“Keep your eyes forward, Mr. Laydon,” the nuns used to say back when I was in grammar school.  Once you heard this, you didn’t dare look anywhere else.

Boy, were we afraid of those nuns.  They used to tell us that our parents signed a paper that gave them permission to hit us if we were bad.  I don’t know if it was true or not but every once in a while we would get a whack from a ruler and we sure didn’t run to our parents crying because we probably would have gotten another one when we got home.  Ahh… the good old days!

How was I, just a mere child with raw knuckles, to know back then that those nuns were, probably unknowingly, giving me some pretty good life advice? 

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As I write this I am on a plane flying home from being out of town.

While sitting here looking out the window, I started to remember how I used to be such a white-knuckled flier. Any change in a noise, little bump, turn, or anything else unexpected used to make my heart jump into my throat.  My heart would start to pound, I would start to sweat, and I would hold onto the arm rests so tightly you would have thought that I would have broken them off.

I would be so worked up about flying that sometimes I wouldn’t calm down until the day after the flight.   Now that I look back, this is a funny story, but one night after flying I was at my father’s house in Florida.  The central air conditioning unit was outside the window of the bedroom I was sleeping in.  On the night that I had arrived I was sleeping as the air conditioning unit ran.  In the middle of the night the unit turned off and I jumped out of bed in a sweat thinking I was still on the plane and the engines had just quit. 

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Over the past six weeks or so I have been writing a series of articles called “Building a Relationship with God”.  During the course of the series, we explored talking to God, hearing God talk to us, looking for the signs God gives us in our lives, and how we know and learn the word of God or, in other words, what He has already told us.

If you would like to go back and read any of the previous installments, here are links to the first five parts of the series:

Part 1

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I hope that you will allow me to take some of your time to say a special thank you to you – my readers.  And to tell you a little story about how almost anything that we want to accomplish in our lives is possible.  All we need to do is have a dream, put in a little hard work, and have faith that God will help us along the way to realizing our dreams.

For as long as I can remember I have had the desire to write.  I was a good writer but I just didn’t know what to write about.  I studied other authors.  I tried to figure out how they write and what they wrote about.  Do I write fiction?  Do I try to write a novel?  Suspense?  I had great ideas but I just didn’t know how to put them all together to make them interesting.  I kept feeling like I was at a roadblock – like my car was all gassed up but I had no where to go.

That was until one night when I was in bed.  I woke up in the middle of the night and I was  inspired to start a web site and write “The Whisper of God”.

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Where I live the days are getting shorter and the air is getting crisp and cooler.  As the leaves on the trees paint themselves into a myriad of beautiful colors before they fall to the ground, the birds, squirrels, and other animals outside are getting ready for winter.

There is something so beautiful about this time of year.  The temperature is wonderful – you don’t get baked by the heat of the sun yet you only need to wear a light jacket to stay warm. 

If you have never experienced the fall season, it is something you have to do.  The smell of the fallen leaves is intoxicating.

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