Do you ever feel that your God is small and either unable or uninterested in helping you?

I want to give you a small glimpse into who my God is. I was outside last night and just enjoying the cool air, smell of spring and the clear sky. It has rained for the past week so last night I was looking up at the sky and I said, wow. There was not a cloud in the sky and all the stars were twinkling and the crescent moon was so beautiful. It looked like a Disney movie. I got to wondering how close the nearest star is.

The nearest star is 4.3 light years away. Light is the fastest thing known to mankind and travels at 186,000 miles per second. If you were standing in Georgia and had a light bright enough to be seen from California (2,500 miles), it would travel across the United States in an instant. Faster than you can blink. You say, that’s great, but you may not really understand what it means. Think of the earth and how long it would take to fly around the circumference of the earth. If you were in a jet, the flight around the earth would take 40 hours. The speed of light would equal flying around the earth 7.5 times in one second. Let that sink in for a minute.

At the speed of light, the moon is 1.3 seconds away. So last night I was looking at a moon that was 1.3 light seconds away and the nearest star was 4.3 light years away. Again, one light second is like flying around the earth 7.5 times on one second. So the nearest star I saw last night, was 4.3 years’ worth of days, hours and seconds from earth. There was a plane flying by last night that had its lights on and the twinkling from the star looked as close as the light from the plane.

Lastly for a whooper of a statistic, the farthest known galaxy is 13 billion light years away. If you are like me, I cannot even get my mind around those numbers. It’s not 13 billion miles away, it is 13 billion light years away.

My God is important and he knows everything that is happening everywhere at every moment. In life there are always those important people like movie stars, athletes, rich people, bosses that are too big and too important to talk to. When God see this I think he just snickers at us. We can’t comprehend how big God is and how important he is. I can talk to him anytime I want to for as long as I want to and he never never never looks at his watch. He knows everything there is to know about me and to my amazement, he still loves me.

So the next time you get to thinking about how important you are, just remember that you are his child. KT

For some reason I am enamored with the gilded age of America. The term refers to 1870-1905 when industrialism was king in the US. It was a time of peace for America and accretive wealth for those people that owned companies that specialized in steel, manufacturing, building, newspapers and with the beginning of the automobile.

The examples that come to mind were the families like Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Goodyear, Firestone and families that owned steel companies, railroads, newspapers etc.

The time period 1870-1905 was a euphoric time of peace, prosperity and happiness. For a select few that is. The automobile, radio and telephone were new inventions and the future of America seemed endless. Mansions of Newport Road Island, the Biltmore Estate in Asheville and Millionaire’s Village on Jekyll Island were examples of the expression of wealth these families wanted to portray.

In Newport Road Island there are streets filled with historic mansions and the wealthy families that owned them would spend their summers in Newport. They would host and or attend nightly parties at different homes. The objective seemed to be having the best party that was bigger and better attended than their neighbor’s party. It was a social status thing and there were many nights that several families would have parties and the guests would go from party to party. It was told that the first party host would do almost anything to keep the people from leaving and attending someone else’s party. Again a pride, ego and status and social thing.

While is hard to believe, these families would have a clothing budget for the summer of 20-30 thousand dollars each. Their party budget was several hundred thousand dollars for the summer. To give you some perspective on how much money that was in 1900, the average US citizen earned $9.00 a week. A school teacher’s salary was $6.30 a week. So when these wealthy families would spend 200k on parties for the summer you can get some idea of what I am talking about.

Why am I talking about this? Many of these families were unchurched, unsaved and died with no eternal salvation. Their God was money and status. Outside of the gilded age, there is no period in US history where wealth had clouded common sense as much as then. Many of these people literally lost their minds when they became older and could not show off their wealth and compete with the younger ones. It was a thing that drove many of them mad because the need to compete and impress was so powerful, it destroyed many of their lives. Also keep in mind that many of these families did not earn a dime on their own and many were the children of wealthy industrialists that were living off of their parent’s financial success.

Every generation has to find its own footing and anchor in life. I think it is great to see people have some success in their life and not change everything about who they are and still be the same people. During the Gilded age, people just seemed to have lost all control over perspective. Go to google and look up “Newport mansions” and then hit the “images” tab and you will see what I mean. The pictures you see were their summer homes. ha

Keeping it real should be our objective. KT

Not everyone in a crowd feels like they are part of the crowd. I was at the University of Alabama yesterday for a hotel grand opening. You had to drive through the University to get to the hotel and the place is spectacular. I am a Georgia fan so I felt like I was spying on the enemy. Ha

I watched all the activities on campus with the students playing Frisbee, drinking at the frat houses and walking to and fro in their Abercrombie shorts and flip flops. I thought about what a great time this must be for the students and wondered if they even knew how special this time was in their life. They will never have a period like this again once they graduate and get jobs and start life. There are the cool kids that have probably been cool from birth and I have often wondered how that happens. You know the ones, that just are the life of the party and have all the right actions, words and personality and just blend in perfectly and are accepted everywhere they go. They are the popular ones. They are everywhere you go and in every job, neighborhood, church and hang out.

It was so peaceful looking at these kids at the University reading under trees, hanging out in groups and eating at the restaurants and coffee shops. It looked perfect with no stress and probably very little obligations. All they had to do was study and graduate.

Then I realized there were the kids that were by themselves and not part of the fraternity houses or the Frisbee games with friends and they were the serious ones. They may have even been lonely in the crowd. There are just some people who are happier not going with the crowd and rather, just doing their own thing. If you look through history, many and probably most of the real leaders, inventors, Presidents, CEOs and the influential folks were not the popular ones. It is most likely that most of them would be classified as the non-cool type.

I was with a publicly traded company once and like the college example, it had all the perks of people, events and comradery. It should been perfect for me but for whatever reason, I was the like the college kid that wasn’t cool. I wasn’t playing Frisbee with the popular kids. And you what? I was really perfectly ok with it because I knew who I was and I was not influenced by a moment in time.

Being cool only gets you so far. It works well when no one is making money and life as they know it is one big social event like being at the University of Alabama. When you get in the real world, all the coolness seems to fade and then real life sets in and they know that they have to compete with a different set of standards and being the life of the party is clearly not enough.

I guess if I was going to speak to the kids that were walking alone at the college I would tell them to keep to their moral principles and be who they are and never try to be someone else. College is 4 years at the beginning of being an adult and life itself is much more defined after college when people can see who you really are. KT