My hope is that as you read this blog, you can look at your life today and find areas where you have been blessed and are currently blessed. I know that is the case for my life. I am among the most blessed.

Age is funny. When we are with our daughters, son in-laws and their families, they are in the life cycle where it seems like we were at just a couple of years ago. Then it hits me, that was 25-30 years ago.

Life is a special occasion, and we shouldn’t miss it. Its common to be in a special moment and somehow think there are going to be many more moments just like it. Just ask any person who just got a bad report from their doctor or was in an accident or  just lost someone close to them if life’s occasions are to be savored.

My advice is to stop hurrying through life thinking you have all the time in the world. Hopefully you will, but you may not. When you kiss your children, make it last. When you hug your family, act like you mean it. When your grand children are talking to you, really focus on what they are saying and make them feel like they are the only person in the world at that moment. If you are fortunate enough to still have a spouse, be grateful. When you are with your family and those you love, use words like, I love you, I respect you, I miss you, I forgive you, I need you and just maybe you will find that you are in life’s special occasions and you are not missing it. KT

IQ stands for intelligence quotient and EQ stands for emotional quotient. The word quotient means the degree or amount of a quality or characteristic.

In the real world, having a high IQ is great but it does not determine the trajectory of your life. Some people score low on testing such as SAT and ACT but have very high EQ scores.

How many really smart people have you known that struggle with jobs, relationships and life. There are many because while they have book intelligence, they don’t possess the personal skills / emotional intelligence needed to excel in the workplace. Thank goodness for me, I had a higher EQ than IQ which was the ability to relate to people. If we took a companywide IQ intelligence exam, I would be dead last.

The only way to develop a high EQ is to be around other people. Kids need to be around other kids and adults need to be around other adults. In the world of gaming, IPad’s, cell phones, screen time and TV, we seem to have skipped a step in the healthy growth of children that sometimes results in dysfunctional adults.

When we were growing up, we had neighborhood friends and played outside, built tree houses, played basketball, raced bikes and a thousand other outdoor things. Many of us probably had ADHD but didn’t know it. We probably had other disorders you hear about today, but we had incredible EQ’s because we related to other kids and developed into adults with a sound self-esteem.

My point is this. Grades are important but they are not the most important. Love, forgiveness, acceptance, and good life examples are many times the difference of us being introverted or extroverted. So, IQ is great, but we should also strive for a healthy EQ. KT

My stepfather was a man’s man. He didn’t play around when it came to the correct way to raise up a child. My biological father, not so much. See, my parents divorced in June 1966, and both remarried thereafter.

His name was Gene Dickinson, and he was a correctional officer at Lorton Penitentiary outside Washington DC for many years. Later in his career, he became an instructor at the prison and taught auto mechanics to the inmates that were only there for a short time.

The scared straight part happened one Saturday when I was in the ninth grade. He needed to go to his office (in the middle of the penitentiary) to pick up some paperwork. He asks if I wanted to go and I said, sure. I was 14 years old at the time and he knew exactly what he was doing and what was going to happen. Once we were cleared through the gate, we were walking to the auto shop school which took us right down the middle of the jail cell blocks that housed the inmates behind bars. Most of these were serving life sentences. Without putting too fine a point to this, the things the inmates said to me and yelled through the bars at me as we walked to the shop, scared me so bad that I made a decision that day that set the course of my life. I was never going to do anything that would put me in a place like this.

Yessiree, the things that were said to a young teenage white boy, will make your ears curl and make you want to avoid ever being in a place like that.

A year earlier this same man sat me down at the table and popped the top on a Budweiser and opened a pack of Marlboros and said, “I know you are going to try both of these things, so I want you to try them first in front of me.”  After I spit out the beer and inhaled half a Marlboro, I never drank after that and never got hooked on cigarettes. He knew exactly what he was doing.

See in life, there is the father that gives you life and then there is the father that gives you A life. That was Gene Dickinson, my stepfather. KT

I am a dog person. Always have been. I believe the dog was created especially for human love. No other animal God created needs the human connection like a dog.

I read this article recently that really touched my heart. It’s about this man who looks about my age who had a dog well into its years that died. It broke his heart, so he went to the local dog shelter and said he wanted to adopt the oldest dog at most risk of being put down. Basically, the dog no one else wanted. He took that dog home and gave it love during its final season of life.

This became his way of giving back and remembering his dog that had died. Now he has 11 aged dogs that he is loving and caring for in their final stages of life. Some are feeble, some are blind, some are so weak they can’t walk. This man loves them, feeds them, holds them and spends time each day with every dog. When one dies, he goes to the shelter and gets another one and brings it home.

This article almost brought tears to my eyes because in the picture of him and his 11 dogs, there is a very old small Yorkie and very old Sheltie like our dogs that died. I imagine that in our final days and hours, God does the same thing for us. He holds us, loves us, comforts us like this man does for these dogs that no one else wants. KT

God is the great I am. It means, I am everything you need. Let that settle in your mind a bit. Regardless of the situation and circumstances, God is everything you need in that moment.

In Exodus chapter 3 is the story of Moses’s first burning bush experience. God told him to go to Pharaoh and tell him to let the Israelites go free.  When Moses ask God, “who do I say sent me”? God said “tell them, I am who I am. I am has sent me to you.”

Since God and Jesus are one, In the book of John, these are the I AM statements Jesus made:

I am the bread of life.

I am the light of the world.

I am the door.

I am the good shepherd.

I am the resurrection and the life.

I am the way, the truth, and the life.

I am the vine.

You may ask, what does all this I AM language mean? It means, God/Jesus is everything you need him to be. What do you need and what are you struggling with? Whatever it is, Jesus is all you need to get through it. KT