I did wonder, however, how he seemed to do it. He owned his own business – a small two bay car repair business with a smaller auto parts store in the next room. His cars were always new or nearly so. And he had a nice house on a corner lot across the street from his shop and store.

I visited there much later and life and realized how small his house is and how limited his business would have been. Nonetheless over time, he did well and retired comfortably. His widow, my aunt, outlived him by many years and enjoyed a comfortable autumn of life.

Why did he do so well when his brothers didn’t seem to accumulate as much or live as contentedly? I looked at the experience of the brothers in the family, all four of them, and came up with these reasons:

1. Thurman was the only one of the four brothers to actually work all day every day. The others might work all day but not every day or they might work every day but not all day. Thurman did both. His work ethic yielded a steady and growing income.

2. He was a christian and a regular church goer. There was no magic formula he followed. His christian beliefs meant he kept his life free of excesses and indulgences. He neither smoked nor drank so bought neither cigarettes nor liquor. The savings alone amounts to thousands over a lifetime. It also allowed him to accept the virtue of contentedness. He and his family were quite happy with their small house and the niche they’d carved out in life. They never strived to accumulate more at the expense of over-extended debt. Having grown up through the Great Depression, Thurman understood well the trap of indebtedness and stayed out of it. He didn’t have lots but what he had he owned outright.

3. He was frugal. His house, which seemed so spacious and upscale when I was a boy, was actually quite small. In its day it was well-built and furnished with quality appliances and furniture. But he lived in the same house until it was paid for, never put another mortgage on it, and stuck the rest of the money away.

So there they are, the secrets of success. Work, moderation, frugality, contentment. They worked for him. They work for everyone who employ them.

photo by Sebastian Fissore, used by permission

8.6%??? Who are they kidding? The media and the White House are touting the latest employment numbers as the lowest since March, 2009.

• The percentage of working-age adults who have a job, a statistic the BLS cannot fudge , fell to 64%, a low last reached over the summer and in early 1984.
• 120,000 jobs gained in November – Private employers added 140,000 (many of them seasonal), about half of that number from retail (translate that to mean layoff in January) and from temp agancies.
• The percentage of unemployed who’ve been out of work for six months or longer grew from 42.4% to 43%.

Take a look at www.shadowstats.com for a more thorough explanation of why government reports run counter to real life.

So, I propose that the BLS should be shortened to BS, because that’s what they’re dishing out with this latest report.

“Tell them,” he said, “Tell them going to the rodeo is against the Bible”

 I was teaching a class at a Navajo church. It was the dead of winter and fiercely cold. The wood heater used to warm the room couldn’t begin to overcome winter’s intrusion into the classroom. This was a class on the Book of Hebrews and I was emphasizing the theme of the book – BETTER. In Christ we have a better covenant, one free of the law which confounds, confuses, and condemns.

 It was the pastor, who took the class along with several of his parishioners and leaders, who asked me to caution those present that participating in a rodeo brought disfavor from God. In the Navajo culture, rodeos tend to consume one’s life. Every available minute along with every available penny is spent in pursuit of the enjoyment rodeo brings. The pastor saw it as a consuming vice and wanted to make sure my message of grace did not override the necessary impediment of a strong warning from the pulpit to forsake such wasting pursuits.

 I could not, in good conscience, meet his expectations. I could not tell a group of learners that God, sitting in His heaven, found rodeos to be evil and unacceptable. One might be overwhelmed by the enjoyment and excitement a rodeo brings. But the same could be said of baseball, dance clubs, television, or whatever. The problem is not the rodeo, or any other engagement. The problem is not whether some act of behavior is acceptable or not to God. It has become complicated because God’s list of acceptable acts has been fabricated by people who deign to speak for and emphasize what they think God finds acceptable or not, emphasis on not.

 I grew up in a church which forbad us to go to a movie theater or even a miniature golf course. That those same people will rent a movie that was shown at the theater we were forbidden to attend only a few weeks prior is only incidental to them. There were many more rules of behavior to which we were expected to conform. Merely uttering the expletive “darn” would consign one to the lake of fire should it go unrepented of before death. The complicated list of taboos was confounding, confusing, and left its victims feeling condemned.

 Some years later, during my Navajo years, we were visited by the senior pastor of a church which had sent out missionary friends of ours. The first evening, as we sat after dinner, he got up from his chair and announced he was going to bed. “I get up at 5 to pray,” he announced. “I have to keep my ticket paid up,” he explained.

 Not being one to let an opening like that pass, I countered, “Jesus paid for mine.”

 One of the contractors with whom I have worked is a fervent, fiery Pentecostal believer and aspiring preacher. In one conversation the subject of smoking came up. I suggested that if a Christian smokes he gets to go to heaven and gets to go there sooner. My contractor friend disagreed. Smokers, as far as he is concerned, do not go to heaven. (That leaves Charles Spurgeon, one of the 19th century’s great evangelists, and a regular pipe smoker, standing outside the gates.) A couple of days later the contractor telephoned me to say he had told a potential client something that was not quite true and wanted me to back him up because he had given my name to the client as a reference. “So,” I said, “smokers don’t go to heaven, but liars do?” His rules of acceptable behavior disallowed smoking but allowed misrepresentations of the facts. Confusing and confounding indeed.

 It is either grace or it isn’t. There are no valid or workable hybridizations of grace and law. All of them end up with rules that emphasize someone’s particular point of view at some particular point in time as to what God considers acceptable. Over time the triviality of those rules always becomes obvious. Someone asked Jerry Falwell once what he thought about physical fitness. His reply is a classic one.

 “I don’t think God gives a flip one way or another.”

 Well, when it comes to movies, miniature golf, rodeos, county fairs, or whatever, I don’t think God gives a flip one way or another either. Behavior, and the actions we pursue as individuals, can never hope to satisfy the rules, regulations, and criteria that follow the whims of those who would consider themselves spokesmen for and explainers of God. Any and every attempt to speak for and explain God inevitably reveals the particular point of view of the spokesman and explainer.

 Always, without fail.

 Conformity to rules, no matter how well-intended those rules may be, cannot make me or anyone else acceptable to God. We need not be concerned whether what we do is accepted by the beloved because we are accepted in the Beloved. I need not worry whether my ticket is paid up because it has already been paid for and grace cancels any and every debt. In grace there cannot be any unpaid balance. Paid in full means paid in full.

 It is either grace or it isn’t.

So, they invited me to lead their congregation and I accepted. They were a whiny lot, complained about anything and everything. A dozen different factions within the smallish group pulled in different directions.

After several months, the complaining wasn’t subsiding. Since were approaching November and the Thanksgiving holidays, I challenged the church to do more than be thankful for one Thursday a year. I asked them to participate in thirty days of thanks. Spend each and every day being thankful for something…anything.

Just thirty days, then we would address other “issues”. I believe that whinyness, complaining, and ingratitude are lifestyle choices. Once one gives in to those baser attitudes, it becomes so ingrained that it is almost impossible to extricate oneself from it outside of a near death experience (perhaps not a bad therapy choice for that bunch).

Thirty days! Just be thankful and grateful for thirty days! I had no sooner preached the sermon and got back home when the phone began to ring. They complained, COMPLAINED! mind you, that thirty days of thanks was way way too much to ask, that it was their right as human beings to complain. Challenging them with the scriptures – “In everything give thanks…” and “Let him who would mean to love life refrain his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking guile” only made them angrier.

They set about at that point to end my tenure are pastor, a goal they soon achieved. All because I asked them to engage in a positive exercise. I think they would have been happier had I asked them to pillage the city.

It has been more than ten years now and as far as I can tell, most of them have not gotten beyond their habit of whining and complaining.

But let me challenge you today.

Whining, complaining, and ingratitude are choices you make. No one forces you to engage in them. Are there difficult, even unfair things that happen to you? Certainly! No one denies that. Should you speak up when injustice falls upon you. Go ahead, let your voice be heard.

But if you do not find a way out, a temporary exercise of your personal right to be heard will ensnare you in a black fog of bitterness and anger.

May I challenge you to the same exercise? Don’t reserve Thanksgiving day as the primary time to express gratitude. Live your life in a succession of thanksgiving days. Thirty days can become sixty, the six hundred, then a lifestyle. I guarantee you will be happier… and so will those who have to live with you.

Time Really Can Be Money

I sent in the paperwork to begin withdrawing funds from a retirement plan Sue and I started investing in many, many years ago. Back then, retirement or the age one reaches when retirement seems possible, seemed so far away.

But it is here. Now I don’t intend to retire yet, but the funds make more money in interest payments to us after they are withdrawn than just sitting in the account that leaving them there to accumulate a paltry dividend is crazy.

I remember when we first started planning for the future, many of my preacher friends thought I was crazy. Their reasons?

Jesus is coming so you won’t need any retirement, you’ll spend your retirement in heaven. Aside from the heaven part being right, failure to prepare for the future is so dumb it requires no answer. They told me back in the fifties that there is no need for education because Jesus was coming. We He hasn’t yet, and no one – NO ONE – has any idea when that might happen.

Or, we have social security for retirement. Don’t count on it. And even if you do, it won’t be enough. Social Security was never intended to be enough. Only a tiny few of us make so little money we cannot put something away for the day we either don’t want to work a job or we physically can’t work.

For ministers there is a provision in the tax code that allows us to opt out of Social Security for reasons of conscience. The Amish communities are about the only ones that actually can satisfy this stipulation. As advisor and consultant to hundreds of pastors, many of them decided to opt out. None of them did so for reasons of conscience. None! So why did they? Because they did not want to pay the tax. Did they substitute the monies they would have paid into Social Security with their own planning? No! What they are going to do is have a very hard time.

Here are the lessons I offer from this:

1. Unless you die young, old age will certainly arrive. Prudent people accept that and plan accordingly. (Please, those of you used to proof-texting, don’t write to me quoting Jesus’ words about taking no thought about tomorrow. “Taking no thought” means worry and fret in the original language. If you plan accordingly, you really will have nothing to worry about.
2. The law of compounding works in your favor. Money set aside now gathering interest compounds, you earn money on top of the money you earned as interest. So take advantage of time and get with it.
3. Don’t think you can lie to the government or yourself. Social Security will doubtless have to undergo changes, but it won’t go away entirely. And if the retirement age is raised, so what? We do live longer and healthier these days. Sue and I live in an age-qualified community, you have to be over 55 to have a home here. There are many, many men bored stiff in retirement. There is only so much golf to be played. The supermarket across the highway has box boys who are in their 80′s. Why? I doubt they need the money. They were bored being retired. So you can likely work longer because you will likely live longer.
4. It is your money, do you really need that flat screen tv or another trip to Disneyworld? The future will soon enough become the present. What you do with your resources in the past will too soon determine how you will live in the present. Cut down on spending and invest more, carefully.

So, I must stop writing because the dog wants a walk, I have to fix my lunch, then I’m heading off to work. Even though I am withdrawing from one retirement plan I have another that earns better return. At work I am investing in another. The company I work for matches contributions to a 401(k) plan and I invest the maximum allowed that provokes a matching contribution. Who knows? I might need the money some day.

I have other blogs and websites, some up and running, others in development. I have a hosting agreement at HostGator which seems to be free of the challenges of hosting Godaddy so I have moved The Dunigan Report to HostGator. In the process, I have decided to take this blog in a new direction.

My other blogs and websites have specific editioral and style definitions. ThePracticalLeader.com is a blog dedicated to the principles of effective, efficient, and well, practical leadership. I have written a book – How To Light A Fire Under Almost Anyone Without Getting Burned – which will soon be offered on that site. BonusBuiltFords.comis a website under construction for enthusiasts of 1948-1952 Ford F-1 pickups, the birth of the venerable Ford F series of trucks. QuickStartBusinessGuides.com is an other embryonic website which will feature downloadable guides for starting more than 100 types of businesses. TheQRPStore.com will focus on low-power amateur radio. When we were in Uganda last year I started a blog called HamRadioSafari.com opening a window on the advensture of living and operating amateur radio in Africa (this blog remains hosted at Godaddy). The Well-Off-Woodworker website, also underdevelopment while I finish writing the book, will show aspiring craftsmen how to develop a successful, profitable woodworking business.

So, what about The Dunigan Report. Well, it used to be a catch-all site, a basin for whatever thoughts, rants, ideas, or accounts might be foremost in our thinking at the time. But, I have had to admit that a blog with no editorial and style parameters merely wanders around. It may benefit its writers in some way, but does little to inspire readers.

Today, November 1, 2010, marks a new location for the blog and a new definition of its purpose. Even the artwork in the header is chosen to focus on the intention of this site. There is a Dutch proverb that says “Too soon old, too late smart.” I’ll turn 60 next month, and frankly there is a lot to look back upon even while looking ahead. I hope to report on the things we’ve learned, the experiences we’ve enjoyed (or endured), and the lessons we’ve been taught. I expect to post at least twice a month and will always invite your reaction, response, questions, and comments.