Family--Parenting Archives | The History of Daddy ClaxtonThe History of Daddy Claxton

Jun 13, 2013 -

Family--Parenting, Featured, Fitness--EA SPORTS Active, Product Reviews, The Real Me

Calorie Counting At McDonald’s–Yikes, I Can’t Eat This…

Calorie Counting At McDonald’s–Yikes, I Can’t Eat This…

My nutritionist, Dr. Carol Ireton-Jones of Professional Nutritions Therapists here in Dallas wants me to eat less than 1,800 calories a day. If I can do that, and believe me, I seldom do, I will lose weight. If I eat more than that, I will continue my losing battle.

The McDonalds Unhappy Meal–I can’t eat this stuff!

I’m in a rush this morning. Need to get some work done in preparation for a client meeting at 9:30 a.m. (so why am I doing this, right?) Well, I rushed out and begrudgingly went to my local McDonald’s. (Quite amazingly, they didn’t have cars wrapped totally around the building, so I did the drive thru. I usually go in, pick a car as I walk past and happily spy that car still waiting to place an order before I come back out, but not today. Service quality at McDonald’s has dropped significantly since they added that coffee crap to the menu.)

So as I’m sitting in the drive thru contemplating what I thought I might really want–lots of stress, so let’s carb out!–maybe even TWO orders of hotcakes and sausage. But then I saw the stark reality. ONE order is 1,200 calories. Just 600 shy of what I’m supposed to eat ALL day!

I thought maybe the steak bagel, that has protein with the steak and will keep me going cos I don’t know when I’ll eat lunch. Uh, 810 calories. Two sausage burritos, hash browns and a drink, 760 or so…. And then finally, #2, sausage McMuffin with egg and we were down to 610. Deal.

I say all this, and then I need to get back to work, but do you realize how hard it is to eat what little your body needs by eating at fast food restaurants like McDonald’s? Those calorie numbers on the menu are helpful when I see them. Many/most places I go don’t have them at all. I’m a big guy, too big, and if I could get down to 1,500 calories a day I’d start to disappear and be much happier. One thing is for certain if I can ever get to that point, places like McDonald’s, even with the calorie counts on the menu, are going to have to come off the list of places to go….

May 30, 2013 -

Family, Family--Parenting, Featured, Product Reviews, The Real Me, Travel

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Sonic Restaurants–The Grease Pits of Fast Food

Sonic Restaurants–The Grease Pits of Fast Food

Sonic Drive-In (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Long before I briefly took a job in Oklahoma City in 2007 did I have a disdain for the food served at Sonic restaurants. Getting to know their CEO, Cliff Hudson, didn’t help my image of the company either. But I’ve always thought the food their was greasy, nasty and if you enjoy it, you basically have numbed your tastebuds to the point of where you could enjoy eating poo.

My kids through the years have said they love the food. Fellow adults talk about how they like this drink or that.

One of my daughters had a thing for a drink called “A Purple O” and one night wanted me to order one for her, but I don’t order Os for my teen daughters, sorry. (Sonic, you’ve really crossed the line on that one in my book.)

But I succumbed the other day to ordering a breakfast burrito so I could get back to work and move on with the day.

I’ve seen before how they have a guy come in and spray wash the sidewalks and wondered why they needed to be doing that. And then from the angle I was sitting, it became disgustingly obvious.

The Grease Pit of Fast Food

I remember from my Wendy’s days in the mid-1980s about dealing with the grease trap out back. That had to be one of the nastiest jobs ever–taking hamburger and Henny Penny grease from the chicken frier out back to be dumped into a vat and later hauled off.

But after seeing this image, it’s clear to me that there is way too much frying going on inside a Sonic restaurant to be producing anything that could remotely be healthy for anyone. It’s clearly time to stop stopping at Sonic until they do some things to change their menu.

The only way the image below becomes possible is if the grease they’re using is bubbling so badly that it’s wafting through the air and onto the floor and then getting picked up on the shoes of the young ladies who run food. (By the way, Sonic screws their food runners over by not having a tip option on the pay with debit/credit card option. Most of the time I just pay for things on a card now and don’t carry cash so most of the time I have to stop at a Sonic, no one gets a tip. That bothers me because their food runners are working hard and no doubt making less than minimum per hour.)

So here’s the pic. Look at the black trails out of the delivery door in this photo and then look how nasty they are in person the next time you’re at a Sonic. Then think one step further about what your insides must look like from eating all that grease. That thought alone is enough to convince me to never want to eat there again. They won’t be adding this to their Website’s “See Yourself At Sonic” section.

I remember Hudson bragging about how they had just done a bunch of renovations to the drive in stores in the mid-2000s, “But we didn’t do anything to the menu,” he said one night. I thought then and still do, “Maybe you should de-grease.”

And that’s how you Sonic.

The Grease Track of a Sonic

May 29, 2013 -

Family, Family--Parenting, Featured, Product Reviews, The Real Me

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One of my childhood favorites: PB&J and CHEETOS

One of my childhood favorites: PB&J and CHEETOS.

Growing up as a kid, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich went with Cheetos chips like milk and cookies.

Mom would pack my lunch to take to school and add a bag of Cheetos. If I was lucky I could sneak a second bag. Maybe a third. But as we all know, Cheetos can get messy. So, somewhere in my youth I discovered a solution that I continue to use today.

PB&J and Cheetos!

When I’m making a PB&J, I just take out the Cheetos I would have eaten along with the sandwich, and I drop them onto the sandwich over the jelly before sealing the deal with the other piece of bread bathed in peanut butter. I then squish it down so the peanut butter holds onto the to Cheetos and then I have a much less messy snack!

I’ve been told by my daughters and others this is pretty gross, but to me, there are few treats better. And my hands don’t turn orange, which maybe the marketing fokes at Cheetos would argue is half the fun of eating them, but this way, I get all of it in each and every bite.

As we all learned when we were kids, “It’s all going to the same place anyways.” And this way I don’t have just a bite of peanut butter and jelly and then have to add Cheetos while my mouth is half-full.

Okay, so you’re wincing and saying it’s disgusting to even think about. Try it first. And then you can thank me.

May 18, 2013 -

Family, Family--Parenting, Featured, Product Reviews

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Zaditor–The Cure for Itching Eyes in Texas

Zaditor--The Cure for Itching Eyes in Texas

WFAA Weatherman Pete Delkus keeps tweeting to North Texas–If you’re allergic to grass, the pollen is high right now–but you already knew that.

Zaditor, the cure for itching eyes in Texas.

And indeed, one of my daughters has been having a horrible time of it for about two months now and I’ve been skating past–until the past three weeks. I got outside, get in the car and drive maybe a mile or two and I find I’ve got tears running out of the corners of my eyes. But I’m not crying. And then my eyes are red. And burning. And then I’m cursing the name of Pete Delkus. Okay, it’s really not his fault.

So this morning I was talking to my mom, a nurse, who after I told her what the problem was said, go get some Zaditor. It’s over-the-counter and it has antihistamine in it. The other thing she said was it’s expensive.

So I was almost to Walmart today and found my way to the eye drop section and there it was for about $11. Next to it was the Walmart Equate brand for $8 maybe. I bought the Equate version.

WOW!

So you’re only supposed to use it twice a day but already after one dose, it’s been like, well, when it isn’t grass pollen time in Texas.

This has worked today better than Sudafed, better than Clariton D, better than Visine.

So here’s the pitch. Try Zaditor or the Equate version. Zaditor, if you’d contact me and send me some samples I’d love to give your product a run, too, knowing it’s the same thing basically. And hey, while you’re here, on the Zaditor Website you can get a coupon for the wonder drug for $1 off retail price. Every bit counts in this day and age and truly, I would have liked to have gotten the brand name, but seriously, Zaditor feels like it’s the genuine cure for itching eyes in Texas. Really, I suppose it’d work in a state that’s not Texas, too, but hey, few other states do grass pollen like Texas… Ye haw….

And thanks, mom.

May 18, 2013 -

Family--Parenting, Featured, Geeky, Product Reviews, Thank You, The Real Me

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Cowboy Mouth At Wildflower Festival 2013–Disconnected

Cowboy Mouth At Wildflower Festival 2013–Disconnected

Tonight was a great night to be in Richardson, Texas as the Wildflower Festival with NOLA band Cowboy Mouth playing on the Metro PCS stage. The show was great–save for a continual microphone issue for the lead guitar player which set their timing back and ultimately meant they didn’t play my favorite Cowboy Mouth song, Disconnected.

But did my daughters Chandler, 16, and Reagan, 13, and I have a great time!

From watching several weeks of YouTube videos of Cowboy Mouth, I knew the “sweet spot” to stand and watch the show and catch flying drumsticks was on the right/center side of the stage. And lo and behold, Reagan and Chandler watched another 10 feet to the right of me and guess what. Reagan got a Fred LeBlanc drumstick.

Cowboy Mouth Fred LeBlanc autographed drumstick.

Because Wylie ISD Communications Director Ian Halperin was up front taking his usual great pics, after the show I was able to gather up a collection of red spoons thrown at the stage for the band’s perennial favorite Everybody Loves Jill.

So Cowboy Mouth began pretty much at 7:30 p.m. sharp. The show was high energy. Great stuff. It’s 11:46 p.m. and my ears are going to be still ringing in the morning. But as they tried to do a couple of songs with the lead guitarist singing, like Everybody Loves Jill, they twice had to start over because his mic kept shorting out. That slowed things down and put them over on time.

And so the show ended. It ended WITHOUT them playing Disconnected, the one song I have played religiously over the past six or seven years. I felt cheated. While I was talking to Ian, Reagan kept tugging on my arm and saying she was hungry. And so, after having spent $60 to get three of us in for the night, and having spent $11 on a super corndog and a cup of lemonade, and after learning that I was then driving them from Dallas after taking DART from Galatyn Park to Mockingbird all the way to their mother’s for the night, we decided that was it for the night. No Spin Doctors for me. Plus, since Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong was big before even Chandler was born, I didn’t get much interest in sticking around to hear it.

And so we walked out. Reagan with her Fred LeBlanc drumstick. Reagan wanting some pizza. And me repeating, I can’t believe they didn’t play Disconnected.

And so as we walked past the fencing back toward back stage of the Metro PCS stage toward the DART rail station, there stood Fred LeBlanc on the cell phone. He’d already changed clothes. And as we got toward him (he’d hung up the phone) I asked if he had a Sharpie so he could autograph Reagan’s drumstick. He was impressed that she’d gotten one. And out came the Sharpie.

As he was signing Reagan’s drumstick I asked “Why no Disconnected?!” He looked up and said, “Well, you heard we had some technical difficulties. We just ran out of time.”

I got some good questions in.

How long have you been at this? “Twenty-three years.”

Are you thinking about … any time soon? “Hell no! We just signed a new recording contract.”

Fred-LeBlanc at Wildflower Festival 2013 with Chandler and Reagan Claxton.

How old’s your son that you mentioned? “A year and a half.” Do you get to see him much? “Oh yes.”

Where are you off to next? “Austin! Short weekend.” (Yes, I’ve been thinking about going down for the show tomorrow so I can see them maybe do Disconnected!)

Then he was kind enough to do a picture with Reagan and Chandler. And of course, he gave Reagan her autographed drumstick.

How about all that? So if they’d played Disconnected, we probably wouldn’t have been as draggy to get out of there. Might not have stayed behind and talked with Ian. And might have missed as special a part of the evening as seeing the entire show–Meeting the voice and man behind it all. Funny how things work out sometimes, isn’t it?

During the show, Fred pointed out they’ve played Wildflower Festival more than any other band. He kept talking about being back next year. Hopefully Disconnected won’t be at the end of the play list –better yet, maybe they could start off and then close with it just to keep things in the universe in balance.

There are two more days and nights left of Wildflower 2013. We also left before Charlie Daniels played tonight. But my guess is he just finished playing and that drive to drop off the girls wore me out…..

May 16, 2013 -

Family, Family--Parenting, Featured, Thank You, The Real Me

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The Morning After Tornadoes 2013 in North Texas

The Morning After Tornadoes 2013 in North Texas

May 16, 2013 sunrise, DFW.

This photo is of sunrise, May 16, 2013. We had an estimated 10 tornadoes in the DFW area last night. There was lots of death, destruction and fear. Lots of rain, too.

I have often told my kids that rays shining down like in this photo are God’s fingers and he’s reaching down to care for us, and using the same system to take good people up to Heaven. Not exactly scriptural, but it’s helped them understand his awesome power.

Today North Texas is recovering from horrific storms that happened here last night.

It’s also seven years ago today I got married to Kari. That was as symbolic a life changing event as what some around here experienced in the storms last night–eventual near loss of most everything–home, car, dog, time with kids, you name it–over time it all got sucked away.

But through it all, God has protected me and helped me grow and be stronger than I ever was before.

God is GREAT!

We often forget how great God can be as we go about our daily walk. Sometimes we get to thinking we can do it all without anyone or worse, without him. And often we have to seek out someone to blame for things they didn’t even cause. I could spend a lot of time doing that about the past seven years if I were of a weaker mind. I could find chemicals to numb the pain. I could engage in bad habits. But instead, I’ve drawn closer in my walk with God–the only safe haven in a storm.

My prayers this morning are for the families who lost so much last night in the storms here, and for families everywhere that feel like they have been ripped apart by a storm in life.

It’s never a pleasant experience and it hurts like the Devil, who most likely is up to it anyways.

Please remember my “former” step-children in your prayers today. (Their mom has become an addict of a terrible drug and they’ve not seen her in almost a year and a half now.) They, like many of the houses in North Texas, have been scattered over the area as well and placed in new homes, with new opportunities and challenges no one, and I mean no one, could have expected.

And of course, remember the families whose homes were leveled last night and for the anxiety these storms produced here and around the world, literally, as people with loved ones here watched helplessly as things unfolded.

Then look again at the glory in the photo above. God is still in control and His fingers are reaching down to us all. The question is, are we reaching back …..

May 14, 2013 -

Family, Family--Parenting, Featured, Movies/TV Series

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HIMYM Mother Revelation Anti-Climactic? Only if you read Yahoo!

HIMYM Mother Revelation Anti-Climactic?

I started writing this based on the Yahoo! review and the YouTube video of the revelation of the Mother on CBS’s long-running show, How I Met Your Mother.

How I met your mother

After watching the actual show, I think the show was just where it needed to be, wound with the threads and twists that have made it fun to watch for so very long. But kids, let me tell you about what I was thinking from reading this review from Yahoo!

BEFORE WATCHING THE SHOW I WROTE THIS

Much of my life has changed as Ted‘s (Josh Radner) has stayed the same over the past seven/eight years of the How I Met Your Mother saga on CBS. I’ve finalized a divorce and then found someone, gotten married, found out what I should have long before I got involved, had my life ripped apart, my heart broken (literally with a heart attack supported by both marriages) and now I find myself on level footing for what likely is the first time in my life. And here we still have “Ted being Ted,” but after Monday night’s season finale, we now know who “Mother” is going to be through the revelation of the YELLOW umbrella, the boots, the train ticket purchase, etc. It’s all coming together and frankly, I’m maybe wishing I didn’t know.

And let’s be honest here. The writers at HIMYM had a lot to overcome when they revealed her. After all, we’ve been treated to the joys of Drumroll please, clearly one of the best romance episodes ever made for TV in 23 minutes or less, to the reintroduction of Victoria and then her passing from the show and Ted’s life once and for all.

Finally introducing Mom was/is a tall act to follow and I guess I’m just wishing there had been more to it.

AFTER ACTUALLY WATCHING THE SHOW AND NOT RELYING ON THE BAD, SHALLOW WRITERS AT YAHOO!

Yes, still much of my life has changed, but so has Ted’s. He’s done a lot of growing up in the past seven or eight years and his decision to flee New York after fixing up his house and coming to the conclusion that “she” isn’t in New York, but maybe Chicago, is spot on Ted. With the agony he anticipates feeling seeing Robin married to Barney, (that’s still weird to watch knowing Barney’s real life sexual orientation), Ted thinks it will be too hard to be around it all. Trust me, I’ve been in that situation before. It’s not a fun place.

But kids, let’s get back to last night’s show.

Each person in the show is headed in a new direction; one they don’t realize. Yeah, I know. That’s how life is. We make a plan, we think we’re going to live it out and then something happens that dramatically alters every plan we had. Makes you wonder if Robin and Barney really are going to get married. I believe there was an episode last year that says they didn’t. Or did they?

We now know that Lilly thinks she’s moving to Italy though won’t entirely be surprised when she’s not. Marshall thought he was going to Italy but is now going to be a judge. Ted thinks he’s headed to Chicago and the girl “with cute boots that we can share cos they’ll fit me” is buying a train ticket to Farhampton.

In reading the Yahoo! version and then watching the clip, I was sad to see that we finally have an answer to the question that’s been there for so very long. After watching the show, well, there was a certain magic in how she was revealed because the set up of the discussion between Ted and Lilly, who always has been so good at pulling “do you like him/her or not” out of people. It wasn’t a Drum roll moment, no, but it still was enough to say, “next season, we’re going to finally get a lot of answers and no matter how many we get, we’re still going to be hanging on wishing there was going to be more.”

May 2, 2013 -

Family--Parenting, Featured, Product Reviews

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AT&T Smart Limits Acting Stupidly

AT&T Smart Limits Acting Stupidly

I have made no secret about it before but I absolutely HATE the AT&T website. I have built and used my share of websites over the years and theirs has got to be the worst.

But the problem I have with them right now is that their Smart Limits function, which I pay $4.99 a month for, has a glitch in it.

AT&T Smart Limits

THE EX-FACTOR

Yes, even though I have kids by my ex wife, I do not like to talk to her. I don’t want to talk to her. I don’t want to get text messages from her. I don’t want to get calls from her.

And so, I pay to have her phone number blocked. Her husband’s phone number is blocked, too, because in spite of the fact that he has zero need nor business to talk to me, after several years he’s still not been smart enough to figure that minor point out.

And so, I pay to have him blocked, too.

MY DAUGHTERS

I also have teenage daughters, twins who are 13. Let’s just say that 13-year-old girls like to talk on the phone. Well, they like to eat up data, too, but let’s just stick to the calls and texting. One month, one of them had 8,000 text messages. I had 5,000 because of Twitter. And the other twin had somewhere around 3,500.

THEORETICALLY, with AT&T Smart Limits, I can have their phones turn off at a certain hour of the night, 10 p.m and turn back on at 6:30 a.m. That way they don’t get bombarded by texts all night and they get something called SLEEP.

One can set up a list of ALLOWED Calls per user. One can also set up a list of BLOCKED Calls per user.

THE PROBLEM

The twins have their phone limits activated and I have a list of BLOCKED numbers. No where in their list of blocked numbers is their muther’s nor step-father’s phone numbers. No, they’re on MY list of Blocked Calls. But guess what? Yeah, the twins can’t call their muther nor step-father because I have them blocked on my user list.

I’ve talked with AT&T about this and been told “that shouldn’t be happening.” No, it shouldn’t but guess what. It is. It does and it has been for a very long time.

I’d love to work with AT&T to resolve their issues, maybe sit in on a focus group or 20 about the functionality of their Website and it’s navigation. I HATE using their website.

And as I say all this, I want to emphasize that as a service provider, I’m all AT&T.

Heck, I should get a discount for the wireless, home, DSL, U-Verse, Mi-Fi, and iPad services. But to get them all switched on to one account would cost a small fortune, but that’s another blog post all together….

Apr 4, 2013 -

Family, Family--Parenting, Featured, The Real Me

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Are you practicing Disruptive Christianity or Sustaining Christianity?

Are you practicing Disruptive Christianity or Sustaining Christianity?

In the Matthew 19 of the Bible, a rich man approaches Jesus and tells him arrogantly that he’s kept all the commandments faithfully as proof of his love and dedication to the Lord. Jesus then ups the ante on him and tells him to go sell all his belongings, give them to the poor and then basically says, “When you’ve done that come back and we’ll talk.” The Bible says that when the rich man heard this he went away sad because he was wealthy. (That’s my definition of Disruptive Christianity.)

Српски / Srpski: Groblje_Sv._Marko (Photo credit: Wikipedia

Fortunately, and unfortunately, I’ve never been a man of great material wealth. Growing up in an air force home with five kids didn’t help that.

Yes, I’ve tended to have cool gadgets and things in my life, but high gloss, fancy cars and extravagant lifestyles have always eluded me. And while a few years ago, I thought life was about as good as it could get–beautiful home, nice car, great job, wife, kids, stepkids, My Dog Molly, and weekends spent building things for the yard, creating, and living comfortable by the pool or building a fire in the pit and making S’mores with the kids, it has become more and more clear to me that God wasn’t happy with me having all that because I stopped doing the one thing he has had me doing most all of my life–living as a disruptive Christian. (To me, this lifestyle had become the essence of Sustaining Christianity.)

I remember my first Sunday here in Dallas in August of 2001. A black minister was speaking that day, filing in for them as they searched for a new one, and he told that congregation something they didn’t like hearing, just like Jesus did long ago. He said, “Get up out of this church building and get out there! That’s where the hurting people are. That’s where the people needing Christ are. They’re not in here with you.” He was serving as the youth minister then. He was gone a little after Christmas and sadly I’ve never seen him again. But he was right and not too long after that, I switched churches, too. (Disruptive.)

Disruptive Christianity

So I am back to the essential point of this post. What is disruptive Christianity?

From reading the previous posts of my blog here on DaddyClaxton.com you can learn more of the hell I endured from June of 2009 until very recently. Yes, in many ways I continue to recover, but like Job had nearly all his belongings and family on this earth taken from him as a test to see if he would curse God or remain faithful, in many ways, I feel I, too, have been living in the belly of a whale.

In many ways, I had stopped being who I am. Some would say I stopped being a troublemaker.

In college, we made a lot of noise and caused a lot of disruptions. We dared to challenge the systems, authority and to question everything.

Even in the eighth grade in Atwater, CA, in our journalism class, I stood for what I believed in and refused to write a fictional short story in a class that was supposed to be about reporting objective fact, not opinion, and certainly not fiction. I got an F on my short story because it became a factual accounting of why we shouldn’t have been writing fiction in journalism. Today, that’s sadly become common place; just as wrong now as it was back in the eighth grade.

This past year, I’ve been doing a lot of work to become an expert at making books for iPad, Kindle and Nook. For the past three months I’ve been working on John Ed Mathison’s When God Redefines The Possible. And you know what? Whenever I work in John Ed’s book, God begins to do just that in my life.

This morning in Arlington, Texas, I met with a woman who has a story to tell that’s going to be disruptive when told. It’s going to shake the foundations of some Christians and they’re not going to like it. Not one damned bit.

And so I sit here contemplating the difference between disruptive Christianity and sustaining Christianity, where I passively sit back and not do what the Lord has commanded by living comfortably and I am called to once again use the talents he has given me, the experiences and the knowledge to shake things up again.

What Kind Of Christianity Are You Living?

Do you spend the abundance of your time preaching to the choir? Do you have vast earthly riches that you cling to and refuse to let go of? When was the last time you talked to a non-believer and encouraged them to take the step to get right with God? When was the last time you held in your hands words that will enrage some in your local community because of their truth and passion and that will cause the status quo to shift? When you were in that situation, did you practice disruptive Christianity or sustained? Did you act or shirk from your calling?

I know now what happens in my world when I get lazy with God and I don’t want to spend anymore time in a whale’s belly. Where are you living?

Mar 21, 2013 -

Family, Family--Parenting, Featured, The Real Me

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Inspirational Leadership–John Ed Mathison

Inspirational Leadership–John Ed Mathison

My 13-year-old DD, (darling daughter) Reagan Lee Claxton, has a paper due today in one of her eighth grade classes at school. The assignment is to write about an inspirational leader and share why.

John Ed Mathison

Last Thursday at 6:30 a.m., Reagan and I left the DFW area for a 1,650-mile round trip to Huntsville, AL, then to Montgomery, and back to Dallas by Sunday. (It was Spring Break here in DFW).

John Ed Mathison–Inspirational Leadership

Saturday morning at 9:30 a.m. we went to Frazer Memorial United Methodist Church to meet John Ed Mathison, their former senior minister, to load up a copy of his book for iPad I’ve been building. (It’s almost done and you can read more about that over on ClaxtonCreative.com) The book is called, “When God Redefines the Possible” and when I work in it, that’s exactly what God starts doing. Very shortly it will be available on the iBookstore and in formats for Kindle & Nook.)

But in the hour or so Reagan and I were with John Ed, it apparently made a very positive impression because on Tuesday she texted me and said she wanted to do this paper on John Ed. How about that? A 13-year-old girl is around you, watching you interact with her dad for an hour or so and your actions are enough to inspire her to write a paper. How many of us have that kind of stroke?

The thing is, John Ed does it naturally. He is a leader among men and a sincere, devout follower of God.

When he doesn’t understand something he politely stops you and says, “Now let me ask you a question.” And then he asks how to apply technology in his life in a way he never has before. Did I mention yet he is in his mid-70s? I was concerned about what iOS version John Ed was running on his iPad cos we’re almost ready with his book and I wanted to make sure when the time came it would load to his iPad without fail. I’ve worked with a couple others who were still running iOS 4.1. But John Ed? No. He was sporting iOS 6.1.2. When I told him he was caught up with technology, he said, “Well that’s a first.” But I doubt it is.

John Ed knows one of the secrets to living a great life and to living a long one is to be a “life learner.” That’s besides the obvious devotion he has to loving and serving the Lord.

If you stop exploring, stop seeking out new information, all the while realizing the more you know, the more you’re aware of what you don’t know, you’re going to cut things short.

(In our time together, I also quickly taught John Ed how to make Keynote presentations on his iPad and gave him an adapter so when he preaches next time, he can hook his iPad up to a VGA projector and everyone can see what he wants to show them on the iPad. Not to mention when he’s ready to show audiences his amazing book for iPad, he’ll be able to open it up on the iPad and it’ll show up on the big screen….)

Reagan’s Paper

I’ve not had the chance to see what Reagan has written about John Ed. But I’m thrilled she’s chosen to write a paper about such a good and Godly man.

I’m almost going to hate finishing his book, “When God Redefines the Possible” because when ever I have been working on it, God has started doing amazing things in my life. And an extra joy is that one of my daughters now can see what generations of people across the Southeast and the world really have seen. John Ed Mathison ranks high as an inspirational leader.

Now let me ask you a question.

How could you inspire others in an hour’s time? That’s really something daunting to think about, isn’t it?