My new book

Note: This post originally said that Dr. Maiden was speaking on the 12th, but he is speaking on the 19th. Pastor Harold Butler will be blessing us with God's word on the 12th.

I looked at my statistics and saw that 9 people have viewed my blog... Awesome! To those 9 of you who are now regular readers of my blog I have a special treat for you.

If I am correct (which I usually am) the former Pastor of NorthRidge Dr. Maiden will be in pulpit on August 19th to speak to our congregation. After this he will have a book signing for his new book.

This led me to reach back into my memory bank and withdraw January 1, 2006. On this day I made a resolution that I would write the book that has been inside of my head for a while now. The good thing about this resolution is that even though I have not made a lot of progress in the past year and a half I have not yet broken my resolution.

So what I wanted to do for my faithful 9 blog viewers is give you a never before sneak peak into my new book which will be realeased on August 12, 2014. So here it is and please leave me some comments on what you think and where changes can be made. I love you 9!

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I am sure that all of you are familiar with a timeline. We learned to use them in the third grade and have neglected them ever since. The basic point of a timeline is to chronologically arrange the order of events that have some significance to each other.
Such an example would be that I was born on May 20, 1982. I was saved on March 26, 1996. I graduated high school on May 22, 2000. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers won the Super Bowl on January 22, 2002. I got married April 24, 2004. Those are all of the significant events that have happened in my life up until this point and so the timeline of my life would look like this.

Now what I would like for you to do is to make a timeline of all of the significant events that have taken place in your life. They could be things like your birth, your salvation, your marriage, the birth of your children, the Bucs’ Super Bowl victory; whatever is important to you. If you like you can write it out in the space provided below.

Take a minute to look over your timeline and to reflect on these events. Think about how important all of these events were and where you would be if they had never occurred.

Now what I need to you to do is to use your imagination. I need you to imagine that this next picture is one straight line. In order to do that, imagine that you can physically pick up the beginning of this picture with your left hand and the end of it with your right hand. Pick it up straight off of this page and stretch the two ends out like Christmas lights. (like its that easy to stretch out Christmas lights) Then take your right hand and toss out the end of the line until it is straight

In your imagination this line should be perfectly straight just like a timeline. This line would be very, very long. It could probably stretch through your house and down the block for a little ways.
Now what I need to you to do is to use your imagination to take the timeline that you made for yourself and crumble it up into a little ball until it makes a tiny little dot. Place this little dot toward the very beginning of the long line that you stretched out in your head that went through your neighbor’s window. It would look something like this.

What you now have is a clear and understandable representation of eternity. The beginning of the line in your hand represents the beginning of time. I will leave it to people a lot smarter than I to argue whether there ever was a real beginning of time. For our illustrations purposes your left hand will represent Genesis 1 when God created Heaven and the Earth and everything on Earth.
The end of this line represents eternity. Now understand this: the line that you have in your imagination is very long. It is probably the longest timeline that you have ever seen, but if this truly represents eternity it is only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of how long the line should really be. We can not truly make a timeline that represents eternity because eternity transcends time. But for the practical purposes that this book will serve we must try to wrap our finite brains around infinity and the only way to do that is use our imagination to make this line.
So if your left hand is creation and the line is eternity then what does the dot represent? It represents your life. I bet for some of you when you were making your timeline you were thinking, “I sure have lived a full life.” Or maybe, “Boy, I am old.” But when you crumbled up your timeline and turned it into a dot I bet it made your life seem insignificant.
What I need for you to understand is that this is as close to an accurate timeline as we will ever be able to make here on Earth. And every time you make your timeline and put it in relation with eternity, it will always be a dot.
What if I live to be 75? A dot. What if I live to be 100? A dot. What if I am like Bethusela and live to be ? Always a dot. When we put our lives on the same scale as eternity it will always be a dot. Regardless.
Do you remember the last time that you went to a cemetery? There were a lot of tombstones surrounding you as far as the eye can see. The tombstones said something like this:
Here Lies John Doe
A Great Man, A Great Father, A Great American
1945-2006
What do we really know about this man? We know his name. We know that there were people that loved him and thought highly of him. We know when he was born and when he died. That’s it. That’s all we know. The reality is that his entire existence on this Earth was summed up with a dash. All of the successes, all of the stories, all of the experiences, all of the hard work; everything is summed up in one little dash.
It seems pretty depressing doesn’t it, but it is a true statement that one day after you die, everyone will eventually forget about you or the people that remember you will die themselves. When that happens all that you were and all that you stood for will be encompassed in that one little dash on your tombstone that separates the year you were born from the year that you died. In other words it will be nothing more than a dot on the timeline of eternity.
The Bible makes this point very clearly a few times on just how short and frail our life is. James 4:14 says, “…you are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.” Job 7:6 says, “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle…” And Job 9:25 says, “Now my days are swifter than a runner; they flee away, they see no good.”

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In order for you to understand what the line and the dot means to me let me paint you a picture of my childhood. I was born and raised in the beautiful city of Tampa, FL. I was an eighties child. Nothing beat the Dukes of Hazzard and the Ninja Turtles as far as I was concerned
I had blonde hair and blue eyes. I took my blonde hair and I parted it down the left side of my head and did a little bit of a comb over. So the left side of my head looked clean-cut and business-like and the right side of my head looked like tumbleweed rolling through the desert. It was almost like a sideways mullet.
I had a very keen eye for fashion. I wore nothing but t-shirts that usually contained some sort of cartoon character, such as Roger Rabbit or Bugs Bunny. I also owned one of those shirts that changed from one ugly color to the next if you touched it. And the prize of my t-shirt collection was a purple shirt with a surfer on it, but if you rolled up the sleeves the underneath color was orange.
Being from Florida, I only owned one or two pair of long pants and the rest of my wardrobe was comprised of jean shorts. The very same pair of jean shorts. You see, my mom found these particular shorts on sale at an outlet mall and felt it necessary to buy every pair, because it is hard to pass up such a good deal. So nearly every day for two or three years I was dressed in the exact same pair of shorts.
Coming form a family that wasn’t particularly affluent, we only got one pair of shoes a year. Shoes were a huge deal when I was in school, who you were was based on what shoes you wore. If you had the “Ken Griffeys” with the number 24 on the side then you could be part of the elite of the school. We bought our shoes at Wal-Mart and I can only remember one pair from one particular year and they had two velcro straps on them and had a picture of my favorite cat-eating alien ALF the side of them. During the summertime I absolutely loved my shoes, when school started and the jokes rolled in I would rather have went barefoot.
There is one thing though that I have failed to mention that topped off my wardrobe… my socks. I had socks that came up to my knees and had different colored stripes on them. It didn’t matter if the stripes matched my outfit, it only mattered that they matched each other. If you add all of this with the worst posture that anyone has ever seen and a set of teeth that makes Austin Powers look like Brad Pitt then you have a pretty accurate picture of what I was like as a child.
My name is James Blewett, (pronounced bloo-ette) not so hard. However when the first day of school rolled around and it came time to call roll all of the teachers pronounced my name as though they have never read English before. “James Blew It” would naturally be what poured out of their mouth. Being the first day of school and the first alphabetically called, this pronunciation would get the class rolling on the floor with laughter to start the year off. And then the statement that every teacher made with confidence as though they were the originators of the centuries old joke “James, you really Blew It this time.” And my year would get off to a great start. Just imagine my joy when I found out that in middle school we would have six classes with six different teachers and six different times calling roll. I am excited about going to Heaven, but I hope that the roll really won’t be called up yonder like the hymn says.
I painted you that picture in order for you to grasp the lack of self-confidence that I had. People that meet me today have a hard time believing that I ever lacked self-confidence because these dies I try not to cross over the cockiness line that separates self-confident people from pro athletes. It didn’t take long for me to create a defense mechanism known in the eighties as a “cut-down.” Now it is something that I struggle not to use.
My family life was not the best that it could be. My mom had an accident when I was really young and hurt her back, the injury handicapped her and she had to quit her job and stay home. My dad then became a workaholic, he didn’t have much choice with all of the doctor bills that were rolling in. My parents tried very hard, and I do believe they wanted the best for us however when I think back to my childhood I cannot think of one positive memory.
My mom was a frustrated, angry lady and needed an outlet for her anger and that usually came in the form of physically punishing me for any small hiccup that I made. I was truly scared of my mother for most of my life.
My dad had to unwind with a few beers when he got home from work and my brother and I would keep tabs on how many because once it got to three or four we made ourselves scarce.
I had often heard people telling me growing up that I was lucky to have two parents that have remained together for my whole life. The thing is that people didn’t know what went on behind closed doors. My parents fought like they literally hated each other on a nightly basis and the only reason they didn’t get divorced was because the state wouldn’t allow my mom to raise us alone and my dad worked too much to raise us, so they were stuck together.
I hated going to school. I really just hated that there were people at the school. I liked to learn and I liked to be distracted from life, but I hated going to school. However, until my freshman year in high school I only missed two days out of my entire schooling career because I just hated being at home more than I hated being anywhere else.
Of all of the things in my life that I hated, there was one thing that I hated more than anything else… nighttime. I hated being around people, but I hated being alone even more. It absolutely terrified me to be alone with my thoughts. When the lights when out and it was just me, I did nothing but question my existence...
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More to come, check a bookstore near you.... in 8 years!