A few more wandering thoughts

I haven’t done it lately, so I suppose it’s time for a few wandering thoughts from a wondering mind. I’ve heard that there’s a book that was published a couple of years ago with a similar title, and that it makes pretty good reading.

— As the Olympic Games are finishing up this weekend, those gold medals that all the athletes are chasing actually contain very little gold. Gold medals at the Olympics are gold plated, and are less than ten percent gold and over ninety percent silver.

The fastest sport at the Summer Olympic Games is probably badminton. What? Yep, that fun little game that you played as a kid is much different at the Olympic level. Returns of the shuttlecock (that’s what it’s called) from these badminton players have been clocked at over 200 miles an hour!

— Well, at least I’m not in the tobacco field! I’m starting to think that some of the people I’m around are starting to get tired of hearing me say that. And I know I may have said it a few too many times this summer, with all the heat, rain and humidity that we have had. But unless you’ve been in the tobacco field, all soaked either from dew, rain, or from sweat, you don’t understand. As I am typing this, I look out the window, after it has just rained, the sun is now broiling down, and the humidity is 100 percent. (This was just before Debby and all the rain came to visit.) And I think to myself, “Thank God, I’m not in a tobacco field!” Oops, I did it again.

— I heard a political commentator on TV last week say that the November general election is now less than a hundred days away. His thought was that it was getting closer, and that time was getting short. My thought was just the opposite, “You mean we have to put up with this for a hundred more days!” Yep, a hundred more days of the race to the bottom.

While there will be plenty of political back and forth and finger pointing in the next one hundred days, there’s one subject you will hear little about from Trump or Harris. That’s what the United States owes its creditors. The U.S. debt passed $35 trillion recently, and that equals out to over $100,000 owed by every U.S. citizen, and over $268,000 by every taxpayer.

The U.S. debt has increased an average of $2 trillion a year during both the Trump and Biden/Harris administrations. So neither candidate has anything realistic to propose on the subject, and they surely won’t accept any blame. They won’t, and the debt will continue to expand around another trillion dollars every 200 days.

— While watching the Olympics, I was reminded of a statement I heard many years on radio from an old time revival preacher, Leonard Ravenhill. He said, “The opportunity of a lifetime only exists in the lifetime of the opportunity.”

Many of the athletes competing have trained for years and countless hours just for their event at this Olympic Games. This was their opportunity of a lifetime. The opportunity may never present itself again. They had to be ready, they had to be prepared.

Those Olympic athletes knew this was their opportunity of a lifetime. But what about us? Often we miss opportunities by not being ready for them when they come along, or not realizing them until it’s too late.

And that’s when regrets come in. I recently heard regret defined simply as, “I could have, I should have, but I didn’t.” Remember, opportunity has a limited shelf life, don’t miss it.