Personal and Confidential? If that's something that interests you, then perhaps you are the type of person who looks a little deeper than skin level when evaluating people. Perhaps you are even the kind of person who truly, honestly, and whole-heartedly VALUES personal relationships. Most folks will just take someone at face value, quickly categorize them, and file the information away in the back of the brain until such time that it is needed. But there are those among us who have a natural curiosity about the deeper layers in people - those hidden things below the surface that are the working parts - the parts that make a person tick. Well, if you are one of those people... Welcome. It's nice to meet you.

What do you think are the most valuable assets that we have in our short lives on this earth? Money? Stocks and bonds? Mutual funds and investments? How about cars, jewelry, real estate and the "hard" assets that we pay so money much for? Or is it our careers, educations and portfolios of work that distinquish us and thus become our most valuable assets? All of these things require huge amounts of time investment. Cars cost money, and the acquisition of money requires work, and financially rewarding work requires training and education, which requires study and preparation. All of these things are very time consuming!

Are you one of those people that spends money that you don't have buying things that you don't need in order to impress people that you don't like? If that's true, you might want to stop reading this right now, because I'm going to reveal what I feel is the most valuable asset we attain as we walk this earth, and it might just fry your cranium.

The most valuable assets in our lives are the personal relationships that we build with other people. Nothing else does more to give us true happiness, and nothing else is more deserving of our best time and energies than the development of close personal relationships with other people. I have learned this from experience, and I am an infinitely happier person today because of this knowledge.

This is something I wanted to share with you, because even though I may not know you, I do indeed care about you. I care about your feelings, your aspirations, your wants and needs, your likes and dislikes, and most importantly, I care about your life. Caring and concern are not reserved for those dozen or so people with whom I am in constant close contact. I care about you, and I may not have even met you yet.

You might be thinking, "that's all well and good and it sounds very humanitarian and all, but not very practical..."

Well imagine this for a moment. Let's say that you and I were only to have one brief moment on this earth where we were brought together by some happenstance, and then we never saw or heard from one another again for the rest of our lives. It happens all the time to people, so that part isn't hard to imagine. But let's imagine that maybe, just maybe, long after we have died and our legacies have been forgotten that we were to MEET AGAIN in a different place, under different circumstances, where time had no meaning or the corporal limitations of our human existence were irrelevant. What if that place was an afterlife - a heaven? What if we suddenly realized that we were going to be in contact with each other for AN ETERNITY. (that's forever, you know!)

Plenty of time to get to know one another, I'd say... Wouldn't you?

OK, it's going to be great! But let's just imagine one more contingency... Let's imagine that maybe, just maybe, there is some QUALIFIER as to the type of eternal life we are going to experience after we pass from this world. And let's imagine that there is indeed a judge up there, (wherever that is) that will ultimately determine who gets to spend eternity in a happy place with people they like and care for, and who gets to spend eternity in the most unimaginable pain and sorrow. I'd hate to have THAT job, but let's just imagine that it were true.

Now, to bring this all together, let's imagine that back on earth, during that one moment when fate brought us together that ONE of us knew something that the other one did not know, and that particular piece of information turned out to be the one very important piece of information that in effect would have gotten the other person "qualified" to go to the happy place rather than the nasty place. How would you FEEL if you found out later that one person, or a bunch of persons found themselves in a place of eternal sorrow and pain because YOU didn't bother to tell them the information!

Ouch! That's the equivalent of seeing your best friend drowning in a lake and NOT throwing him a life preserver! How could you live with yourself? You might even find yourself asking the question, "why didn't I care enough to help save that person???" Why couldn't I have put aside all the cares of the world for just one moment so I could help this poor person to get what I'VE been given?

OK, this was a long way around the barn, but I just wanted to let you know why I really care about personal relationships, and why I try to take time to nurture and develop them. I care about them because life is precious, and there might be something that I know that could make the difference in people's lives. That "coincidental" meeting with somebody might not be coincidence at all, and it might be my only chance to befriend that person and start a relationship with that person that could eventually lead to me sharing that piece of knowledge that is the catalyst between happy eternity and sorrowful eternity.

Maybe... Just maybe. I guess nobody can be certain, but I sure would feel awful if I didn't follow my intuition enough to care and share only to find out later that I was partially responsible for their misery. Allowing somebody else to suffer is downright heartless, wouldn't you agree? I guess that's one of the reasons that I began writing Christian music. I had a life-changing experience and felt something new and powerful in my life that has led me down a totally new path... It's the path of caring and concern for my fellow man, and I'm following in the footsteps of history's most famous figure of love: Jesus of Nazareth.

I hope this explains a few things. Before we get any deeper into the subject, let's be friends and get to know each other. I value my personal relationship with you more than any of that other stuff that's out there, and I want to demonstrate to you that it's true.