Welcome to My Mind and My Heart

I have been traveling this week and am exhausted tonight. I am not ready to put my thoughts together for a typical New Year's Resolution post on charity, so I ask that anyone reading this be charitable and understand why I am choosing instead to re-post a long-past post.

I have considered which post to choose, and I hope the decision was inspired. If not, at least enjoy reading something from long enough ago that perhaps you missed it when I first wrote it - just over three years ago. It struck me that most of you who read my blog now did not do so when I first started recording the things of my soul, so I decided to re-post the personal introduction I wrote when I started this blog.

So, without further ado, here is a look at me:

Welcome to my life and mind.

Unlike my wife, I lean more toward the "record the things of my spirit" motivation for blogging. I blog primarily to record how I view life, in order to preserve for my posterity my perspective on eternity and the mortal issues that, IMO, influence eternity. Generally, I am not as verbose as my wife - which really says something about her prodigious compilations. Concise, I am not. Furthermore, I have been told my common sentence composition puts Dickens and Hugo to shame - linguistic slackers that they are - not in quality of their vocabulary, but rather in the simplicity of their sentence structure. My mind meanders from point of interest to point of interest, and it takes more exertion than I often am willing to offer to restrict the journey to a straight and narrow path.

Having said that, I am an unrepentant parser. I try to be very clear about what I say, which is one reason I have a hard time writing simple, non-complex sentences - as my tendency to try to avoid confusion and misunderstanding often leads to a type of verbosity that requires slow and careful reading and, by extension, sometimes causes confusion. Such is life. I insist on addressing what others say, not what the reader assumes or thinks they must mean behind the words, since that is a courtesy I request from others.

I am personally conservative in my own lifestyle and, I have been told by many, quite perplexing in the balance I strive to achieve in my religious and political views. I believe in teaching correct principles and letting people govern themselves - primarily as a product of believing the Golden Rule. I will request a conversation cease if people are talking past each other, not listening in order to understand and merely trying to shout down the other party; however, I never will request such a cessation simply because of fundamental disagreement - regardless of the intensity of the discussion.

I am a teacher by inclination and initial training, a salesman / admissions counselor by trade, a preacher at heart (if not a Mormon, I would live at a pulpit), a musical performer and public speaker by nature and, most importantly, a husband of 24 years and father of 6 kids (and numerous non-biological "children" - hence, "Papa D") by choice and grace.

Welcome to my mind and my heart (and my sense of humor that both makes my wife laugh and embarrasses her on a regular basis). I hope you welcome me to yours.