Today, I'm going to celebrate The Almighty Dollar!

How so?

First, I'm going to introduce you to a very special website.

You might have been there before or this might be your very first time there.

Either way, here it is...

http://www.orgsites.com/ca/invisibleyouth/

In case you're wondering, this is the website for Invisible Youth Network where the focus is on helping homeless and/or otherwise at-risk children, teens, and young adults.

Next, I'm going to take you to a specific page of this site...

http://www.orgsites.com/ca/invisibleyouth/_pgg3.php3

This is the page where you can find out how to give cash donations, either by snail-mail or using a donation button to make an online payment.

If you make an online payment, it must be one of at least ten dollars.

However, if you use snail-mail, you could make out a check for a dollar and send it on its way.

Let's say that you decide to donate a dollar a month ($12 per year in all) .  That might not seem like a whole lot, but every dollar adds up.

While you're donating a dollar after reading this, somebody else who has read this might also be doing the very same thing.  What if every person here at Gaia all got the same idea!?!

That might not be realistic to imagine, but it could very well happen!  What if it did?

What if fifty people at Gaia saw this and decided to donate?

Do you know what this would mean?

It might mean that ten deserving young people would be receiving five dollar gift cards for McDonald's.  Or, it might mean that several kids were going to be receiving school supplies and/or some personal hygiene items.

Let's venture on...

What if those same fifty people told five of their non-Gaia friends about reading this, and what if those friends did the same...and so on...and so forth...!?!

Everybody's single dollar donation would multiply!!!

If you're reading this sentence, it means that you've, likely, read this celebration of The Almighty Dollar and have the information I've shared here in your mind and heart.

What next?

The ball's in your court now, so, what part will you be playing in this celebration!?!

...

The most positive things about suffering, imo, are:

1.  It makes you less likely to take feeling good for granted.  When you go through a bout of suffering, getting back to normal feels wonderful!

2.  It makes you more understanding of others when they go through suffering.  Before, one might have sympathy for someone else, but the suffering allows them to also have empathy.

3.  It also gives you the confidence to tell somebody now walking in your shoes that this too shall pass.

Suffering can also result in some hits in visual arts, music, writing, etc.

I'm currently working on a book about a time when I went through a deep depression and didn't know why.

At the time, I had some reasons that I might feel sad or uncertain, but the depression was overdoing it.  It turned out to have physical more than psychological reasons--a chemical imbalance in my body.

I'm now (over 35 years later) using my experiences to help others--as well as to take part in the well-known dream of writers:  bookwriting!

"Christianity isn't a religion--it's a relationship."

I saw those words on a poster at a Christian school several years ago, and they made sense to me--and, especially, in the light of being asked this question.

Yes, Christianity is considered to be one of the world's religions--but it's also a relationship with Jesus.  In fact, it's first and foremost a relationship.

I celebrate this relationship as a United Methodist, which is one of many denominations of Protestant Christianity.

In short, my answer would be that any religion I might choose to practice must include at the forefront a relationship with Jesus.

If I weren't in the United Methodist church, I would probably be in the Friends church, Unity church, or, possibly, a Lutheran church.  United Church of Christ would also be a possibility.  I might just attend all four of those churches on different Sundays plus other denominations at other times but mostly those four.

Now, if this question means that I would have to attend a church that wasn't necessarily a Christian one, I would go with a Unitarian church because it's a congregation that welcomes people of all paths of faith--including the Christian path of faith.

In short, I might come to do some things such as Wiccans do or I might take on some practices of an Eastern Religion, but the deal is that Jesus comes with me and is made to feel welcome!

Lately, money has been coy--that is, it's been playing hard-to-get.

Either hard to get--or else, when I get it, it gets passed on to the next recipient.

I believe that most of you have been there and done that.

Then, of course, there are those e-mails that promise that, for a small investment, you can end up rich.

Do you believe this to be true?

Believe it now when I tell you that you can be rich for a small investment.

The details are getting spread far and wide over Cyberspace about an investment that only amounts to a dollar a month, but it WILL make you rich!

You can also invite your friends to invest, and you will end up even richer!

A dollar per month!  That's it!  (though some people make the choice to invest even more)

The more people you tell, the richer you'll get--and so will they!

You will be investing in futures--priceless futures!

You can find out more about this wise, wonderful, and exciting investing by visiting this website:

Invisible Youth Network

Children are our future, and it's not right that around 4000 children and teens are part of the homeless population of the San Diego area alone--and that the total number of them has at least seven figures!

If every person in the United States alone invested a dollar per month, the number of young lives turned around would be astronomical!

Even if only a portion of every person in the United States alone did this, we would notice the change!

If you're reading this, please share it with other people you know, and just see what kind of change an avalanche of monthly dollar donations will bring about!!!

No, I'm not going to guarantee that you, personally, are going to find hundreds or thousands of dollars coming your way each week because you've invested a dollar per month, but you will be rich because you'll be living in a world where hopelessness has turned to hope and dreams that were, at one time, not dared to be dreamed of will be realized!

How am I doing, Jesus?

That, with certain parts of my life, I can never go back again except in memories.

I can remember one such time that the thought hit me that never again would my dad and I go to Michaelangelo's in Noblesville to eat together.  He had passed away that February, and it was now late in the summer.

At the time, the thought was so sad that I started crying.

Then, I didn't think about it.

However, I thought about going to eat at Michaelangelo's, so I did one day.

When it came time for me to pay for my meal, I was told that it had already been paid for.

I looked around and didn't see anybody I knew--and it turned out that somebody must have simply been inspired to do a random act of kindness and pay for my food.

But why?  I was well dressed and didn't look as if I were starving to death.  At the time, I wasn't using any sort of special assistance to walk.

But, for some reason, somebody singled me out to pay for my meal.

Then, I remembered that thought I'd had, and I believe that the spirit of my dad must have put a bug in somebody's ear to pay for my meal--a way of saying that we could still eat at Michaelangelo's together.

One place that I'll never be going to again is Hickory Villa in Cave City, KY.

So many times I think of that place and can see myself coming in the door where Bobby is taking a break from cooking and sitting at a table to enjoy a cigarette or two.

Linda (his older daughter) would wait on me, and I would sit there in this homey place and watch a train meandering along a near-by track, Nashville-bound.

Then, Etta (his wife) would get off from her ranger job at Mammoth Cave and arrive at the restaurant good 'n 'hungry.

If any or all of the other kids and their families were in town, they would come in, too.

Bobby passed away from fast-spreading prostrate cancer seven years ago this Valentine's Day.  Etta eventually went to Missouri to help her sister out.  The other kids were other places besides Cave City, and Linda tried to keep Hickory Villa going for so long as possible.

Bobby had told her not to feel guilty about selling the place if it ever got too much for her.  It did, and so she sold it.

I haven't been there in years, so I have no idea if the building is even still standing, though it probably is.  But I have no idea what's in it now.

I miss being in good enough shape to take tours through Mammoth Cave.

Often, I think of that area and all of the happy memories I had spending time there.

Sometimes, I long for those days of sending my folks a postcard from Upton--a kind of way of lording it over my dad how he'd once gotten stopped by a cop for speeding as we were going through there on our way to my grandparents' farm back when I was three or four years old--and driving on down to Cave City, checking into Wigwam Village, and dropping in down at Hickory Villa to let everybody know I had arrived and woud be around for a few days.

If it were still early enough, I would usually drive on out to Mammoth Cave National Park and hang with some of the night shift.

I loved going out and feeling the cool, gentle night breeze, seeing a sky full of stars, and listening to the sound of the tree toads.

Sometimes, I would imagine that their melody was the sound of the stars coming out at night.

And what a joy to feed the baby raccoons!

There are other parts of my life that it would be fun to go back to, but I know that, had I not moved on, there would be people in my life whom I didn't have back then that I would miss.

That was one of the things I thought about when my dad passed away on February 2, 2004.

For many days of the year, I would have been so happy to wake up and find that it had all been a bad dream.

Then, I found out that friends were expecting another baby and they were so happy.  On November 13 when Jaylee was born, I knew that it was too late to wake up and have everything to be a dream.

Online...

Even when I can't afford gas, public transportation, etc...

Even when I don't have a passport...

Even when it's too slick to go outside or the snowdrifts are too high for me to get out my door...

Even when I'm flopping around in a hostess dress--or even naked as the day I was born...

Even then, I can travel all over the world and even touch the stars or walk on the bottom of the ocean...

And it's more real than mere imagination when I am...

Online...

Yes I both would and will!

Not in this temporary body, of course.  This is but a vehicle for my soul, and it's already wearing out like an old car.

But, even if living forever meant living in this body with its limitations, I still would because life is beautiful, and I couldn't imagine just ceasing to exist.

I generally don't refer to it as a psychic experience--more like a sign, a prophecy, or even a sixth sense--but I've had this kind of thing happen to me a number of times.

Sometimes, it will simply be a feeling--like coming back from Lexington, KY on May 31, 1969.  As we (my folks and I) got closer to home, I began to get this feeling that something was terribly wrong.

I shrugged it off as just a feeling telling myself that everything was right--that my cousins were coming and bringing their new baby for a visit in just a few days and we'd had a wonderful time visiting Uncle Kermit for the past couple of days.

Then, it was midnight, and my dad turned on the radio to get some news.  There was talk of tornadoes that had swept through the state earlier, which was bad enough--but it was the next item that really hit home with me.

They talked about a drowning that took place down in Shelbyville, and it turned out to be my friend, Mike, from school.  We were both 16 at the time.

Most of my premonitions have had to do with happier occasions, however, and they usually come in the form of dreams.

Like, when I was in second or third grade, I had this dream that I'd gone to Sunday School and there was this guy from my class at school.  I went to Sunday School a few hours later, and there was Paul!  It turned out that his grandparents were members and that his mom and dad were shopping for another church, so they had ended up at ours.

When I was in seventh or eighth grade, Dark Shadows became THE soap to follow, and most of us young ladies were swooning over the mysterious vampire, Barnabas Collins, who was played so wonderfully by a Canadian actor named Jonathan Frid.

I wanted a picture of him to tape to the door of my bedroom but I couldn't find any.  One Saturday or Sunday, I took an afternoon nap and had this dream about going to Hook's Drug Store (which was in a shopping center a couple of miles north of where we lived), going to the magazine rack, opening a particular teen magazine (Can't remember now if it were 16, Tiger Beat, or something else...) and finding this wonderful picture of him.

When I woke up, I told my dad about the dream and asked him if he would drive me up to Hook's to see if my dream would come true.  He didn't hesitate for a minute.  He dropped me off at the door, and I hurried in there to the magazine rack and picked up the magazine I'd pictured in my dream.

When I opened it and went to the area of it where the picture was supposed to be, there it was--and it looked just as I had pictured it in my dream!

I had this other dream about driving along the by-pass (now called Scatterfield Rd.) and looking to the left to see that some homes were being torn down.  I wondered to myself why those perfectly-good homes were being torn down.  That was the end of that dream, and I chalked it up to having been involved in an eminent domain protest in the northwest part of the state a short time before.

It wasn't but mere days later when the newspaper talked about some homes about to be removed in order to make way for some businesses.  West side of Scatterfield Rd. just like in my dream.  Some of the houses were relocated, but there were some that simply stayed put and got torn down.

There was a fire in a restaurant that had just opened a few months before--one of my favorites--and the owner talked as if she planned on opening it again once she got through the insurance red tape and was able to clean the place up (it was mostly smoke and water damage).

One night, I had this dream that I had called Kay to see if things were any closer to where she could reopen, and she told me that the restaurant wouldn't be reopening.  I asked her if she knew what would be going in there, and she told me that she had no idea, so I decided to drive past the place to see if I could find out.

When I looked at the storefront, it looked like a Chinese restaurant.

Not long after that, Golden House relocated from its original location about a block or so south to where The Candlelight Tearoom had been.

There have been several more examples, but I'm going to close with this one.  During the 2006 Christmas season, I began to think about two foods:  Russell Stover's Chocolates and Thomas English Muffins.

On January 15, 2007, I met Russell Thomas Hartsaw online, and the rest is history!!!

I'd like to cordially invite you to check out the website of our organization, Invisible Youth Network as well as becoming a part of and our online community here at Gaia   and          the one at Care2.