The consulting and counseling practice of Higher Ed By Baylis LLC is suspending operations indefinitely

This blog posting is first a very important announcement concerning the future of my dream to run an educational consulting and counseling practice in my forced retirement. It is secondly an admission that I have failed to live up to the desires that I expressed in my July 31, 2014 post entitled, An important announcement concerning Higher Ed By Baylis LLC and By’s Musings. In that post I noted that I was temporarily suspending HEBB LLC operations and curtailing posts on By’s Musings until at least the beginning of 2015. We are now well over half way through 2015, and I am coming back and announcing the indefinite suspension of the counseling and consulting practice of Higher Ed By Baylis LLC. I am closing up this portion of my dream, in order for me to accomplish at least something from the long list of things that I have wanted to do. After much prodding from my neurologist, I have finally agreed to concentrate only on my writing. Thus for the foreseeable future, I will spend my waking time writing books and posts for By’s Musings. I know that I have enough material to keep me busy because I have accumulated ideas for more than 40 books and more than 400 posts.

However, don’t worry! I may have been a slow learner, but I have learned this lesson well. I will not overwhelm you with these treatises all at once. I will dole them out, one at a time. I do not take this step lightly. I have had so many things that I wanted to do, and things that I believed the Lord had given me to do. However, the Lord has been teaching me daily that we are basically weak, and only He is strong. We can only accomplish what he allows us and enables us to do. Many of us believe that it is better to burn out for the Lord, rather than rust out. However, I have somewhat reluctantly come to the conclusion that neither option is what the Lord intends for us.

For the past six years, I have been suffering from severe fatigue. A plaque on my desk has turned very prophetic. It reads,

“When I works, I works hard.
When I plays, I plays hard.
When I sits, I sleep.”

For 45 years as a student, faculty member or administrator in higher education I lived the first two lines of that plaque. Early every morning, I was the first one in the office, with my ever present cup of coffee. I was also usually the last one to leave the office in the late afternoons or early evenings. I almost always took work home with me. However, given that schedule, I still managed to average ten hours a week in the gym playing basketball. One of the nicknames I picked up over the years was “ Old Iron Legs,” because I could play longer than the other players, most of whom were much younger than I. The gray hair and beard in the picture taken more than a dozen years ago may have fooled new opponents for the first two minutes on the basketball court. However, after just a few quick trips up and down the court, they realized that I came to play, and it wasn’t going to be easy to take advantage of this old geezer.

For the past six years, battling severe fatigue and other medical infirmities have restricted me to the world of the last line of the plaque. Six years seem like a long time. As a result of my neurological difficulties, one of the sensory dysfunctions that I am experiencing is not being able to hear string instruments. Instead of “hearing” such instruments playing music, I feel vibrations in various places in my body, or I see images of the sinusoidal waves of the sounds produced by the string instruments. I hear voices and other types of instruments perfectly well. You may ask, “How do you know what music is playing?” If the music is familiar, my brain translates the stimulus that the auditory receptors in my ears pick up into the vibrations or visual images that I perceive. Then my brain goes into the library of my memory banks and finds the particular music piece that is being played.

Although, I don’t sing aloud very often, so that others can’t hear my off-key singing, I have found comfort in singing silently the old gospel hymn, Just a Closer Walk with Thee. With a sovereign God in control, I don’t believe in coincidence. So it was a God moment, this past week, when at the funeral service for a friend we discovered that this hymn was part of the congregational singing. The presiding pastor explained that this hymn was the closing hymn of the last church service that my deceased friend attended the morning of the day he died. His wife asked that it be included as part of his service. I close this post with the words to that hymn:

I am weak, but Thou art strong,
Jesus, keep me from all wrong,
I’ll be satisfied as long
As I walk, let me walk close to Thee.

Refrain:

Just a closer walk with Thee,
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea,
Daily walking close to Thee,
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.

Through this world of toil and snares,
If I falter, Lord, who cares?
Who with me my burden shares?
None but Thee, dear Lord, none but Thee.

Refrain

When my feeble life is o’er,
Time for me will be no more,
Guide me gently, safely o’er
To Thy kingdom’s shore, to Thy shore.

Refrain

“Road Closed” image provided by PresenterMedia. Gray beard picture provided by Indiana Wesleyan University.