Serve by Design

I have been eating Mars’ M&M’s chocolate candy for years! In every serving, I have enjoyed eating all six colors – brown, green, orange, red, yellow, and blue – of these delectable candies that “melt in your mouth and not in your hand!” However, those who know me best will tell you that I favor the blue ones most of all. My secret goes back many years until I was outed by some preacher friends with whom I met weekly in a small group. Imagine that?! Blue Makes Me Happy! During one of those meetings, a friend had spread a selection of M&M’s from his stash out on the table for the taking. I looked at the multiple-colored candies and immediately began to retrieve several blue ones and lined them up before me. This friend looked at me incredulously and asked, “What are you doing?” I answered sheepishly because by now everyone was staring at me, “I’m gathering the blue ones. They’re my favorite!” He said something like, “You’re crazy! They all taste the same!” From that day until ...

Every time our kids come home to visit, they lament the day when they’ll have to clean out the basement after our passing. The irony is that much of that stuff is theirs! I must confess though that Monique and I have contributed to a lot of the stuff that’s stored down there! When we retired from school and church work, we each moved our offices downstairs into file cabinets, onto bookcases and packed away in storage boxes. We have about maxed out the available shelving and space. Self-Storage Image: uhaul.com Have you noticed the one-, two-, and three-story ground-level storage buildings that dot our communities? The “bread and butter” of U-Haul used to be in renting trailers and box trucks for moving our stuff from point A to point B. Today, I’m seeing more emphasis upon providing storage space in modern, secure, and even temperature-controlled   facilities. These buildings have multiple-sized pods for every storage need. Consumers are accumulating more and more stuff! They’ve ma...