I attended a business luncheon with my CFMA group. We had a guest speaker come and give a speech on effective listening. He was quite entertaining.......he began with a story about him taking Tango lessons........he took several lessons and finally his instructor told him he would now have to go practice. So off he went to a ballroom dancing event.......he approached a lady that he said had gotten seperated from the herd, and asked her to dance. She accepted. He was very nervous...he concentrated on his footwork, making the frame, kept with the beat of the music, etc.....and although he made many mistakes, he eventually got through the dance. At the end the young lady stated, "the words to that song were beautiful weren't they."......."Words??" he said. He didn't even hear the words............what aren't you hearing??? There are often warnings to all bad events in life......the Titanic, Enron, WorldCom, Columbine, Va Tech, etc. they all had warnings.........we just need to listen. The presentation was very good, and was a good perspective on something most people were never taught how to do.

What I took away from the discussion though was something different......leading up to his story on Tango dancing, he said that the reason he wanted to learn the Tango was because of the movie "Scent of a Woman".........after he saw the movie he was inspired by the Tango scene so much that he added the Tango to his "Life's to do list"...................I thought, you know that is a great idea........everyone should have a life's to do list. So after a little thought I started my list.....in no particular order

• Take a tour of Alaska
• Visit the Grand Canyon
• Raft the Salmon River
• See a broadway musical in NYC with my wife and kids
• Take a hot air balloon ride at sunrise
• Walk Madeline down the aisle
• Learn to play a musical instrument (if you know me that will be a hard one to cross off, but Andrew has such a gift and I'd love to play a song with him someday)
• Visit the Lourve
• Hike the A.T. (I'd like to be a thru-hiker, but 5 months will eat up quite a few vacation days......being a section hiker may be more realistic)
• Lead 50 people to Christ (whoa that seems like alot.....but if I live to be 86, one a year isn't too hard is it? And I think I can already knock two (Mack and Andrew) off the list.
• Take up woodworking and be as good as my grandfather was.
• Go on a mission trip with Andrea and the kids

Well that's a good start, I better get busy.