Families Without Limits!

Dear Friend,

Just a short note to let you know that our Twitter fans have declared my new book, Families Without Limits, a hit!

For those of you who have taken advantage of my offer and have downloaded your own copy of my new book for FREE, I want to thank you so much.  The response on Twitter.com and elsewhere has been heartwarming.  If you haven’t downloaded your FREE copy, please do it now.  If you have any problems with this, just drop me an email, and I’ll get it to you right away.

Also, if you have friends who you think might enjoy a copy of my book, I now have a feature that allows you to send them a link from the Families Without Limits main page.  Just check out the button at the bottom of the FREE book sign up form there.

We are still pulling together the new look and feel of The Way of the Passionate Warrior.  While this site is being redone, I am posting fairly regularly to Twitter, so please join me there at http://twitter.com/hughdeburgh.  In the meantime, I may re-post some classic content here that I think you might like.  Or not.  Haven’t decided for sure on that one.

Also, I want to apologize for this site being down for as long as 24 hours the other day.  There was a technical problem at our host provider, but once I discovered the situation, they cleared it up quickly.

Again, thank you so much for your interest in stepping your family’s life up a couple of notches.  I can’t believe how far we’ve come in just one year.  And I thank you for that.

Remember, we don’t have to accept a boring family life!  So why should we?

All the best,

Hugh

Michelangelo's David (Circa 2010)

Dear Friend,

I get asked all the time about my family’s high adventure lifestyle.

I’m being interviewed right now by life360.com for a feature piece, and they want to know all about it.

When I hear this sometimes I feel like looking behind me to see who these people are talking to.

Yeah, I guess, compared to a lot of people, we do live an unusual life of adventure.  It’s a life built around what we want to do instead of what we have to do.

But I always get a chuckle when people apparently suppose that we spend much of our time running zip lines and bungy-jumping or something.

I think that, by imagining that a creative lifestyle must involve all sorts of high adventure and possibly physically risky behavior, there’s the perfect excuse not to do anything with your own life.

By making our lifestyle seem really exciting, it also seems out of reach to those of us who are not adrenalin junkies.  Or who think that we’re too old to make a change in our life.

So let me set something straight.

Living a creative family lifestyle means living your life your way.

That’s it.

If that means eating bon-bons and watching soaps all day, then that’s how you need to live.

You aren’t being compared to some ideal standard by the world.  And even if you are, who cares?  It’s your life and your happiness.

This is about you.

Now, I am not saying that I approve of what has happened to good ol’ David’s body these days (see image above), but if he’s happy, who am I to say anything. 😉

And that’s just it.  This is about you being happy.  Not about you looking happy.

Can you handle a life like that?  Are you ready to be happy?

If you are, then you are in the right place.  Stick with me, and I will do my darnedest to help you get there.

Talk to you soon,

Hugh

Get your FREE copy of my new book, “Families Without Limits,” at http://familieswithoutlimits.com.

Learn more about me at http://hughdeburgh.com.

Dear Friend,

After my last few posts I’ve been taking a break from writing here at The Way of the Passionate Warrior in order to think about the best ways that I can keep bringing you great stuff.  🙂

For example, I’ve been networking with various “experts,” and in the future I plan to bring you as much useful information on how to transform your family’s life as I possibly can.

I’ve also been doing some planning on the future structure of The Way of the Passionate Warrior so as to make it easier for you to find just the information that you need.  My goal is to make this site the primary resource for anyone who whats to set their family life on the right path through Creative Family Lifestyle Design.

All of this work can be tedious and time consuming, so I am thanking you in advance for hanging in there while it’s in progress.

I promise you won’t be sorry!

In the meantime, I will be posting and keeping you up-to-date on the progress of our interrupted journey.  We will be back on the road within the next few weeks for certain, whether the Warrior is ready or not.

Some business demands relating to an employee who has to be out for the month of April is putting a cramp into our style.  As you can see, in order to make this kind of lifestyle work, you have to tweak dozens of little aspects of your life.  And a change in any of these, though seemingly insignificant in itself, can totally blow your degree of freedom.

I am working on new sources of income for our family, but, until then, it would be unwise for my wife to “quit the day job.”

Thank you so much for being a loyal follower!  This is an incredible journey, and I can’t wait to share more of ours and to learn more about yours!

All the best,

Hugh

Don’t forget to download your FREE copy of my new book, Families Without Limits, while supplies last!

Life IS Education

Dear Friend,

In my last post I left you wondering whether you should be sending your kids to school each weekday morning, and, if not, what you are supposed to be doing instead.

School or No School?

My key goal with this post series is to help you to understand that going to a school is not necessarily the best decision for your child.

Then again, after reflection on your current situation, you may determine that some school attendance may just be a great idea.

The key here is reflection.

Up to now, the fact that kids go to school has been taken for granted, right along side the notion that the Earth is round and the Sun rises in the east.

And, most of the time, that school is either a government-run and designed institution, or it’s a private school that essentially follows the same public model, only with more money and a wealthier clientele.

Modern Schools Were Designed by Industrial Age Social Engineers

I wanted you to understand that the design of modern schools is the result of the intentional efforts of early twentieth century industrialists like John D. Rockefeller and his “General Education Board“.  The goal of this design was to create compliant workers in a new “industrial utopia”, and it was considerably influenced by German theories of social design that were floating around at the same time that folks like Hitler and Mussolini were adopting eerily similar philosophies.

In turn, the lifestyles of entire generations of families, and of our society as a whole, have been and continue to be built around the assumptions in these philosophies.

The result of blindly following this path has been a failing yet bloated educational system, a “dumbing down” within society, an often lazy, lost and confused generation of young people, and a generally unhappy army of parents, who lose themselves in alcohol, drugs, affairs, and serial marriages in an attempt to bring meaning to their lives.

The bottom line is, we are all blindly following a family lifestyle model that silently makes assumptions based on the ghostly images of horribly outdated and long rejected ideas of how children ought to be raised and how lives ought to be lived.

It’s time to put a stop to it.

Here’s my take on how to do just that.

What IS Education?

First, we need to understand that the idea that children must be educated is historically new, and, frankly, artificial.  It assumes that there is a thing, a scientifically identifiable process that we call education; a coming-of-age initiation that children must go through before they can emerge as adults in our society.  And this process is designed by modern-day witch doctors, those experts and gurus who clearly know better how to raise your kids than you do, even though they have never actually met your child.

Of course, this entire concept is foolish.  But right now, it’s all we have.  And in many places, it is even required by local law.  If we don’t subject our kids to this crap, we just may lose them to Social Services, under the eyes of the all-knowing busy bodies on your local school board!

So, what are we supposed to do to ensure that our kids get what they need?  How can we be terrific parents to our children?

Education is Learning.  And Learning Grows from Living.

Too much is made of education as a separate and complex process.  Billions are spent to deliver education to the masses.  Is it all necessary?

For humans, learning is a natural function of awareness.  Our eyes are open.  We are surrounded by things, circumstances and events.  And we learn from these, whether we are a child or an adult.  So learning is simply a natural and integral part of growing up.  We cannot neatly separate the process of learning from the process of everyday living.

The logical role in this process for an attentive and loving parent is to ensure that your child is exposed to as many interesting, stimulating and challenging environments as possible.  That same parent may want to regulate how much and how soon their children are exposed to some of the more frightening or confusing events that surround us.  But eventually, even these must be exposed to our kids if they are to grow up as strong and well-balanced adults.

Parents can best help by always surrounding their child with love, understanding, patience, and by being a healthy sounding board for the ten million questions that every kid bombards us adults with.

Schools are Free Day Care Centers

Many parents today use schools as a highly convenient and free child-care service.  Because society says school is good, and because these parents survived the experience themselves, it is easy for most of us to rationalize that school is where our kids should be.  Even if we secretly have serious doubts about it.

We all have complex lives that have taken years to reach their current point.  And one of the key assumptions in our lifestyles is that our kids will be kept busy and out of serious trouble or danger between the hours of 7:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.  And after school activities can keep them busy even longer, allowing you as a parent to finish up that project, make one more sales call, or even (God forbid) have a few moments of quiet time before the little monsters come roaring into the house.

The focus of The Way of the Passionate Warrior Blog is to help people to reform their lives through creative family lifestyle design.  This means that you will reconsider every aspect of the way you have lived your life up to now in an effort to live a better life, one built carefully around those things that really matter to you.

How Much Time Do You Want to Spend With Your Children?

A key assumption of my writing is that spending more time together as a family is an important component of your ideal lifestyle.  But this is not true for everyone.

If, deep down inside, being a parent is not how you primarily define your life, then having a free babysitting service, and carefully limiting how many hours a day/week/month/year that you are exposed to your children, might be the right thing for you.

If this is true, then it would be easy for me to judge you at this point.  To throw on some guilt and shame.  But I’m not going to do that.  It is far more important for you to be honest with yourself.  And it is also equally important that you take your job as a parent seriously.  Kids need affection, love and regular interaction with interested mentors.  If that does not honestly describe you, then do what you need to do to make sure that your child finds this elsewhere.  Please don’t just shove them off to boarding school.  Out-of-sight, out-of-mind is a cruel way to deal with parenthood.  You can do better.

If you are serious about bringing your family closer together, and you are willing to turn your lifestyle upside down, if necessary, in order to live a life that you truly love, then you need to be open to the myriad of options available to you today to ensure that your children have a cool, exciting, and stimulating upbringing.

Just Live Your Dreams

I just returned from a four month road trip with my family, because I believed that this was a great way to introduce my kids to the continent that they were born on.  Was that my only goal?  Heck no!  I wanted to see it too!  And that’s the great thing about this kind of child-rearing lifestyle.  You don’t need to sacrifice your dreams so that your kids can have a better life.  Instead, you need to live your dreams so that your kids can learn how to really live.

So, I hope that I’ve convinced you that formal education as dictated by tradition and the local school authorities is not necessarily the best way to raise your kids.  I also hope that you now understand the proper attitude you need to have in order to effectively approach this aspect of creative family lifestyle design.

Is school screwing up your child?  Maybe so.  And it just may be continuing to screw up your own life as well.

Perhaps it’s time to start examining our unspoken assumptions about how we ought to live our lives, and instead begin the journey towards the family life of our dreams.

All the best,

Hugh

Dear Friend,

As a follower of this blog, I will assume that you have a child of school age, or that is about to enter school.  Or perhaps you have grandchildren, or you are just thinking ahead.

Either way, when it comes to the educational options for your loved ones, perhaps you are confused by the avalanche of contradictory advice that fills the Internet, bookstores, and coffee shops everywhere.

The problem is, there are as many ways to raise to your child as there are children on Earth.  And, in reality, education is merely the process of exposing your child to the world, and preparing him or her to live in it.

Today, I’m not going to try to cover all of the ways that people raise their kids.  But I am going to talk about education, what it is, where it comes from, and what role it ought to play in your child’s life.

What Are Schools?

Why do we have schools?

Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it.  We need schools to teach our young people the knowledge and skills that they need to succeed in life.  Schools also provide contact with peers, and opportunity for children to develop socially.

But is all of that really true?

To understand what schools are, why they exist, and why you send your child to one every weekday, you have to understand where schools came from.

How Today’s Schools Came to Be

Years ago, say two hundred years, most small communities in North America built a school house if they could afford to.  Or at least there was a teacher in town who ran a private school from his or her home.

In those days, very few homes had books.  Protestant Christian and some Roman Catholic homes had a Bible, but often little else.  Only the very wealthy could afford to maintain a library at home, and public libraries were almost unheard of.

Most parents lived simple lives, and generally worked as subsistence farmers.  Many were illiterate.  The majority of people in those days never traveled more than ten miles from home in their entire lives.

As a result of these conditions, a child who stayed home was likely to repeat the lifestyle of his parents.  And many did.

But those parents who were determined to improve the lot of their children often pulled together what funds they could and paid for those children to attend the local school.  Some had to travel farther to find a school, and actually boarded there during the week, or even for longer periods.

These parents knew that schools had books, and books were the primary repositories for knowledge in the world in those days.  Schools were also led by a schoolmaster, someone who was presumably educated in the classic wisdom of the Ages, as well as in the basic three “Rs”.  While attending these schools, their children had the hope of discovering new abilities that might propel their prospects beyond the conditions that they were born to.

In the old world, many people were stuck in their station in life.  Upward mobility was often impossible due to rigid class distinctions that were determined by the accident of birth.

As a result, a great deal of the motivation of immigrants to the New World was the possibility that they, or at least their children, might improve themselves and their life’s prospects through improving their knowledge.  North America in particular became, at least to an extent, a “meritocracy” – a land where you could rise as high as your abilities could take you.

In this environment, you can see just how important it might be for a humble subsistence farmer to pay for his childrens’ education at a school.

The Rise of Industry Effects The Character of Schools

As time passed, however, circumstances changed a bit.  Throughout the nineteenth century, farmers and other common families continued to send their children outside of the home for education.  But also during this period two movements grew that influenced how this education was delivered, and exactly what sort of skills and values were being taught.

The nineteenth century saw the growth of the Industrial Revolution.  This explosion of industry and technology led to the growth of cities, as former farmers came looking for high paying jobs in the factories.

Factory owners needed skilled workers as well.  Or, at least, workers who had the kind of attitude and the basic skills necessary to be a part of an efficient industrial enterprise.

The Rise of a New Social Movement

At the same time, a social movement grew, mostly among among upper class women, to improve the conditions that many “poor” children were facing in these new factories.

Traditionally, children worked on family farms right beside their parents and other relatives. So it was natural that, when these families moved into the cities, these same children would be working in the factories beside those same people.  However, these social crusaders believed that the dangerous factory conditions were no place for children, who needed a healthy environment in order to grow, and who also deserved a proper education so that they might someday better their lives.

Industrialists quickly realized that, if they were going to lose these children from their factories as a result of this growing social, and now political, movement, at least these same children should be learning skills and attitudes in school that will make them better employees once they graduated.

The Free Public School System

The result of this movement was the free public school system.  Industrialists, who played a key role in designing these new public schools, made sure that education was standardized around those skills needed in a factory.  The day was split up into neat 45 minute sections, separated by a ringing bell.  Attendance was mandatory, and tardiness was dealt with harshly.  If parents did not comply, “Truancy” laws were enforced to make them send their kids to these new schools, or else.  The model for the school’s design was that of the factory itself.  Children, the raw material, were fed into the system at an early age, in order to be processed into identical “cogs” that would fit nicely into the industrial “wheel”.

The 3 “Rs” were emphasized in these public schools so that these future workers could read a machine instruction manual, for example.  Simultaneously, children were conditioned to take instructions well, to listen to superiors, and to squash socialization, as that cut into productivity.  Children were graded by letters (typically A through E or F), much like a factory quality-control team might grade the product being produced there.  The children pumped out by this system were meant to be obedient, eager to please those in authority, focused on their work, and able to complete tasks assigned with a minimum of outside assistance (to talk during a test resulted in a grade of “F”).

Nineteenth Century Schools in a Twenty-First Century World

Regardless of your opinion of these new public schools, it is hard to argue today that the skills, habits and values that well served a nineteenth century industrial economy are still those best suited to the twenty-first.

And, the idea that social engineers with political power and influence can force a particular style of upbringing on every family smacks of an abuse of power today.

So, what is so different today that the role of traditional schools in your child’s life should be questioned?

Well, lets go back to the eighteenth century world that we started in.  In those days, knowledge was rare, expensive, and accessible only by associating yourself with those few people who both had it and were willing to share it.  This usually meant attending a school outside of the home.

Today, Information is Everywhere

Today, we are awash in information, as well as in the means of converting that raw data into useful knowledge.  Books are ubiquitous.  And the Internet has brought the world to our fingertips.  There is practically no bit of knowledge that you cannot now discover merely by keying an innocent question into Google or some other search engine.

Schoolmasters are no longer the gatekeepers to knowledge for our children.

And the nineteenth century rationale that children need to be protected from being exposed to dangerous conditions in the dark depths of a factory no longer apply in a post-industrial world.

The valuable skills that were, and continue to be, taught in mainstream schools may have been helpful to a prospective factory worker.  But in today’s free-agent world, being taught to sit still, listen carefully, repeat back verbatim what is “taught”, and then to follow orders carefully, is actually quite destructive.

Children today need to learn independence, self-reliance, cooperation, leadership, creativity, and spontaneity.  These are nearly the opposite skills to those still being taught in mainstream education.

Where Do We Go From Here?

But what’s the alternative?  Our entire society is built around the assumption that kids spend their days locked up in a government-run building, being kept busy while both parents (or the single parent) works his and her a** off just to stay ahead of the bill collectors.

If our kids aren’t in school, then where are they, and what are they doing?

Join me for the next installment in this series as I discuss how twenty-first century families need to approach “education” for their children.

Until then, all the best,

Hugh

Life is Our Classroom

Dear Friend,

Since long before I married and had children, I have been passionate about education.

You see, I really did not enjoy my life experience with the traditional approach to education.

I attended public schools my entire life (and in an area with a well-funded school system).  I found the experience boring to the point of being mind-numbing.  What I remember most are the other kids.  I had a few good friends, but then there were also the tyrants who ruled the bus and the hallways.

I just never really understood why I had to go through all of this.  What was I supposed to be learning?  And how was I going to use it later?

I know that we all just had a vague notion that we were paying our dues, and if we wanted to get a decent job, we had to go to college, and in order to get into college, we had to endure this.  And besides, our parents said so, so what choice did we have?

Once I had kids ready to go into school, my wife and I began to compare notes on what we ought to do about their education.

She was a lifetime Catholic school girl – preschool through university.  And she felt fine about her experience.

We tried to get our oldest admitted to our church’s preschool, but there was an age limit that we missed by a month or two.  Finally, a friend told us about the local Montessori school.  It was a longer drive, but we figured it was our best shot.

We enjoyed the experience with this school.  We admired the non-traditional Montessori approach, that was structured around the individual child’s needs, and progressed at their own pace.  Eventually, all four of our children attended this school, with our oldest attending through fifth grade.

Before we left on our North American journey, we decided not to enroll the kids at the Montessori school for that semester.  I mean, we wouldn’t be there most of the time and the money saved would go a long way in our budget.

My wife then bought lots of curriculum books and prepared to homeschool all of the children, with my help.

However, we quickly became overwhelmed.  It just didn’t seem worth the effort.  And besides, we were doing so many cool things and visiting so many incredible places, that books and papers just didn’t compare.  So, after several sputtering starts, we just dropped it.

When we finally got home, we intended to enroll the kids back in the Montessori school.  But, as I noted in an earlier post, my son talked us out of it.

Since that time, we have been enthusiastic students of a form of homeschooling nominally called unschooling, or autodidact education, which means self-directed learning.

If you aren’t familiar with unschooling, then you will be surprised, and probably suspicious of it when you first check it out.

My wife was initially uncomfortable with a form of education that does not involve teaching.  With unschooling, there is no teacher, no classroom, no curriculum, no grades, no school buses, no bullies.  In fact, there is no school.

The concept of unschooling is as much a family lifestyle as anything else.  And, when combined with parents who have detached themselves from careers that kept them away from home, unschooling becomes an umbrella term for a family that fully lives life together.

In March we will be attending The Autodidact Symposium in South Carolina.  There, we hope to join with other unschooling families and learn more about this new path for our family’s future.

I cannot tell you how happy and relieved that I am that we have moved our family in this direction.  It is as if all of the pieces finally fit together.  For the first time, we will be truly free to discover our world together, with no schedules, no ties that force us to be somewhere particular.  Yet we still enjoy those ties to friends, family and culture that bring us back to our homes.  It’s the issue of force that makes the difference.

We are free.

I’ll post more about the Symposium when we go.  We are looking forward to some of the speakers, and to networking with potential mentors for our kids.

There are some other impressive national unschooling gatherings scheduled, including an unschooling cruise in the Spring of 2011 (the Spring 2010 cruise was scheduled to stop in Haiti, and the disaster there forced its cancellation).  And recently there was a gathering at an indoor water park in Ohio.

The more we read about this way of living as a family, the more we like it.

Of course, if things don’t work out, we can always go back to a traditional approach.  But why would we want to?

Anyway, let me know if you are interested and I’ll post some of the books and resources that we are using/have used in our unschooling research.

Thanks and all the best,

Hugh

Fun in the Snow

Dear Friend,

I’ve really been enjoying the snow that has blanketed North America recently.

It has been a joy to watch it fall from the sky.  And even the rain has frozen into sheets of ice that the kids love to mess with.

If you knew me in my past you would find the above statements shocking.

You see, I used to hate snow.  I had to drive to work everyday, and I hated driving in the stuff.  And in the ice, the sleet, the mud, you name it.

In truth, I had always enjoyed unusual weather, but once I “grew up” I simply couldn’t enjoy it anymore.  I thought that this was just one more aspect of adulthood that sucked.

In recent years, as I have tailored my lifestyle in ways that better fit my nature, I have rediscovered my love of unusual weather.  And where we live, snow is unusual.  At least it was, until this winter!

Today I find that I am able to enjoy many things that I could not enjoy before.  And when these many small, enjoyable things in my life accumulate and multiply, what I am left with is a life worth living.

It is impossible for me to convey how much of a difference this change in my life has made.  How much relief I feel.  How much more color that I see in life.

I am able to enjoy the little things that were mere annoyances before.  And I am able to be close to my children in ways that were impossible for me before.

I let go of my old life and chose to intentionally direct my new life.  And I’ve never looked back!

So now I say, “Let it snow!”

Talk to you again soon,

Hugh

It's Time to Fall In Love ~ With YOU!

Dear Friend,

I’ve saved the best for last.

It doesn’t matter how hard you work or how much natural talent ekes out of your every crevice – you will not achieve satisfaction in life if you do not love yourself.

Instead, you will sabotage your own success, knowingly or not.  You will believe others’ doubts about your abilities.  You will internalize criticism.  You will judge yourself through the eyes of others instead of your own.

If you really aren’t crazy about you right now, then do both of us a favor and stop wasting money on self-help programs and business start-up guides.  Stop taking classes and wondering why you aren’t rich yet.

Coming to terms with you is the very first, threshold step to having the life of your dreams.  Skip this, and you guarantee failure.

Because success is not achieving some goal that you have set for yourself (or that others have set for you).  Success is the joy you feel when you are living your own life, your way.

The joy is in the process, not in the completion.

If you don’t love yourself, you will not embrace the type of lifestyle that you were meant to follow.  Because that lifestyle is simply a reflection of you.

You cannot feel the power of joyful love until you have fully embraced and loved the full you – you know, the you with warts and flaws and bad breath and occasional strangeness.  Because those oddities and undesirable characteristics are what diverge you from the average.  They help define, you, like it or not.

And these things aren’t bad until you decide that they are.  Someone along the way told you that these characteristics of yours were bad.  And you believed that someone because you trusted them.  So you now see yourself as they did.

But let’s say that you decided that there is something about you that you want to change – that really doesn’t reflect the true you.  Fine.  Change it if you can.  And if you can’t change it, forget it!

It’s as simple as that.

Achieving all of this might require a few visits to the shrink’s couch.  Or alone on a mountaintop.  It might take some time.

But the fact that you are anxious about achieving more for you and your family is a good indication that you are ready to take this on.  You just need to know how, and in what order to take on each challenge.

So get to know the real you.  Forget everything that others have said or implied in the past (easier said than done).  And decide that you are ready to move past self-pity into your new life.  Your are ready to love yourself.

Now, Start.

You can do it!  And I am honestly so proud of you!

Talk to you soon,

Hugh

Dare to Dream - And to Do!

Dear Friend,

“Follow your dreams – this requires courage, drive, and bold action.”

It is easy to ignore your dreams.  To forget them.  To label them as unrealistic, childish artifacts.  To deny that they really matter to you anymore.

Adult life is filled with reasons that dreams are for children only.

Yet we all hear the admonishments to “follow your dreams.”

That’s easy for others to say, of course.  But people who have responsibilities don’t have the luxury of following their dreams.  A least not yet.  Not until they finally make it big.  Get the big raise or promotion, or (God forbid) they win the lottery.

When you have kids to feed, thinking about the life you once dreamed of is depressing.  It’s counterproductive.  It’s selfish.

Get back to work.

Yet I am telling you now, if you do not find a way to pursue your dreams, you will never be truly fulfilled.  You will never live the life that you were created to live.

You have a purpose in this world.  Your dreams are outlines of that purpose.  You must “follow your bliss.”  And your dreams highlight the essence of that bliss.

When I think about this I am reminded of the life of my great grandfather.

You see, my great grandfather lived in a world much more precarious than the one we live in today.  He worked at odd jobs for years, never really finding his place in the world, squeaking out a living.  He had a wife and children who depended on him for everything.  And he lived in a world with no formal social safety net.

Yet, one day, he decided that he had found his calling.  He picked up his family and moved away from the place that their family had been seated for centuries.  He moved to another state and enrolled in a University, something no one that he knew had ever done.

Some people accused him of irresponsibility.  He had no certainty of where his next meal was coming from.  Yet, he knew what he had to do.  And he was not going to let the practical world stop him.

Years later, when I came to know him, my great grandfather was a very old man.  Yet he was also considered one of the most respected and influential members of his community.  He had become an ordained minister, struggled with others in the church who didn’t believe in him, and ultimately built his own church, and later a grand outdoor tabernacle, practically by hand.

In a time when most people barely traveled a few miles from home in a lifetime, he had traveled a continent, spreading the Good News.

His church stands today as a monument to his dream.  And the mountain of community awards that he received as a local leader today fill boxes in my attic.

I barely knew that man, but he inspires me to this day.

He could have stuck to what he did before he took his big chance.  Those around him openly said that his actions at the time were immoral – they put his family’s welfare – perhaps their very survival – in danger.  But if he had done what they said, would he still have been the man I knew?

You may be in a position similar to my great granddad.  You have no right to chase far-fetched dreams.  Doing so may be tantamount to endangering your family.  Doing so may well be the height of selfishness.

Do it anyway.

Live the life my granddad did.  Be the you that you know you must be.

Just do it.

All the best,

Hugh