“I'll think of it tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. Tomorrow, I'll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.” ― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

Good morning and welcome. It's Monday, November 9, 2015, and I do hope we all are ready to give our best today. It is, after all, the only day we have at our fingertips that we can do anything about. My wife believes me to be a procrastinator. She actually thinks I am an expert at being one. She may be mistaken. I like to think of myself as being a master scheduler who takes seriously my planning of when things should be completed. What she thinks of as me postponing may be nothing more than the fact that it has not come up on the schedule yet. (I actually worked once as a computer scheduling specialist, just for the record.) I've read some quotes that really do little to explain my situation. One that appears to be the most popular goes like this: "I'm not a procrastinator I'm just extremely productive at unimportant things." I must say that I do not have a clue as to why this is copied and pasted so much because for the life of me I cannot even begin to figure out what it means. Others are a little more clear: "Stop procrastinating beginning tomorrow." "Procrastinating is the art of keeping up with yesterday." "I always write 'Wake Up' on my to do list so that I can at least accomplish one thing today." "I am a skilled multi-tasking procrastinator, I can put off all kinds of things at the same time." Okay. I know. The Bible teaches quite a bit about the dangers of putting things off, especially in the Proverbs. I did not find much about master scheduling. I'll keep looking and get back to you if I find something. Thanks.

We are doing a particular Santa and Mrs. Claus event that requires us to furnish a background check. We don't mind since we do work with children but this is the first time in six years that we have ever been asked. Fortunately, my membership in the IBRBS (International Brotherhood of Real Bearded Santas) provides access to a service that does these types of background checks. You will be glad to know on my name they found no hits on the hundreds of criminal databases they checked. As for the wife, I'm not even sure they established she had a background or not. That's how clean her's was. When they complete the process, for a fee of course, they send you about ten pages of information. The first page pretty much summarizes their findings and the rest is boilerplate listings of all the databases they have checked along with several pages of disclaimers. You know. They ran the background check but cannot be held responsible for anything they didn't find. That tends to be how things work in today's world. Pretty soon the disclaimers will very much drown out the claims if you get my drift. Think about it. A thirty second commercial for a new drug on TV consists of 5 seconds about the drug and 25 seconds of disclaimers. The good news: We are clean. That is, unless they missed something.

And, in case you don't know the truth I for one am not in line to be fitted for a halo. We all have plenty of things we've done and probably continue to do that plague us even though they will not appear on an official background check. That's the sin nature or as the Apostle Paul puts it: the old man nature. If we are a genuine child of God through the finished work of Jesus Christ, well, we do have another power in our life. It's called the abiding presence of God the Holy Spirit or as Paul says, the new man. We have the old and new and they don't get along. At all. In fact, they war against each other. The old man is already defeated because we are eternally and forever saved as a child of God but he doesn't care about that. He wants to do anything he can to get us to mess up, to make wrong choices, and to fail in our testimony. He is relentless but he is not invincible. (The old man - new man conflict is covered extensively by Paul in his letters to the Romans, Ephesians, and the Colossians.) Bottom line: That new man can always be victorious, "You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world." (1st John 4:4) That should be good news to us all. I know it is to me and I need to be reminded of it every single day, all day long. Amen. ....More later.