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When William showed up about 13 years ago, he was an amazingly confident kitten. He had been wandering the neighborhood for days when my ex-wife brought him inside and declared that someone had to take care of this little guy.

He was tiny then, but he was already a lion in his own mind. He walked right up to the older cats in the household and let them know there was a new sheriff in town. His dominant and fearless attitude earned him the name of William — after William the Conqueror.

There’s little he won’t get into. He has talented paws that are especially suited to opening drawers. Since he enjoys finding soft clothes to sleep on, he has a long habit of opening drawers and setting up shop on top of the clothes for a long nap. Here’s an example of his handiwork. He always jumps up and looks innocent after he’s been caught.

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Are you a coward? For much of my life, I’ve been one — at least a large part of the time. I’ve drifted along avoiding things that scared me, acting as though I could somehow cheat my fears without having to face them. I’m at the point in life where I can’t do that anymore.

I can either face the fears and become who I’m supposed to be or I can go back to hiding in cowardice. Now that I understand the truth about what I’ve done, though, I don’t think I can put it back into a box and hide it on a shelf. I have to confront the fears — and become the person God made me to be.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue since the first of the year. Something happened that made me ask myself whether I was going to continue being less than my best or if I intended to make the changes necessary to be who I wanted to be. If I’d realized all the implications of that when I started thinking about it, I might have run. But I didn’t. And once I let myself go down that road, I didn’t have any choice but to follow some trails to their logical conclusion.

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I’ll be honest and tell you that I couldn’t care less about auto racing. The idea of spending my time watching a bunch of cars go around a track — much less caring which car finished first — is beyond my comprehension. I’m sure other people feel that way about sports I love, but car racing seems bizarre to me.

It’s hard to consider it a sport when the biggest key to strategy is to go as fast as you can and keep turning left. (The Onion had my all-time favorite satire of NASCAR.)

But news from the world of NASCAR caught my attention Friday when there was buzz that five drivers had declined an invitation to the White House to meet with Barack Obama. (One of them later said he actually will be there.) Not only can I not understand why this is news, but I can’t understand why all the other people who receive similar invitations don’t do the same thing.

Somewhere along the way in this country, we’ve started acting as though the president is a big deal and should be treated like royalty. If the apparatus of government were limited to the powers it should have, a peacetime president would have nearly as much power and appeal as the general manager of your local water purification plant. We need to quit treating presidents as though they hold an office worthy of automatic respect.

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