Snapshots and Visions

About the Book

You have the power to reinvent yourself!  The power lies not in your mind alone.  It’s also in your genes and DNA.  It’s what makes us human.  Humans change – that’s the essence of life.  Everything, from the smallest plant to the largest mountain, is in the process of change.  And that’s especially true with human beings.  We can’t always recognize it when it happens slowly and we learn to adjust to the differences.  But when a living organism stops changing, it dies.

 I’m not just talking about simple physical changes, here.  Those changes are not that important, really. They’re going to happen, one way or another, whether we are conscious of them or not.  I’m talking about psychological, emotional and spiritual changes – the kinds of changes, for instance, that mold children into mature, emotionally balanced adults.  Each of us, by the time we hit senior citizenship, will have made countless choices and agonized over millions of decisions.  We tend to think of them as either good or bad.  Some of them led to happy, productive, constructive events.  Others got us into a world of trouble.

But from the perspective of age, every choice was good in this sense: it offered the opportunity to learn something.  Right or wrong, good or bad, whatever the consequences that followed our decision, we learned from what we have done.

That kind of learning is called experience.  That’s all experience is – living through the consequences of choices and remembering what happened. 

About the Author

   Jim Willis is one of America’s leading students when it comes to understanding human behavior and the challenges that arise when confronting life’s many changes of direction. After graduating from the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, he became a high school band and orchestra teacher during the week, a symphony trombonist on the weekends, a jazz musician at night and a choral conductor on Sunday mornings. The author of five books on religion and spirituality, he has served as an ordained minister for over thirty-five years, counseling people who have spiritual and emotional needs. He is currently the senior pastor of a Protestant church in Florida and the Director and Human Advisor for Over60Exchange  www.over60exchange.com.  

Along the way he has been a woodworker and handyman, the host of his own drive-time radio show, an arts council director and an adjunct college professor in the fields of comparative religion and instrumental music. His love for long-distance bicycling led him to make several cross-country bike trips and inspired his first book, Journey Home: the inner life of a long distance bicycle rider, which deals with confronting life’s changes.  

Jim and his wife, Barbara, host a website at www.willisoutreach.com/,  a site that seeks to build community around spiritual growth and the art of being human in a technical age.