My brothers and sisters, God called you and chose you to be his. Do your best to live in a way that shows you really are God’s called and chosen people. If you do all this, you will never fall. – 2 Peter 1:10

Thursday lunchtime I enjoyed the privilege of being guest speaker at the Tarboro Rotary Club. The members were a warm and receptive audience and the luncheon provided an enjoyable followup to my visit with the Golden Seniors (formerly Kiwanis) in May.

Last month’s talk focused on my WW2 novel, Suddenly the Light Was Gone. This week at Rotary I looked at our tenure here in Edgecombe County, building my presentation around four questions:

• Who am I?
• Why am I in Tarboro?
• What do I hope to accomplish during this year?
• What do I think of this town?

I tied everything together – or at least I tried to – with my essential personal doctrine, which can be summed up with the phrase, “Live Like You Mean It” (because God certainly meant something remarkable when we were imagined, created, and then gifted into this world).

In other words, our response to moving here has been the same as every new chapter in our forty-five years together: enthusiasm, gratitude, commitment and the choice to love.

Each new adventure is another invitation to live. We were created, every one of us, for the purpose of engaging each new day as if it were a gift; and it is!

All I do when I have twenty minutes to talk to a group of people is to offer my latest report on how this “Live like we mean it” plan is going.

I am happy to say it’s working out pretty well! – DEREK