Lift the World

_{(“About Me” last updated January 6, 2023)}

Hey folks, thanks for visiting my little journal/blog/make-the-world-a-better-places website… thing. 😊

Let’s see, if there’s anything I’d want you to know about me, it’s that more than anything, I want the world to be a better place for my having been born–for every person’s life to be brighter when I’m around, for every place to be better because I was there.

I want to spend my whole life encouraging, inspiring, lifting, loving, and serving every person with whom I come in contact. I want to be an influence for love and peace and light and… lots of other good things… as far and as wide as I possibly can. 🙂

For both people and for mother earth and all the rest of her living beings. 🥰

Second only to that, I want to become the very best person I can be–with loving every person and creature with an unconditional, selfless love as my tippy top goal.

(Yeah, I’m a cheesy guy. Yup. Guilty as charged, but that’s me.)

These two objectives… they are my dream, my passion, my hope, my heart… my life.

Though I have these dreams, I am very much a work in progress, and I still significantly struggle to live up to my own ideals. I’ve done many very good things in my life, and I’ve done bad things as well. I still do–both. I hope the good outweighs the bad, but either way, I just keep trying to overcome my own faults, so I can more effectively love and lift the world.

And that brings me to this blog. I hope that by sharing my life, my thoughts, and my experiences via this blog/thing–the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly–that it really can further my dream and hope of leaving the world a better place for my having been in it, perhaps even helping other people feel understood, safe, and loved for who they are, where they are–petals, thorns, and all.

So that’s all… that. Other potentially interesting details include…

I live in a beautiful little pocket of Northwest Arkansas on about 100 or so acres, just far enough away from town to be in the country, while still being quite close to the modern conveniences of first-world living.

I’m privileged to live here, having inherited a wonderful extended family when my mother remarried and moved here many years ago now. I came out to visit my elderly mother (I say elderly, but she has more energy than I do), and then… I never left!

My Arkansas family has been wonderful to me, including letting me live in this beautiful little piece of heaven with them.

Currently, I’m now on my 40s. I’m single. I’ve never been married. I have no children, and… that’s… really hard for me.

And that’s an understatement. A really big one.

Suffice it to say, I’m where I am today (single and without my own family and all that) because I followed a course of life I thought god directed me down, one I trusted and had faith in but that appears to have been wrong.

It’s without any doubt been the hardest and most-painful experience of my life, stretching me to my limits, and… I guess I finally broke, as because of that and some other experiences, I’ve lost my faith in god.

I might get it back one day. I might not.

I seek truth and love in my own heart and for the world; and whether there is or isn’t a creator, doesn’t really matter to who and what I want to be. If there is one, I would hope that creator would be proud of me and my efforts because they’re honest and sincere and selfless; and if there’s not a creator, then I will have given my heart to the world and hopefully left it better than I found it.

Moving on. 😊

I own a small mobile auto mechanic business, just me and one other person, and I recently started a tree service business as well.

I’m in active preparation to either find someone else to run the auto business or to sell it; and the tree service is just getting started. Once it’s off the ground and rolling, one of my nephews will likely run it.

The end goal is to have both be a source of passive income, so I can get my nonprofit off the ground. That’s where my heart is, and that’s where I’m going. 😊

It’s been quite challenging trying to balance everything that’s going on inside my head and outside in my life. I’ve struggled personally a lot these last years, falling back into old habits and addictions and ways of thinking, but I’m trying, and in my book, sincere effort is better than gold, regardless of whether the game is won, so to speak.

There’s a lot more I could say, but I’m gonna end there right now. I hope this little blog is a blessing to you. Feel free to send me messages, ask me questions, whatever you’d like. The blog is just about my life, the things I believe, and the things I’m learning and trying to accomplish. I want to be transparent. That’s hard when there are other peoples’ lives involved, and I want to respect their privacy even when I’m not really concerned about my own, so I can’t be completely transparent without injuring others, but to the degree I can share without causing harm to others, I will.

Honestly, I think the world will benefit greatly from people who are willing to share everything, even the deepest, darkest, most “shameful” parts of their lives. I personally think we’ll find we’re much more similar than we are different.

I hope that sharing the things I share will encourage others to do the same and will help us all be less judgmental of ourselves and more empathetic and kind to others.

If you’re reading this and you feel I’ve wronged you in any way, please send me a message, and I’ll do my best to mend what I’ve broken. I really do mean that.

I’m trying to LEPAEPBTIFT (leave every person and every place better than I found them). I hope I can do the same for you.

My love to all of you.

Lift the World.

~ Stephen

P.S. If you’d like to learn a little bit more about me and my life. Click on the links below at your leisure. I think I wrote most of them while a bit sad, so please forgive any negative undertone. I will be going back through each one periodically to make edits in an effort to provide the most-accurate representation of my life that I can 😊. I haven’t gone back through them since I wrote them back in 2019-2020, but that’s a 2023 project on my list. 🙃

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