It’ll remain so, as there’s a new blog and radio show/podcast to take it’s place. I’m calling it:

Front End Alignment

Join me there.

As you realized what was going on, I was going, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ I couldn’t believe it. My first feelings were anger. I thought, You’ve got to be joking, God. You can’t be serious… Kyle believed that stuff happens, and it happened that day. He violated the physical laws of nature. Electricity is there. If you violate it, it has consequences. I don’t know. There are so many things that happen. And I know there’s the theology that says God causes and ordains all things and there’s also the concept of free will, that we get to choose. Where do those things collide and come out? I don’t really know.

I like the basic idea of Esau’s experiment because it avoids the pitfall of false prayer, i.e., asking God to give you what you want. He writes:

Every day, for thirty days, I pray and ask God to surprise me? “Surprise Me, God.” Nothing more, nothing less. Three words. Not asking for something in particular. Not giving him my list. Not presenting my agenda. Just inviting him to barge into my life in any old way he pleases-to crash into the busyness of my schedule and mess with it.

I’ve not read the book but where I think he goes wrong — and the electrocution illustrates it — is presuming that God can pull levers in the physical universe. It’s a destructive belief and undermines the potential of a truer, more helpful prayer, eg, “Help me see something surprising today” or “If something surprising happens today, help me respond in a way that’s helpful.”

When I told my daughter about the article, she reminded me about this Far Side cartoon of God at his computer, poised to “smite” the dufus guy walking under the dangling piano. I love this cartoon because it’s the perfect illustration of how many people view God.

He was the father I loved who let me down in so many ways. Who knows how our relationship might have developed if he had not been murdered … it’s painful to think that his early death robbed me of the chance for us to know each other better.

Those are my sentiments, even though my dad wasn’t murdered and lived to be 80.

When the race ended, National Guard members stationed in Iraq could talk via satellite with friends and family. See more photos starting here.

He’s in the UK this week but he’s blogged three times in the past 24 hours about the shooting rampage at Red Lake High School where he once taught.

Read his posts for insight and inspiration.

3/21 - 9:15 PM: Red Lake shootings

3/21 - 11:12 PM: Red Lake Redux: They are all our children

3/22 - 11:55 AM: The Circle — A Story from the Heart of Red Lake

3:15 update: Thanks to Tony, a blogger named Hammer has now posted about Red Lake with a link to Kent’s blog. Thanks, guys.

Jon is the son of another friend, Larry Harmsen whom I’ve known and gone biking with for many years. (Jim and Larry rode on the very first RJ Tour back in Nov. 200.) Jon joined us on our one-day Real Joe Motorcycle Tour that we held back in August. (No, I never wrote about it. I did take photos, but lost them in a hard drive crash.) A couple weeks later, he and his wife rear-ended a van and they’ve both been in the hospital since. Details and updates on CaringBridge.

I may moblog some photos from the hospital.

I mean “shot of solitude” SOS which I wrote an essay about 4 years ago (blog post is still us but not the essay.)

One of my Wigley and Associates‘ weblog clients is Eden Prairie Police Chief Dan Carlson. Earlier this morning, he blogged a Week in Review post in which he gave a little glimpse of his activities from his personal life. It ended with a paragraph about the importance of quiet time.

This week I was cramming to get our taxes done (yep, I’m a laggard) and catch up on client work. On Wed. morning, I noticed that the background tension/noise in my head was approaching apeshit levels so I took time for a 30 minute SOS walk in the Carleton College Arb just after sunrise. Ahhh. That simple break got me through two-days of tax prep and is still reverberating. I gotta remember to do it more often.

I can’t say I’m any smarter about the latter. But after a four-month hiatus, I’ve discovered that I miss blogging for Real Joe. Something about the regular discipline of reflecting about what’s going on in my life and the cultural sea I swim in… and getting some feedback from other guys who are doing likewise.

I just ordered Real Live Preacher’s new book that’s based on his blog, supplemented with some essays. I’d like to do that someday. But in the meantime, I’ll just blog for myself and a small audience of family, friends, colleagues, and a few strangers. How often? I don’t know. My self-employed income is as tenuous as ever, so I can’t devote much time here. I’m aiming for shorter, more frequent posts.

I hope to have a meeting in another week or so with two guys I know who are bloggers. We plan to brainstorm on ways that we might collaborate on a blog.

I’m increasingly liking the self-employed life, and if I can get my book Small Business Blogging done by the end of the summer, I’m guessing I’ll like it even more. My big challenge now is being organized and self-disciplined enough so that I get enough billable hours each month and enough book-writing time in each day. I can’t really afford taking a vacation because of the hit in billable hours I’d take. So either I get way ahead of the game by accumulating more billable hours than normal (it’s surprisingly hard to get more than 20 per week). Or I get a book published and generate recurring revenue from it. I like the latter option.

And if I can pull it off in the business blogging world, then I’ll be better equipped to try and pull it off in a Real Joe-related endeavor, like my stalled Ego Orgasms book.

I don’t exactly remember the instructions the doctor’s office gave me but I recalled the scene when I read Stuart Green’s Sex and the Married Man column in this month’s issue of The Rake. His buddy’s wife had a fit when she found out he used a ‘dirty’ magazine provided by the fertility clinic to help him do what needed to be done to make the required deposit.

Lucky for me, my newly wedded wife had no such hang-ups. As I headed out the door with a, um, glossy magazine tucked into my coat, she sent me off with a with a “Hey, have fun!” smirk and a smooch. It never occurred to me to thank her for not going ballistic. Maybe I’ll do that today.