If you search ‘how to protect your child online’, you’ll most likely become overwhelmed with a flood of information. In one corner is the fear monger, spewing forth all the rancid possibilities and imminent demise of your child once they connect to the internet. In the other corner are the shouts for ‘privacy!’ and how you have no right to access your child’s on-line life. In between are a thousand different and valid arguments purporting just as many strategies and viewpoints. Control Can’t Control If your goal is to control your child’s on-line behavior or access, then I’m afraid to...
The Gift of Being Present
Spending time with family over the holidays requires a lot of intentional effort. For myself, it begins with taking off from work early in order to get home and pack up for myself and kids. Then on to loading the van with the precision of the 20th level of Tetris- luggage, gifts, snacks and children fitting with only inches to spare. After the traditional tug-of-war, we finally get the kids loaded up and ready to go (except of course for the last minute potty breaks), and we hit the road, at least before the second potty break in 30 minutes. This is all prerequisite to driving through the wintry...
Learning to Love
I often contemplate love. I know how important it is because it’s all over Scripture. It’s in every movie, and on the pages of every book. Somehow in a world that is unsure about this whole “God thing,” love prevails as an essential theme of the human race. Even when we are our culture forbids us to pray, talk about Jesus, or share the Gospel, it allows us to love. So I recently read 1 Corinthians 13, which I have read a hundred times, heard at dozens of weddings, and practically have memorized. Paul talks about love being patient and...
A Lesson from Ivan- life on life interaction
Emma was asked to read an award-winning book for school and make a diorama, so we headed to the bookstore to find one. She’s in second grade. She had a few choices —-a Newbery Medal and Honor Book or a Caldecott Medal Book. The Newbery award is given to “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.” The Caldecott Medal annually recognizes the preceding year’s “most distinguished American picture book for children.” In short, one has a bunch of words and the other has pretty much nothing but pictures. Our choice was obvious, so we headed to the local...
Little Things Make Small Kids Big
My 5 year old daughter has a runny nose and congestion. It’s just that time of year. Lucky for me she remembered to remind me that she needed her medicine tonight as I was tucking her into bed. She’s moved up in the world from the chalky chewable’s (Have you ever tried one? They taste nothing like grapes or cherries), and on to the more sophisticated swallow-whole pills. Needless to say, this is a very big deal for a five year old. As she gulped down the medicine and handed back her glass of water to me she made the...
Grateful Remembering
I write this during the week of Thanksgiving, a holiday which seems set apart for counting my blessings. This year however is vastly different for me than the ones that have come before, primarily because in the month’s leading up to this Thanksgiving I’ve spent time nightly remembering the day and writing down what it is I’m grateful for. The importance of gratitude has been slowly creeping in on me for years now. In my younger days I thought being grateful was nothing more than a decent virtue, another tool in my belt so to speak. Sadly, through the years...
A Country Boy Can Survive….But Can He Grow?
I grew up country, in the hills of Arkansas to be exact. This is a fact most people might not notice about me at first. At some point I laid down my thick southern drawl; but I still wear the boots, get my hands greasy under the hood of a car, use duct tape to fix nearly everything, smoke meat, and stay outside as much as possible. There is so much about growing up country which I’m grateful for. As a kid I could walk behind our house to fish, shoot snakes, work on broken down cars, and have bonfires...
Intimacy – to know and be known
As a therapist working with couples, my goal is to try and give them what I did not receive (or ask for) as a young man engaged at the age of 20. Over a decade of marriage and four children later, to say that I have done the following poorly for most of the years of my marriage is a vast understatement. To be perfectly honest, for most of my years I have remained hidden behind and within work, anger or alcohol. For me, healthy marriage comes down to one core thing, which is knowing and being known. It seems that at the...
Being Sandwiched
Three Short Insights of How to Stay Emotionally Healthy in the Craziness of Caring for Aging Parents According to Wikipedia, The Sandwich generation is “the generation of people who care for their aging parents while supporting their own children. According to the Pew Research Center, just over 1 of every 8 Americans aged 40 to 60 is both raising a child and caring for a parent. I’ll confess -I’m a super-sub ham-n-cheese. I’ve been sandwiched for ten years when it became apparent that my mother’s memory-loss issues were far too severe for my dad to handle. Ten years into it...
Trying to Understand
Marriage may be the most infuriating, brilliant, amazing, and humbling of creations. The Apostle Paul actually describes it as a “profound mystery” in Ephesians, which is probably the best description for it. There are more books, seminars, Sunday School topics, sermons, and research about marriage than almost anything else, and yet most of us are still deeply confused about how to “do life” with another person. I’ve been involved in the mystery for four years now and have experienced the full gamut of emotions. I have been more richly blessed, more deeply heartbroken, and more graciously forgiven than I could...