DAD'S NEW YEAR'S REPORT! DO 1724 31/12/83
1. MY LITTLE REPORT IS THE BOOBY PRIZE! This is sort of the comic relief after all your reports! It's not much at all. But just for fun I thought I'd show you what my Diary does, what I come up with. After all that hard work of keeping a Diary every day, this is how little it produces!--Ha! PTL!
2. WASN'T MARIA'S REPORT WONDERFUL? And you thought you were going to run out of things to do or work or ideas or publications?--Never ever ever ever!--Not as long as she & the Lord are around. I'm almost afraid to sit in my room without a GN or a Letter in my hand--sometimes I see her coming & I grab one real quick! (Maria: Now the truth is out!) Once or twice I think it was upside-down! (Maria: He sits so wedged in there I can't get around to see what he's doing! I try to get around & look over his shoulder but I can't!) I've got that all up there for protection! I'm well-fortified, surrounded with books & papers & bookcases & libraries & partitions & posters of pretty girls & all that sort of thing so that she has a little difficulty finding me or getting at me! I can always grab something quick to make sure I'm busy, because if I'm not, you ought to see the way she stacks it up!
3. WELL, AFTER YOUR REPORTS, THIS IS THE ANTI-CLIMAX! In fact, it's 11 o'clock, I don't know whether I should even give it. (Maria: I gave you first choice & suggested you do yours first!) I'm not complaining, I'm happy about it! I'm tickled pink because you had a chance to see how Maria can really sock it to you, amen? I think we ought to have some more of this! She never runs out of things to say, I'll tell you right now! She's always got something on her mind & some burden & some new idea & is always coming up with something else to put across. She's the spark that really sets off the explosions! Well, I guess she lights my fuse & then I explode, but she's the spark, & of course the Lord. But now you know you'll never run out of things to do as long as she's around.
4. WELL, THIS IS ALMOST SILLY TO READ AFTER ALL THOSE WONDERFUL STATS, SO I'LL READ IT TO MYSELF & YOU CAN LISTEN, OKAY? But I think it's good because it'll show you how little I do in comparison with all of you put together, Maria & all of you & all of our Creations Units & FC & Sprint & all that. You've been hearing the World stats, the real thing, now look at how little I do compared to all that! (Maria: But you're just one person, these are collective!) That's what I'm trying to tell you, that's what I'm trying to get across! You're always giving me all the credit for things, whereas I'm almost nothing, I am nothing! I am nothing & do very little or nothing, it's you & the Lord that does 99.99% of the whole thing! (Maria: But without the inspiration & the Word we wouldn't be able to do anything.) You don't have to encourage me, I'm feeling fine. (Maria: Don't argue then!)--Ha!
5. THAT LOUD LAUGH YOU HEARD IN THE BACKGROUND WAS FROM ONE OF THE GUYS THAT SHE ALWAYS COMES UP WITH SOMETHING FOR HIM TO DO! While I'm trying to keep him busy with something very important like the WND, she's always wanting him to write books & essays & edit & all these hundred other things! By the way, I do hope you appreciate the WND, because I do spend a lot of time on it. I have to measure articles & edit everything. Thank God for our WND Editor, he lays them out & puts them together & does a beautiful job of it, like the previous Editor did.
6. BUT THE WND IS NOT REQUIRED READING, YOU KNOW, you don't have to read it at all, & you don't have to proofread it because it's already a mess! I didn't do it--they did it! Blame it on the newspapers! But anyhow, it's not required reading, it's just for your information if you have time. You can lay it aside & read it next year if you want to, but I figure as long as I have to spend an hour or two every day reading the paper, I might as well edit it for you & give you what's most important, for you to be able to know what's going on in the World, things you need to know for your information.
7. PARTICULARLY SOME OF OUR PEOPLE WHO ARE OUT WITNESSING, FFERS ETC. TALKING TO INTELLIGENT PEOPLE WHO ARE INFORMED, YOU NEED CONVERSATION PIECES & to show that our Family is well-informed on what's going on in the World. We're not cloistered behind monastery walls & ignorant of all their devices, we know the score, we know what's going on! We're not a bunch of dummies that don't know what's going on out there, we know all that & we've got a Heaven of a lot more! This is all they've got, the empty wind, whereas we've got the real thing! But still you've got to know about what's going on & be well-informed, especially regarding fulfilled prophecy & things that are going the way that the Bible says & the way we've said & the way the Lord has shown us.
8. THERE'S ALSO ALL KINDS OF INFORMATION ABOUT FAMILY LIFE & CHILDREN & DISEASES & ELECTRONICS & EVERYTHING ELSE! We've run across some very interesting little items that keep me informed, & I keep you informed. I have all the fun & our Editor does all the work! We'll have Number 11 ready by the time I read today's paper & we're getting them out almost once a week! We don't plan it that way, I just keep adding whatever I find. Some papers are just loaded with good informational things & important things, others I'll go through the whole paper & maybe only get 3 items! Another paper I'll get a dozen.
9. I TRY TO GET OUT THE ITEMS THAT I THINK YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT, THAT WILL BE OF INTEREST TO YOU & INFORMATIVE, so that if you're talking to people out in the World, witnessing, FFing or something, you'll be able to show that you're no dumb bunny, you're well-informed & you know what the score is & what's going on & you can converse on almost any subject, whatever they're interested in, & a lot of times it's good to be able to talk their language.
10. THE ANTICHRISTS ARE SMART ENOUGH TO PUBLISH AN INTERNATIONAL NEWSPAPER THAT ALL OF THEM KNOW IS THEIR NEWS, THE ONLY REAL WORLD NEWSPAPER! They've already got their World newspaper & they're keeping their people well-informed in every country, because nearly every smart one knows English & reads it, as well as several other languages. That's why they're going to be able to run the World. They know all these countries, they've lived in them, they know the cultures, they know the languages, they can speak'm & read'm & run'm--just like us one of these days! We're a little behind them right now, but you just wait, we're going to be out in front one of these days.
11. I ALSO FIGURE I'M SAVING YOU A LOT OF TIME! Why should you have to waste an hour or two every day reading the paper when just one guy can do it & one other guy can slap it together & send it to you & save you all that time? I don't think it takes you an hour to read the WND, does it? It shouldn't. You don't even have to read the things you're not interested in, just skim through it & read what you're interested in. You don't even have to read all of the articles, just read the underlinings & you'll get the gist of the whole thing.
12. I ALWAYS WONDERED IF THE LORD WAS EVER GOING TO USE MY UNDERLINING SYSTEM, BUT ALL THROUGH SCHOOL, HIGH SCHOOL PARTICULARLY, I UNDERLINED THE TEXTBOOKS. Of course then I sometimes got bawled-out for it & then I had to buy the book, pay for it.--Which was fine because then I could add it to my library & I had it for reference work. I mean, you spent a whole year studying that book & then you had to give it back to them, of all the stupid things! I figured it was a good idea if I was going to know anything about it to keep the book, so I used to buy'm & keep'm.
13. THOSE WERE THE YEARS WHEN I LEARNED HOW TO PICK OUT THE MAIN THOUGHTS & IDEAS & SENTENCES & CONNECT THE IMPORTANT WORDS & UNDERLINE. So even the underlining you're going to find is something that is somewhat of a science. Maybe you think it's kind of careless, & a lot of times it's a little crooked because I'm sitting on the toilet or I'm writing on the wastebasket or some other handy thing, or holding something between my teeth while I'm trying to do that at the same time! Well, nobody's perfect! So anyhow, I hope you're getting something out of it.--And thanks to all our Family contributors also, who send in very good articles.--Just watch formats that don't fit!
14. WELL, I'VE ONLY GOT ABOUT SEVEN STATS TO READ YOU! I told Maria, "Don't worry about me, I don't think it'll take me more than about five minutes to give you my stats!" Some of them are just funny things that I stuff my diary with, like how many days of sunshine we had, how many days of rain, how many cloudy days. (Dad gives the total number of sunny, rainy & cloudy days for the past year, along with the average temperatures.) I've got the records of every day & every month & all that too, & it's important. There have been times when I've had to refer back to these several years previously, "Well, what was the weather there? What kind of weather did they have this time of year etc.?" It may not be important to you, but it's important to me.
15. WELL HERE'S A PRETTY IMPORTANT STAT, WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW HOW MANY PAGES I HAD TO READ & PROOFREAD & SOMETIMES RE-READ & RE-CHECK, CORRECT ETC? It's very few compared to all the millions of pages you've been hearing about tonight, but I personally read 13,142 pages just this past year, an average of 36 pages a day. See, that's not much, but those are finished pages ready for pubbing. Sometimes I've had to read & proofread & correct & re-check. See, if you spread your reading out like I do mine, you can read 13,000 pages a year at only 36 pages a day! (Maria: Do you have a stat of how many notes you've answered?) Oh no!--I have no stats on that. I'm just talking about stuff that we pubbed. I read at least a dozen or two notes & reports everyday. If you count up all the newspaper articles & all the letters I have to read & the reports I read & the notes I read & answer, there would probably be at least that amount many times over!
16. NEXT I'M GOING TO TELL YOU HOW MANY HOURS OF EXERCISE I HAD--381 HOURS!--SO I GET ABOUT AN HOUR & FOUR MINUTES AVERAGE EXERCISE EVERY DAY! The little half-an-hour to an hour you see me in the pool, that's only part of my exercise. Sometimes I exercise more than other times, but I was interested to find out that I was averaging about an hour a day. So praise the Lord, I guess I'm getting enough.
17. AND SLEEP, THAT IS THE MOST AMAZING STAT OF ALL! It doesn't matter whether I get 3 hours one night, 12 hours the next night, 4 hours the next afternoon or how it's chopped up & scattered around--& it usually is--when I add it all up it adds up to exactly 8.5 hours of sleep per 24 hours. So you see, the Lord knows how to make your body to know how much sleep it needs & to get that sleep regardless. So don't worry if you have a sleepless night, maybe you'll have a sleepy afternoon. Or if you didn't get much sleep the night before--you only got 3 or 4 hours sleep because I kept you up all night--maybe tomorrow night you'll get twice as much or more than you need. I've been keeping careful track of that & it averages out to almost exactly 8 hours within every 24 hours of the day for over the period of a year! That's a marvellous body the Lord's given you, it's got its own time clocks, timers & everything. In weight I've kind of gotten a little above my average this past year, but I'm coming down a little, thank the Lord!
18. I DON'T SUPPOSE YOU'D BE INTERESTED IN MY SEX STATS, WOULD YOU? (Family: Oh yes!) Really? A little thing like that?--245 times this past year! It shows you how much I'm slowing down, that's not even once a day. (Maria: You were sick a long time.) That's right, I've been sick! Those are pretty sick stats compared to what I used to do, that's less than one a day. I used to do better but I'm getting old. You wouldn't want to know with how many women, would you? Obviously I'm not going to tell you how many different women because the hour got late & I didn't have time to finish counting all the women, but I'll tell you what my monthly average is--five different women a month. That's not bad. I'm not over-doing it, really, am I? Our enemies think I have a harem of hundreds & I'm really getting around, but I'm only making love to five different women a month, that's not so much.
19. NOW HERE ARE WHAT I CONSIDER THE MOST IMPORTANT EVENTS WHICH OCCURRED. Besides all these great big important stats that you've heard, these are just the stats of the things that happened in our Family, the most important events here that the World doesn't usually hear about. Do we have time for this? I've just got 12 of them. Well, I've got 12 little spaces & some of them have got 2 or 3 stats, one for each month. See, I can keep all the important events that happened that month in a little space 7 centimeters long & four millimeters wide. It saves a lot of space. There's a whole year's stats right there on one page!
20. THE FIRST OF THE YEAR WE MOVED INTO OUR NEW ROOM & SARA & ALF MOVED INTO THEIRS WITH THE KIDS, WE SWAPPED ENDS OF THE HOUSE WE WERE IN, ONE OF MANY HOUSING CHANGES THIS YEAR! We invented the pool heaters, & that was very important to us. That may not be earth-shaking news to you, but it was Family-warming news to keep them from shaking! February, Mary Dear was born. March, the BOFs began & Techi was 4 years old. That was a big event! I went to the dentist several times the next month & the following month--that was a big event for me. This is the non-news, see, this is the unimportant news. This is just for a laugh at the end of this very serious evening. (Maria: The Lord gave us a real sweet dentist too who didn't ask any questions & was really good.) Amen!
21. WE STARTED THE GN BOOKS & TECHI LEARNED TO SWIM! We started the Heaven Poster & we finished it too, thank the Lord! Phoebe died, God bless her! Well, she didn't die, she came to life! She went to Heaven! PTL! We worked on the MOP with Maria & I don't know how many other people. We rigged up our timer switch. Tell'm how important the timer is, Son! That was a big event in his life because up to that time he had to get up at dawn every morning & turn off all the security lights. So that was important.
22. THINGS THAT HAPPEN TO YOU INDIVIDUALLY MAY SEEM UNIMPORTANT TO THE REST OF THE WORLD, they may seem insignificant by comparison with all the rest, but if we didn't keep you happy, how could we get all this other work done? And if we didn't keep our property protected, God knows how many people we would have visiting.
23. THEN THE NEXT MONTH WE EVACUATED MWM, MCV, EURCRO & I DON'T KNOW HOW MANY OTHER PEOPLE! The next month we had the RRR--I'm not barking, that's the Reap Radio Revolution--& I went to a dentist again. We finally got the Heaven Poster & we got Heaven Girl! In fact, we've got a lot of Heavenly Girls right here with us! PTL!
24. WE FINALLY COMBINED MCV & MWM. We got the Combined Index together, we had three new visitors, we started the WND, we started the wind-down & a lot of us got the flu. The same month that we got the flu we got the Poster. Well, we might have caught the flu a little earlier than that, I don't remember exactly, it seems like I've had it all year. We started the new FN now & I'm well again, thank the Lord! That's all!
25. YOU SEE HOW UNIMPORTANT MY STATS ARE? I told you they were going to be a real laugh after all the rest! But that just shows you how important you are & how much you accomplished compared to how little I do & how insignificant it really is. I want you to be impressed with the fact of how much you're accomplishing. One person couldn't possibly begin to accomplish all you accomplish, & of course the Lord is behind it all!--Behind & above & underneath & on all sides, thank the Lord! He's doing nearly all of it through you & I have only a very small part in it with a bunch of insignificant little ridiculous stats like that. (Maria: It shows how important the pebble is!) (See ML No.128:9.)
26. WE WEREN'T GOING TO KEEP YOU UP SO LATE TONIGHT, SO I THINK ONE RESOLUTION WE OUGHT TO MAKE IS TO TRY TO GET TO BED EARLIER & FOR ME NOT TO TALK SO LONG! I think the best way you could celebrate the New Year is by being asleep by the time it arrives, or at least hitting the hay by the time it arrives! PTL? But wasn't that tremendous! Think of all those stats! I mean, it's enough to boggle the mind! It's terrific what this little group has accomplished in just one year! That's only the past year, just one year, think of that! Terrific! GBY all! You've done a wonderful job & you ought to be proud of it, thankful for it & really praising the Lord for it! Amen? Praise God? You ought to feel a real sense of accomplishment & satisfaction in the tremendous job that you have done in which every single one of you have had a very important part.
27. NOBODY'S JOB HERE IS UNIMPORTANT, NOBODY'S JOB HERE IS SMALL, NOBODY'S JOB HERE IS LITTLE, NO ONE HERE IS A LITTLE PERSON & INSIGNIFICANT. Everybody here is extremely important or you wouldn't even be here. I mean, you are vital to this work! Every single one of you is vital to this Worldwide work or you wouldn't be here. PTL! Hallelujah?--Even if nothing else but just to cheer me up when I see how pretty you are & enjoy your beauty etc. at dinner. Well, that you only have to do about an hour or so a day. God bless you all! It just dumbfounds me when I think how much you have accomplished just this past year only.
28. IF I WAS GOING TO SAY WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO SEE ACCOMPLISHED THIS COMING YEAR, I would be very happy if we even accomplish as much this coming year as we have this past year, much less out-do it! We may even under-do it because things are getting tighter. But if we could ever equal this year, that would certainly be another miracle! Praise God! Hallelujah! TYL!--And thank you for helping make it all possible! GBAKY, in Jesus' name, amen!
Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family