Jimmy’s House

I’m sure everyone has been wondering what’s going on around here. Ok, you probably aren’t wondering too much since this place has been so dead. Well, I’ve made some changes and I just haven’t made it here yet to let everyone know.

I’m moving my blogging activities to several other places and won’t be updating this site any time soon.

I’ve started another business called Blue Collar Coaching and you can visit that site and blog, here. http://bluecollarcoaching.net

I’ve also started a podcasting web site with one show and probably two more coming. You can visit that site here. http://bcrn.tv

Thank you everyone for checking in.

Have you ever read a book that you just completely loved and then tried another book by the same author and had a major let down?

A few posts ago I did a quick review of Mark Batterson’s book “In A Pit Wit A Lion On A Snowy Day”. That was and will probably remain my favourite “Christian” book of all time. It hit me right where I needed it to. I was really struggling with wanting to quit and I needed some encouragement. I got exactly what I needed.

I have to admit that my expectations for “Primal” were unfairly too high. It’s not that this book was bad or anything. In fact I do plan on doing a review here explaining why I think it is a good book and deserves your attention. I’m not, however, going to tell you it’s the best book ever and you need to rush out to a book store right now and pick up a copy. My goal is to tell you what Mark is trying to accomplish (in my opinion anyway) in this book and encourage you to go read it if it sounds like something that will minister to you in a special way.

Primal is simply the four love languages Jesus says make up the great commandment. We are to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength. Mark Batterson breaks down those four love languages into four sections of this book and explains how each is accomplished.

The heart of love breaks for the things that break the heart of God. I would call this the missions chapter as Mark goes into depth on his views of missions and their importance in our lives and our spiritual journey. I’ve never in my life been on a missions trip. After reading this chapter I don’t know if I should start planning a missions trip or start feeling guilty for never having gone on one. It is not Mark’s intention for me to feel guilty, but I’m struggling with that emotion anyway.

The soul of love is being in awe of God’s creative power. Mark describes it as ‘wonder’. How can you study the universe, God’s very creation and not be in wonder at all He has done? This section is the ‘can you believe it’ section of Primal.

The mind of love, probably the most obvious, is about our personal understanding of God through our quit times of prayer and bible study and other ways God reveals more of Himself to us. He talks about our natural curiosity in all areas of our life and how we need to be spiritually curious as well. This section of the book seemed very cerebral to me and I honestly remember very little of it because of that.

The strength of love was by far my favourite section of this book. This was the section that ties into his book “In A Pit…” the most. It’s about taking risks and exploring new ideas spiritually. It’s about dreaming big and doing big and letting nothing stand in your way. It’s about not being afraid of failure and realising that the cure to the fear of failure isn’t success but experiencing more failure. It’s about the hard work that goes along with loving God. This is the ‘go’ chapter of the book. The chapter that tries to push you out of your chair and experience some spiritual adventure, which is at the very heart of Mark Batterson’s belief system.

I hope those four paragraphs help to give you an idea as to what this book is about. It’s a great opportunity to dive deeper into a verse that I know I’m guilty of just reading without taking the time to really understand what Jesus was trying to tell us. It’s a book well worth the time it takes to read.

Be watching my blog between the 15th and 22nd of December. I’ve been picked by Random House publishing to get an early release copy of Mark Batterson’s (http://evotional.com/ & http://theaterchurch.com/) new book if I will release a review between those dates here on my blog.

I’m so excited to do this! I’ve never done anything like this before so wish me well as I try to do this book as much justice as someone like me can.

I have read both of Mark’s previous books, “In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day” and “Wild Goose Chase”. These were two of the most encouraging book I have ever read in my life.

I did a story below incorporating his first book into a theme I was dealing with.

If you are at a point in your life where you are really searching for reasons to continue to fight on and not give up I would really recommend “In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day”.

I apologize for the lack of updates here at my blog, I promise to do better in the future!

My sister and brother-in-law are both in Afghanistan right now.  This is the only picture I can really get.  My sister sent it to me on my birthday.  She sees these mountains and planes every morning.

I have to confess that I’ve never sat around in my house and thought about my sister as a brave person or anything.  I don’t think that’s something any of us spend a lot of time contemplating.  Is this person brave or is that person brave.

Well, in the last week have had a lot of email conversations with my sister and I have to say that I’m quite proud of her right now.  She has to carry a locked, cocked and ready to rock, M-16 around with her all day.

Yeah, I know someone who is brave.

Sis, I love you, come back home safely, please.

Many of you won’t understand this but I’m going to rant anyway.

I’ve got a customer that is a week late on sending out checks.  That’s unfortunately pretty common right now.  They’ve been telling me all week that checks were mailing out this week.  That used to mean that I would have a check by Wednesday or Thursday at the very latest.  What that means now is that the bank will mail out the check on Friday so I won’t get it till Saturday and can’t deposit till Monday and it won’t hit their bank until Tuesday or Wednesday next week.

I have other customers that haven’t hit the slightest bump in the road and are paying exactly as they did prior to this slow down.

These tough times are revealing the healthy and the unhealthy in my world and I’m finding it to be quite telling.  Some of the biggest builders here in Kansas City aren’t as financially healthy as they looked when times were booming.

I’ll tell  you right now it’s because of the level of debt they are trying to service on 1/4 the revenue.

Debt=Risk my friends.  I hope I’m not the only one learning this right now.  I hope millions of other people in America decide to quit playing with snakes.

Before I tried to start my own company I was convinced that anyone out there that was successful had stumbled upon their success. That it was by chance that they made money or was doing well. I had a gamblers view of business. I figured that all these successful people had just rolled the dice and voila, MONEY!

Most people who win the lottery, if they don’t change their spending habits, will be back to where they started eventually.

The chances are that anyone who has had that kind of success in business will probably end up back where they started as well. I think our current economy is proof of that. There are a lot of businesses closing up around here in the Kansas City area. I’m talking about construction based businesses. I’m talking about cabinet shops, electric companies, trim companies and so forth. During the tornado of construction that existed during the end of the ’90′s and the first half of the 00′s many turkeys were flying quite well. I’ll call these lottery companies. All you had to do was call back whoever called you. It was so busy here in KC and there was such a shortage of labor and product supply that all you had to do was return a call to get work. That’s a lottery company. Very little effort had to be put into a construction business to experience success.

So, lottery time is officially over, for a long time if not forever. If you think you can start a business by just opening the doors and doing little else you are wrong. This isn’t the lottery. You can’t just patent something and expect everyone to buy it. You can’t just copyright something and expect everyone to buy it. You can’t just write one great book and expect to retire and just collect checks.

You are the missing element in your own great idea. Quit looking around for that one break to make your idea into a household name. It’s not out THERE, it’s in YOU. Only YOU can make YOU successful. You can hire all the coaches in the wold to give you advice but if YOU don’t get out there and work on YOUR idea it won’t be successful.

Business success doesn’t happen by chance, it happens by force.

If you’ve been in business for more than 5 minutes you’ve had thoughts of giving up. I’ve had plenty of them over the last 5+ years of running my business. None of those moments were as strong as a couple of weeks ago.

A couple of months ago we had a snafu on a job. It was supposed to be union wage rate and no one told me. We were ready to walk away except the project manager told me not to worry, this happens from time to time and they would be sure to compensate me. Well, I should have seen the writing on the wall. I didn’t and now I’m only getting $2,200.00 of the $5,100.00 that I needed to charge. When I got the call a couple of weeks ago telling me I wasn’t getting the right amount of money I was ready to just pull it all in and quit. This isn’t the best time for me to take a $3,00.00 bath. This was officially a HUGE test of my faith.

Well, I needed to come up with some solutions. Now, be warned some of these solutions will make sense and some of them are just….well….silly, but it worked.

The first thing I did was go to the bookstore. I needed a book encouraging me to persist. I needed a book that would tell me not to give up. I needed a book that would tell me that tough times are what it takes to even find success. In a conversation with Kevin Miller he mentioned a book.

Yeah, how’s that for a title? I’ll tell you right now that I’d put that book right at the top of the list of books I’ve read in my life. I feel like Mark Batterson wrote that book for me, for right now. It encouraged me in ways I never planned. Look, I’m not a fancy writer so what I’ll do is sum up this book by quoting some of the best from it.

“Faith is the process of unlearning your irrational fears.” “Lion chasers have a high threshold for fear because they have built up fear immunity.” “The cure for the fear of failure is not success. It’s Failure. The cure for the fear of rejection is not acceptance. It’s rejection. You’ve got to be exposed to small quantities of whatever you’re afraid of. That’s how you build up immunity.” “Satan has two primary tactics when it comes to neutralizing you spiritually: discouragement and fear. He wants you to focus on past mistakes you’ve made” “The goal is to muster the moral courage to chase lions” “Lion chasers choose fear”

If you are afraid to step out and get started doing the work you love, read this book today!

Ok, so, what was another thing I did to get myself back on track? Now, try not to laugh too hard okay? I went to see the new Miley Cyrus movie! Are you done laughing yet? Hey, I have four daughters under the age of 12 okay! These are the kinds of movies I go to see. To be honest I was expecting it to be decent. I feel like Miley actually has a chance to be the kind of role model I won’t be ashamed of some day. She sang a great song at the end that really hit home and ties into that book big time. Here is the video per youtube.

I have to remind myself to enjoy the ride or as Miley puts it enjoy the climb. I think we can all take that advice. It’s not whats easy that makes us valuable in the market place. It’s overcoming the challenges.

Ok, so, finally here is the last one. This is a sermon by Andy Stanley. I love Andy Stanley’s stuff. If you are on iTunes and don’t listen to at least his monthly leadership podcast you are seriously missing out.

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Andy summarizes this entire blog post so well in this lesson. God’s hands are not tied and He, not you, is responsible for the results. We are to be faithful in what God has sent us out to do but He is responsible for the results. That was so freeing to me. I have realized that I need to just persist and let God handle the results. He is in control and He has amazing plans for me. He has not brought me this far to just let me fail. He will see me through this because He wants me to be a lion chaser.

It’s so easy to get too busy with life and forget to have some fun. I don’t mind being serious but sometimes I have to remind myself it’s ok to laugh.

Well, in my opinion, no one is funnier than Brian Regan.

Well, this seems to go along quite well with this theme I’ve been following around here lately. I’ve been talking about how important hope is in our lives.

I’m really excited because Dave Ramsey is holding a live broadcast this Thursday evening focusing on why the world is NOT coming to an end no matter what the evening news tries to tell us. This broadcast will be shown in over 4,000 locations nationwide.

You can click on the above image and find somewhere near you to watch this presentation. Dave wants this to be completely free to the public. He has given what he calls ‘great American businesses’ a chance to provide sponsorship.

I couldn’t resist so I went ahead and signed up my company as a sponsor. There is a lot of expense pulling something like this off. I find it a pleasure to offer a few dollars of my support.

I am hearing news that this will be broadcast on Fox Business Network as well so you may be able to catch it there if you have cable/satellite.

I think this video speaks for itself. Thank you Gary for sending me the link!

The Kings Firecrackers are a performance jump rope team made up of talented 4th-8th graders from the Kings Local School District in Ohio. Coached by Lynn Kelley, they perform at venues across the country. Some noteable past performances have been at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a Presidential Inauguration and an appearance on The David Letterman Show.