Live Fire with Chuck Holton

Tom and Penny Green are homesteaders in the heart of Alaska’s vast interior. About a year ago, I got to spend a few days with them learning about their lives, and getting to know this wonderful couple. We finally got around to telling their story on CBN today, so make sure to watch the piece.

This story went through several iterations, and since we didn’t have time to tell the whole story on today’s show, I’m uploading an extended web-version of the video here.

You can also see pictures from our trip to Alaska on Flickr.

Okay, starting in Panama City:

Shopping in Via Espana – buy about anything for next to nothing.
Casco Viejo – the old part of the city where the president’s “palace” is, among other things.
- Miraflores Locks watch for your ship to come in.
- Salsipuedes market means literally “get out if you can.” Like a Bazaar, and it’s bizarre.
Panama La Vieja- REALLY old part of Panama city.
- Fort Amador Causeway Fun at night.

Now to the Carribean side of the isthmus – the Colon side

Gatun Locks
Fort San Lorenzo- 15th century pirate fort on what used to be Fort Sherman.
Portobello- another pirate fort.
Isla Grande – local hangout on weekends, inexpensive, tranquil island not too far from Panama City.
the San Blas Islands and Kuna Indians

El Valle de Anton – Kind of like Boquete, only closer to Panama city (about 2 hours)

Playa Blanca Resort – About an hour from Panama City, very close to Rio Hato.

Yaviza – the end of the road. Not for the faint of heart.

Santa Catalina – surfer’s paradise.

Isla Coiba – all the adventure you can handle.

Boquete – the land of Perpetual Spring.

Coffee.
Indians.
Coffee.
Flowers.
More Flowers.
Coffee.

Miscellaneous:

David
Santiago – not much to see here.
Penonome – buy a hat.
Las Palmas waterfall
Hotel Europa (Panama City)
Hotel Rebequet (Boquete)
Hotel Costa Inn – Panama City
And if you’re really in the mood to splurge on a hotel, or catch a communicable disease, try the
Hotel Ideal in Chorillo. Not for the fainthearted nor those who can afford more than $9 a night.

About time I think I could kill one or more of my children with an electric razor, along comes
Dave Meurer to the rescue. If you like Dave Berry, you’ll feel like you graduated from grade school to high school when you read Meurer’s books. My favorite (for obvious reasons) is Stark Raving Dad.

Get ‘em. You’ll thank me later.

Google Earth If you haven’t tried it yet, you should, unless you’re on dial-up.

Most of the time I try to have a point when I blog. Then there are days like today, when the most interesting article on WaPo is that ugly people are more likely to commit crime. Heh. I’m afraid to go anywhere near that one. But I will say this. What if pretty people are just more likely to get away with it? Anyway, it won’t be long until somebody links this story to Dick Cheney, whose case was closed today when they couldn’t find a lawyer in Texas willing to prosecute him, after what happened to the last one.

What gets me isn’t people who were born, say, homely. It’s the ones who make themselves hideous on purpose. I always thought the verse that says, “Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart,” was a verse of hope for ugly people, but something I read in J.J. Luna’s book, “How to Be Invisible” made me see the verse in a different way. (I’d give you a direct quote, but somehow I can’t find the book, though I know I put it on my shelf. Hmm…) Anyway, the quote was something about “we should teach our children to want people’s impressions of them to be formed by the outward manifestations of inner character and civility, not by their appearance.” Which is a nice way of saying that if you feel the need for your appearance to shout “look at me,” your character may be mumbling, “move along, nothing to see here.”

Well, heck, there I went and got all spiritual on you anyway. Oh well.

What I really wanted to blog about was that I cleaned out my Favorites folder today, and found some interesting relics and arcane links that I’ll be sharing with you piecemeal for the rest of the month.

First, is this link to a short course in Dvorak. About a year ago, I decided that since I make my living at the keyboard, maybe my living would come easier if I were a more efficient typist. I found this Dvorak method easy to learn, and now I can type over 200 words per minute. Too bad I can only think about forty words per minute, though. What I need is Dvorak for the brain.

My guilt overwhelms me- it is a burden too heavy to bear. Psalm 38:4

Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of things in my life over which I feel legitimate guilt. But what I really struggle with is the illegitimate guilt – the guy inside of me who drives me like a racehorse on the final lap of a big race – all the time.

I when I am writing a piece for CBN, I feel guilty for not working on my book, but when I’m working on my book, I feel like I ought to be spending time with my kids. When I’m spending time with my kids, I’m kicking myself for neglecting the farm, and the joy of farming is marred by the knowledge that I’m not working on the latest CBN project. Etcetera. Etcetera, Ad Nauseum.

I should be working on the rental houses. I should be more involved at church. I should be in better shape. I should be a better husband. I should keep better tax records. I should have gotten the brakes on my truck fixed months ago. I lay awake last night thinking how I should be shoveling the new-fallen snow instead of sleeping! Maybe all of those people who keep telling me I’m insane are on to something.

I’m a perpetual over-committer. I’ll admit it. But it’s more than that. I’m firmly convinced that it would take three of me just to keep up with the regular maintenance of life, even if I was unemployed. I felt this way in college, when I went around and asked each professor one semester how many hours of homework they recommended I do weekly for their particular course. The sum total would have left me an average of 2 hours a day for sleep, work, eating, etcetera.

Everybody wants a piece of Chuck Holton. The government wants a big chunk, and that’s just counting the time I have to spend at the DMV getting my auto registration renewed. My employers want a chunk. My family wants some, my church, my animals, my websites, etcetera. If I never slept and ignored my family completely, I might be able to get half of the things done that are on my list.

And of course, that’s not an option. But to tell you the truth, as much as I’d like to share some pithy quote or scripture verse on this subject, I can’t. I’m sure that if I spent more time reading my bible, I’d know it, of course, but that, too is one of the things on my list that always seems to get put off my the most recent emergency.

It’s easy to put my finger on the problem – too much to do and not enough time to get it done. But what I don’t understand is why! Why am I like this? If I were to set a world record for running the mile, what is that thing inside me that would surely say, “but if you had tried a little harder, you could have gone even faster”? If I won a gold medal at the olympics, something inside me would say, “tsk tsk, if only you had trained a bit longer, you could have got two!”

Art Williams wrote a book called, “All you can do is all you can do, but all you can do is enough.” I try to believe that. But the man inside me does not.

Maybe I like my life this way – perhaps, on some level I purposely overbook my life like the airlines do their planes. Maybe there’s a deeply hidden fear somewhere in me of reaching the end of my list. Who knows?

And so I press on, the only way I know how – one foot in front of the other. One task at a time. Put out the fires as I come to them. Trust God for the ones I can’t get to.

Do you struggle with this too? If you have an answer for my problem, I’d love to hear it.

File under “Ideas I should have thought of”: Ebay – the online auction marketplace, now boasts over 181 million registered users. The combined value of all of its auctions is over $12 billion, which is larger than the GDP of half the world’s countries.

This week, Ebay scored its biggest sale ever - a $171 million Giga-Yacht to Russian Billionaire Roman Abramovich, who wanted it for his collection. Yes, he’s got four of them.

I don’t know which is more ridiculous – that this guy isn’t yet 40 or that there are 50 people in the world who have more money than he does. Yow. Not bad for somebody who started out selling plastic ducks out of his apartment.

I don’t know Mr. Abramovich personally, and so I can’t comment on him personally. It’s easy to ask, “Why in the world would anyone need ONE hundred-million-dollar personal pleasure boat, much less four. Couldn’t this guy’s money be better spent eradicating some third-world famine or rebuilding New Orleans?”

Randy Alcorn put it succinctly;

Materialism is an attempt to find meaning in a universe that has been stripped of meaning through the denial of its Creator. This is the heart and soul of materialism—it is not a random form of behavior but the logical conclusion of an incorrect theology. Materialism does not begin with a wrong view of things; it ends there. It begins with a wrong view of God, which produces a wrong view of man and a wrong view of things.

It’s easy to point fingers at guys like this. It’d be nice if all the world’s rich people would be a bit more prudent with their money. Then again, what about you?

Here’s a quote from another of Randy’s articles:

If you have enough food, decent clothes, live in a home that shields you from the weather and own some kind of reliable transportation, you are in the top 15 percent of the world’s wealthy. Add some savings, a hobby like hunting or fishing that requires equipment, two cars (in any condition), a variety of clothing and your own house, and you have reached the top five percent.

You may not feel wealthy. But that’s because you’re comparing yourself to someone who owns even more.

To get a better handle on reality, consider that more than 1.1 billion people in the world live on less than the equivalent of one U.S. dollar per day. Five hundred million people are hungry and another 500 million are so poor they don’t get enough food to be fully productive.

The bottom line is this: There are billions of people in this world who are drowning in meaninglessness and sin. You have been given a life raft. Are you going to spend your time pulling folks out of the water, or griping about the size of other people’s boats?

And good news – you too can be richer than Oprah. All it takes is a little investing in eternity.

I’ve been reading a bit lately on the Mega-Church phenomenon in the U.S. The Megachurch today 2005 study showed 1,200 churches with an average attendance of over 3,600 people. The largest, Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church, just purchased and renovated Houston’s Compaq Center into a new sanctuary capable of seating 18,000. They boast a weekly attendance of nearly twice that.

Leaving out the fact that Mr. Osteen is asking congregants to pony up a donation of $2,500 for their seat there to pay for the $90 million facelift on the new Osta-dome, and at that rate it’ll take similar donations from about 500 congregants just to pay for his parsonage. It takes money to run any ministry, and a bigger ministry requires a bigger budget. What I wonder is whether this trend toward mega-churchdom is a sign of God preparing his flock for the last days, or a sign of the times, where people go to church to be entertained and motivated, much the same way that they do for the Superbowl or Amway.

Either way, never fear. God’s purpose is greater than heretical preachers, ego-cults and feel-good theology. I’ve come to believe that God can and does use these blind guides to suit his purpose. It doesn’t make what they are doing any less wrong – it makes Him that much more amazing.

Whether you attend a big church or a small one has little bearing on whether or not you spend eternity with God as a golfing partner. When it comes to heaven, you paddle your own canoe, so to speak. (Hint, don’t go with the flow.) That’s not saying you have to earn it, but that you have to choose it, and when the day of judgment comes, you can’t lay the blame on your pastor, your parents or anyone else.

I think there’s something to be said for large churches – they provide opportunities that smaller churches can’t hope to duplicate. But personally, I like to be able to call my pastor at home when I have a pressing need. Try doing that at a mega-church.

Now if I could just get my pastor to podcast his sermons.

On another note, I finished the book “How to be Invisible,” by J.J. Luna. I read it to research methods that people use to “disappear,” because one of the characters in my upcoming novel will be sneaky like that. A fascinating read – one that’s likely to make you want to change your identity and build a safe-room.

This week I’ve been finishing up a story for CBN News that will air next week on Coal mining in West Virginia. I’m looking at how the coal industry has affected the culture of Appalachia. A very interesting, educational week for me. And lots of fun, getting to spend a couple of days in the mines. I wouldn’t want to do it for a career, though. Some of those guys go months without seeing the sun. God bless ‘em.

An interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor about fuel cell technology possibly allowing miners to have emergency self-rescue devices that would function for 72 hours or more. Too bad they didn’t have them ready yet – it would have saved the guys at Sago.

I talked to my friend at the mines about the Governor’s safety stand-down. He said everyone thought it was a good idea – and it only shut the mines for a couple of hours each shift so that every man could get refresher training on emergency procedures.

The consensus amongst the miners is that the Sago tragedy was a complete freak accident, and probably could not have been prevented. They also made a good point – the most dangerous part of coal mining is driving to work, and most of them feel safer underground than they would walking in a major U.S. City.

On a lighter note, check out this hilarious liberal rant generator. Sounds just like some people I know on Homesteading Today.