against our self-driven world-view of narcissism and worry and self-doubt.

It's not a formula, please don't mistake what I'm saying as that.. but it's by committing ourselves to it in discipline and not requirement, we can begin to understand the true nature of things.  It's never a requirement. If we try to do something because "we have to do it" we'll never get the full benefit and for all we know, the benefit may be skewed in any case.  But if we do it out of the joy of knowing it is a good thing that profits much, whether we see it in the near or far, fruit will come.  And fruit that comes is not a fruit that is forced.  Perhaps for ten years you see nothing, but then suddenly, you look at the life that you live and notice ones alongside who have been fed by the fruit from the branches of your life for years without you knowing.

That is knowing your world-view has changed.  When things happen, good things (of which we know nothing good comes except from the Father), happen to change the life of those around you; Godly spoken words, or words of thanksgiving or praise, come from your mouth as easily as a singular, "Hello," emerges when passing someone in the hallway.  When you notice right thoughts flow out about something, not because you rehearsed and memorized them like some actor on stage, but because they flowed from a well deeper than that within you.  That is when you know the Word has changed you.

Do anything

There is a well known saying.  "All it takes for evil to win is for good men to do nothing."  It's something like that and I'm sure I will have many people thinking it was worded slightly different.  But I just read something else in 1984 that really got me..   Winston is trying to reconcile with this gut feeling inside of him that something is just not right.. things can't be the way they've been portrayed, but there is no proof.  The history has been meticulously erased, rewritten and smoothed over, so that every statistic given by the ones in power has backed up "proof" of being completely correct and even people who fight against the government are wiped from existence so thoroughly that a husband will forget his wife after a time and will even wonder if he merely imagined her, she is so permanently removed from every form except the memory of the individual.

"Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth."

I cannot iterate enough that this book needs to be read..  There are so many applications even though the horror of Big Brother never(?) came to be..

Proles

"In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumours and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous ; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice. The great majority of proles did not even have telescreens in their homes. Even the civil police interfered with them very little."

1984 Chapter 7
I just looked at this through new eyes. The "proles" are the proletariat, a citizen of the lowest class. In the world of 1984, they were the underbelly, those not even worth worrying about because they could be controlled so easily. When I saw this, I wondered if the book was true in some sense.

If you strain out the multi-millionaires and government employees and those in power, you get a distinct and sometimes disregarded (especially by some in leadership) group of people who don't really care much about how things happen as long as they don't mess with their status quo very much. As long as I'm doing all right, it doesn't really matter what happens four doors down, much less on the other side of this big blue and green ball we live on. You could take this one paragraph and swap out very few words and perfectly describe a lot of life in the United States right now. Hardly 10% of the entire population votes in any election, meaning out of a country of 300 million, 30 million are deciding who will be in office. When special elections come up for state constitution amendments even less show up. That's just one example, and it is fresh because the elections just happened. But it's just something that made me stop and think. Another quote from the book...

"Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious."

Swiss Family Robinson -- Jean Rudolph Wyss (60)

I finished reading this book last night.  If you want a book to encourage you to give up everything and find a nice deserted island to live on, this is the one.  I don't think your experience will be the same as their's, however.  I have to say I wasn't incredibly impressed with the realism.

It's about a French family on an island apparently near New Zealand (there is a kangaroo mentioned).  In the film, they were headed for New Guinea.  They were shipwrecked, though the entire ship lasted quite a while on the reef where it was stranded (the family had to blow the whole thing up when they were done with it).  It was definitely a book more suited to a less cynical or realistic reader (not to say I am cynical, since I'm not). Though cutting the inside out of a tree to make a virtual winding staircase to the canopy above would kill the tree.  If food supplies seemed to be getting low, one only needed to pull any random plant out of the ground.  It would invariably turn into potatoes or some other form of edible root.  You want coconuts?  Walk under a tree and a monkey will throw one at you.  Every wild animal they caught was easily tamed by simply puffing tobacco smoke at it or biting its ears (as in the case of the onager).  The wildlife of this strange island reminded me a of the television show LOST.  There was a 30 foot boa constrictor (who ate the donkey), flamingos, kangaroos, bears, ostriches, salmon (in New Zealand?), a beached whale, tigers, at least two lions, monkeys, parrots of all kinds, huge land crabs, hippos, buffalo, eagles and walruses among others.  An eagle is caught and trained to hunt other birds for the family (in fact, the eagle kills a male ostrich and is instrumental in helping the boys catch another ostrich which is trained to be a mount).

PETA would be incensed if it were around in those days (not that I care what PETA thinks), as Mr. Robinson and his sons shot everything in sight whether they needed it for food or not.  Instead of helping the poor beached whale back into the ocean, they stripped blubber off for oil (lamps) and skin to make leather harnesses for the other animals, then left the rest for the seagulls and birds.

This book, in my opinion, was written simply for entertainment purposes.  It was perhaps written in the same manner, or at least with the same beginning, as the one I've written, pure fun and fancy.  "Let's write about a family who gets shipwrecked on an island."  There is no tragedy of loss.  Civilization is lost, though it is spurned by most of the family at the end anyway.  In the immense farm of animals, the only deaths chronicled are the "old" donkey (eaten), which was probably on its last leg anyway, and Juno (the dog) who'd lived at least 12 years to that point (killed by a tiger).  The trained eagle also died after being with Fritz the entire story, but so many things are happening at that point it is barely referred to.  Nor is there any deep political meaning of trying to escape the evil empire or kingdom of taxation and tyranny.  On the contrary, this French family welcomes the colonization of their proud New Switzerland by the English whose ship found them.

Now for the rating:
Flow - 8
Believability - 4
Suspension of Reality - 5
Message - 3
Intrinsics - 5
Total - 24

So I think for the moment, I'll put this book at 60 on my list of the top 100.

Wrote a song

Well, I suppose another item on my "Bucket List" was to write songs...  so I suppose I could post this here.  It has a tune sort of, but I've no REAL knowledge of the piano or guitar or notation to put it onto paper, though I can whistle it....  hm.

Anyway, here it is.

It's called "Your Hand Catches Me"


There's been something I've been trying to do
Trying to find the life You've made for me
But I've been doing it all on my own
Running and looking and searching alone

You've held out Your hands to help
But I've been too busy to see
It's not that I wouldn't accept it
But it never seemed that concrete
I've given it a lot of thought
And it's just a matter of faith
To believe and follow is all You've asked
With the willingness You've given me

I've tried and failed so many times
This life has wearied me
But I push You away and try again on my own
I can't find the strength to do it again
And You reach out Your hand
I slip as I rise and reaching I cry
And Your hand catches me.

Number 47

I said I wanted to read the top 100 novels.  I've listed these here.  It is most likely not complete, as I will probably add some classic Christian novels; Chronicles of Narnia and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are listed, though Pilgrim's Progress is not.

Here they are.  If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them..  My bucket list says the top 100, but I'm very willing to go over that number. :)  I will also strike through each of the novels as I read them.  A subsequent post will be added to talk about those books at the time I finish them.

1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
3. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
5. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
6. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
9. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
10. Animal Farm by George Orwell
11. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
12. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
13. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
14. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
15. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
16. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
17. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
18. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
19. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
20. Ulysses by James Joyce
21. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
22. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
23. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
24. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
25. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
26. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
27. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
28. Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne
29. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
30. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
31. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
32. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
33. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
34. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
35. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
36. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
37. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
38. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
39. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
40. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
41. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
42. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
43. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
44. The Stranger by Albert Camus
45. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
46. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
47. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
48. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
49. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
50. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
51. Watership Down by Richard Adams
52. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
53. The Swiss Family Robinson by Jean Rudolph Wyss
54. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
55. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
56. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
57. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
58. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
59. Dune by Frank Herbert
60. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
61. Dracula by Bram Stoker
62. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
63. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
64. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
65. The Stand by Stephen King
66. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
67. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
68. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
69. Middlemarch by George Eliot
70. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
71. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
72. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
73. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
74. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
75. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
76. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
77. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
78. The Trial by Franz Kafka
79. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
80. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
81. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
82. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
83. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
84. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
85. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
86. Persuasion by Jane Austen
87. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
88. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
89. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
90. Emma by Jane Austen
91. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
92. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
93. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
94. Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
95. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
96. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
97. A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
98. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
99. Beloved by Toni Morrison
100. Atonement by Ian McEwan

Bucket List

1. Finish my degree
2. Become a best-selling author
3. Turn book into a movie
4. Climb to the top of a mountain
5. Visit different countries
6. Visit every state, not just travel through
7. Get married
8. Have a child
9. Sell a painting for over $1000
10. Own horses
11. Design and build my dream house
12. Send someone to the nations as a missionary
13. Lead someone to the Lord
14. Ride a gondola in Venice
15. Go to a Renaissance fair
16. Complete a marathon
17. Learn to dance
18. Go water skiing
19. Go ice skating
20. Go snow skiing
21. Learn the guitar
22. Learn the piano
    Be able to play and sing this song (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIgVU_5FsqA&list=MLGxdCwVVULXd1RUDA2Jn7kDMbnJ6ywscF&playnext=3)
23. Sing in Les Miserables on stage
24. Go snorkeling
25. Go white water rafting
26. Go on a cruise
27. Go surfing
28. Ride in a hot air balloon
29. Go paragliding
30. Go on a cross country road trip
31. Go rock climbing
32. Go on a safari
33. Visit Victoria Falls
34. Dive the Great Barrier Reef
35. See Angel Falls
36. Climb the Statue of Liberty
37. See Mount Rushmore
38. Visit a castle
39. Visit the Pyramids of Giza
40. Visit Israel
41. See the Leaning Tower
42. Go to the British Isles
43. Go to Niagara Falls
44. See the Coliseum in Rome
45. Publish and keep a blog
46. Restore a 1965 Mustang
47. Read top 100 novels (bottom)
48. Become an early riser
49. Write a screenplay
50. Have a role in a movie
51. Direct a movie (or be a consultant)
52. Own a sailboat
53. Own a business
54. Drive the Autobahn
55. Have a garden
56. Go green
57. Walk on the Great Wall of China
58. Own a drive-in movie theater
59. Memorize poetry
60. Be a hero
61. Paint a mural masterpiece
62. Stay close to family
63. Buy dad and mom a home
64. Build a boat
65. Hang glide
66. Fish with my kids
67. Learn another language
68. Learn to fly a plane
69. Visit the Smithsonian
70. Visit the Louvre
71. Sculpt with marble
72. Learn pottery
73. Build an awesome model railroad layout
74. Do a radio show
75. Own land in the mountains
76. Build a cabin by hand
77. Write a symphony
78. Be a trusted best friend to someone
79. Be able to give Godly counsel to people
80. Keep my mouth closed when I need to
81. Confront people when I need to
82. Give out more love than I receive (from others)
83. Build the myPad houses and help them become popular
84. Become a master carpenter/builder
85. Be a confidant and advisor
86. Inspire someone to greatness
87. Find a needy village and give myself to training them
88. Help reform the national tax code in some way
89. Home school my kids
90. Train my children in the way of the Word of God (Pr 22:6)
91. Lay down my life for my friends
92. Read the Bible through every year
93. Build a castle the way they did in medieval times
94. Learn to live off the land
95. Direct and produce the movie “This Present Darkness”
96. Adopt a child
97. Keep a written journal about everything on this list
98. Build inner-city ministries to get the forgotten off the streets
99. Build the ministry “Speed the End”
100. Allow myself to make mistakes