Conversations During a Long Winter's Nap

 This morning I woke up, as always do, well before 4 AM, but being that it was Christmas Eve, I decided there was no reason to get out of bed yet, and with the apartment a bit cold, I crawled back under the covers and recovered the warmth there, my thoughts straying into the things I think about only in those hours of the morning before daylight brings my attention to the agenda of the day.

This morning there was no sound of rain, as there had been the previous two nights.  We had a front come through that lingered and brought not just showers but a true soaking rain over several days, not only at night but during the daylight hours. The sound of that type of rain is one of the things I miss most severely about where live--the heavy patter on the roof and windows, and on the pavement during the day. One learns to savor it when it arrives, because one may not hear it again for many months.  

This morning in my thoughts I reflected on things I wrote in my previous entry here, about my struggle to build an audience for my show (playlist), and my fears that this will lead to its being canceled. These feelings are true, and in prayer, when we are to be honest with God, I confess my desire to find a greater audience. It is not out of ego fame--I truly don't care for that. But still it is ego--the need to feel as if I am doing something impactful on Earth. The last couple years I had come to regard myself as perhaps "the least influential person who ever lived," and had told myself that this was ok, since all power comes from God. 

Being an influencer is of course the aspiration of our age.  Fame is the coin of the realm.  I know people who truly judge others by how many Twitter followers they have, and how many likes they get on their videos. This latter metric is in fact what determines the pay scale at my network, which means I get a miniscule piece of the pie, barely enough to pay the electric bill in winter and certainly not in summer.

I am thankful for that. God is our father. By faith and baptism we are adopted sons and daughters of God. He provides for us what we need and will deny us what is not good for us. So many things that I have desired in life have been denied to me, even as great blessings have been heaped on me at every turn. The things that have been denied to me now look likes graces. They were denied to me for my own good, by a loving heavenly Father.

Certainly I am glad I did not become famous in a media sense,  at least in my youth, for I no doubt would have succumbed to the snares that draw down so many of those people, almost all of them, into something akin to a demonic cesspool. I might be one of them.  Even at this stage in my life, when I have put on more of the armor of God, could I resist temptations of satisfaction from attention.

God has given me as big an audience as I can handle, I guess, which is far more than I could have built on my own. My audience comes from the network. I did not build it organically through my own bootstrapping. I have nothing to complain about.

Still, being honest with God, as Jesus did in the garden in expressing his desire that the cup would pass from him, I would ask God to show me how to reach out to more people. In my head pops the question why?  Just so you will feel better? What do have to say that is so important that people need to hear it?

Christmas Greetings to Whoever is Reading This, Known to Me or Otherwise

 It has been a long since I wrote in this blog. Months have gone by.  This does not mean I have abandoned it. In fact just the opposite. I find myself, in bed at night, composing a blog entry and thinking I will write it down. Then during the day I forget, and another day goes by, and at night I am composing again.

I know of none of my old friends who read it anymore, who once read it. So I have no one to whom I can direct the open letter. At Christmastime I pretend I can write to them once again. 

In the time since I wrote, life has seemed amazingly constant. My day job has been demanding, with long hours and putting in extra time to keep ahead of things. Only in the last couple weeks has it felt like things are leveling off. Yet there are still long days, which mostly means I get up as early as 2 AM, when I first awake, in order to get a jump on things, and to work during the hours when I can work in peace without demands or distractions.

My weekends are taken up entirely with preparing for my weekly show on Wednesday. Lately this has morphed into not only preparing a Keynote slide presentation but also a short intro movie using iMovie on my mac. I have become an amateur film maker. Having a short intro film helps me calm my nerves as the broadcast begins. 

Between these two activities---my day job and preparing for my show---almost all of my time is taken up.  The idea of fitting anything else into that schedule seems impossible.

Somehow in October we managed to squeeze in two weekend road trips. Over my birthday, we went up to the top of Mount Lemmon, the "sky island" near Tucson with pines at the top. Like last year, we stayed in the small community of Summerhaven, this time at the new lodge which has opened this year. The next weekend we went up to Gallup, New Mexico to see the annular eclipse on October 13. To see the actual event, we drove out ot the visitor's center of the El Malpais National Monument. 

Other than these two events, it has felt mostly the same week to week. My show, Spellbreakers, is still on the air on the  Badlands Media Channel on Wednesday evenings, and of course the broadcasts are available after that.  Here is the playlist for my show. I take it as serrously as if it were a show on a major radiio network. I love doing the sponsors. I have come to love interacting with my audience. I feel so much stress leading up to the show, mostly out of perfectionism---something technical always goes wrong. Then afterwards I am on such a high and can't wait for the next time.

I don't know how long I'll get to keep my show. I often wonder. I am not exactly one of the favorites of the guy who runs the network. I'm lucky if he even reads my emails. My view numbers are low compared to the other shows, especially the number of "likes" I get. I tell myself I do not have the "touch". Were this a real network, I would probably be canceled by now. That's show business, I tell myself. I have given it my best shot.  However long I get to do this will be a gift.

I once craved variety in my life, like people do when they are young. Now I take it as a blessing if I just keep doing what I'm doing--working my job, paying the bills, and doing my little show with it's itsby bitsy audience.