Todd Wilson over at FamilyManWeb.com just sent me a good reminder. Here it is:
It’s a beautiful, spring morning here in Northern Indiana. The sun is shining, the temperature is well below freezing, and there is a winter storm warning for the next two days. Perfect weather for finishing up the last minute details before we hit the road next Wednesday---NOT!
Actually, I feel a little overwhelmed and discouraged. I’m having a tail light issue on the RV, which I hadn’t anticipated, my grandmother will be going to heaven soon, and---did I mention the winter storm thing?
Here’s the real kicker: time is passing at lightning speed, and I don’t like it. Just yesterday, my wife was talking to an old high school friend who mentioned that her daughter would be going to college in the fall and she was saddened by the thought that she was---leaving.
When my wife relayed their conversation to me, I was taken back in time to a restaurant table filled with a bunch of young couples that were entertained by a little girl in a highchair who could say, “Bubbles.”
Now the restaurant is gone, some of the couples are no longer couples, and the little bubble girl will be going to college in the fall---and I’ve got a lump in my throat.
That’s the thing about time. It sneaks up on you and changes things before you notice or can do anything about it. It takes little girls and boys and turns them into men and women. It takes fried chicken-making grandmothers and confines them to wheelchairs unable to communicate, eventually transforming them into fond memories.
Time’s doing ‘it’ right now. My little daughter who begs her very busy father to play Candyland will quit asking one day. And about the time I’m starting to have time---she won’t be there.
Drat that dastardly time!
But my ‘drats’ won’t change things. My only recourse is to enjoy my family, the cold weather, and a game of Candlyland today because the bubble girl is going to college in the fall.
"Dastardly time" is unrelenting, and just like Todd says, it changes things and moves people beyond our reach. You know, since I've lost the ability to work full-time, you'd think I'd naturally have more time for my kids. Imagine my shock when I'd looked back over the months and found that I'd spent a lot of time on "stuff" and not as much on my kids as I would like.
When I was a kid, I had a big sandbox in my back yard. It was Tonka heaven! In the summer, I would liven things up and get a hose to create "water management projects." One of the first things I learned working in "muck" was that sand and water have their own mind about where they want to go. Holes that would normally stay where you put them needed something in them or they would disappear as quickly as you dug the hole. It's the same thing with time. Time will naturally fill in the voids unless you intentionally put something there to keep it open.
What they say is true: you make time for the important things. No one went to their grave wishing they'd put in more overtime or pressed harder for that raise in pay. Work is work; it's what makes living possible. Don't forget to live. Make the time for your family.
This is what I wrote yesterday before I collapsed from fatigue
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Theme for Monday: Broken glass
I woke up this morning to the news that my daughter had walked through a glass door. Don't worry! It was a small door on our secondhand entertainment center and it didn't even hurt her, but the glass shattered like only glass can. I come downstairs to help my wife clean up. While I'm at it, I decide to help her out by replacing the fluorescent tubes that burned out in the basement. I brought out the burned out pair and placed them next to the door to be carried out to the trash. You know, that was a bonehead move. Why couldn't I have simply removed it to the garage or the trash can?
As it was, Karen bumped it while she was trying to clean up the glass and POW! it broke falling into the laundry room. The good news is that it didn't break all of them and since we already had the cleaning tools out, it was just more glass... thinner, in a different area, and possibly contaminated with lead and mercury, but it was just more glass.
It's kind of funny when you look on environmental sites and they have so many steps to cleaning up a florescent bulb, something like "If drapes or carpet have come in contact and become contaminated, arrange for disposal with an authorized hazardous materials handler..." In other words, don't just throw them away. Remember when we could play in the street, start small fires with magnifying glasses and actually throw lawn darts as a fun summer evening game?
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Added today:
So we ventilated the room, swept and vacuumed until we didn't hear that "popcorn" sound from the vacuum brush any more. Now we wear socks or shoes for a while.
I just heard my son call out, "Glass shard!"
He found one, but not with his feet. Thank God for that.
The most frustrating part about this was that for years--years!--I had the thought to simply remove those doors before something like that ever happened. The only thing they really served for was to keep out dust. I can live with dust, especially if it means not cleaning up glass and not taking a trip to the emergency room. Why I didn't remove the glass in the first place was probably because it looked better with the glass in place. I hope this is the only time I ever make the mistake of choosing class and appearance over my children's safety. As it is, I'm very grateful God protected my daughter.
I'll definitely know what to look for to hold our components when we buy a 50 inch widescreen TV ...in 2016.
Early education fascinates me. I'm not sure why it does, but I often wonder at the how's and why's of development. The Cate's of Why Homeschool posted about a study from Yale that showed that 100% of six month-olds and 87.5% of 10 month-olds picked a toy recently associated with a "Good Samaritan" role in a video. The controls and results all seem valid to me, and it has significant implications regarding the "on-board" morality of pre-verbal children. They actually appear to have a preference toward objects that are cooperative and selfless.
These findings seem to erode the tabula rosa theory that insists children are born with a blank slate and learn everything from environmental factors. Could we be born with a pre-disposition toward valuing cooperation and selflessness? Do we have a moral center at birth or even before? This study seems to indicate so.
I need to look at life through my daughter more. We were looking out the window at the snow falling last night and she said, "It looks like the snow is pouring out of the streetlight!" Sure enough, it did.
The other day, we had fog when we were leaving the house and she said, "Oh! It's blurry out!" Back when her older sister was the same age, she noted, "It's froggy out there." I'm not sure which I like more.
God gives us the gift of children to remind us of the holy wonder of creation. May we never take them for granted.
When I was growing up, video games were more or less a novelty. Pac-Man, at right, made a lot of money in the arcades, mostly in quarters (remember cash?), but no one really considered a home gaming market, mostly because the technology didn't exist. Today, a wildly popular game such as Halo 3 grosses $170,000,000 in the first week of sales, out-pacing the figures for Harry Potter books and film releases. It is cultural currency of the highest order. It's also rated M for mature by ESRB, and with good reason. According to the experts, it's a violent, gory first-person shooter.
This game is a boon to anyone looking to train skilled commandos willing to dispatch their targets with extreme prejudice. It's not so helpful for parents who are trying to raise normal, healthy human beings. What's even more troubling is the fact that some churches are incorporating this game into their youth activities. I realize that some times that youth leaders are using some unusual tactics to build community with the kids, but some ideas are not worth pursuing, like bobbing for goldfish (wasn't that an old frat trick?). I have to wonder at the wisdom of incorporating WWJBA? into any program (What Would Jesus Blow Away?). Whose decision is it to expose any child to the violent imagry in this game?
If the questions thrown at youth ministry seem unfair, you should probably know that I was a youth leader for a few long years, meeting success and failure week in, week out. What I didn't realize until long after my work with youth was over was that Sunday School and youth programs started off not to minister to the youth of the church, but as an outreach effort to bring in new believers at young ages. It was an overt, deliberate attempt to bring about child evangelism. No wonder it's doing a poor job raising our children! When I was serving as a youth leader, I had a dramatic insight as to why youth ministry is so tough today. Parents, nominal pillars of the church community, would foist their kids on me and directly or indirectly say, "Here you go. Teach them about God." How is any youth group leader going to undo in 2 hours what the teen has been up to the other 164 hours that week? Parents are the rank and file defenders of their children, something most parents seem to have forgotten or summarily abandoned. Any youth or children's pastor needs to focus on child evangelism and parents need to lead their children into the deeeper waters of biblical Christianity, not abandoning them to a youth leader.
In the case of Halo 3, I find myself agreeing strongly with Paul Asay of Plugged In Online. I have a hard time convincing myself that it's a valid tool. There's a reason M ratings are handed out and parents of teens, Christian or secular, would find their parental rights undermined by the church leaders in such a tactical blunder. Sorry, but Halo 3 should be dropped like a sack of potatos for use in Christian youth evangelism or any youth program.
I think I'm beginning to understand what's going on here. As most homeschooling parents know, teaching fosters a sense of intimacy. For a lot of professional teachers, they keep it cool by distancing themselves from their students or putting it in a pseudo-parental relational context. Unfortunately, there's a lot of folks out there that mistake these feelings of intimacy for love and it manifests itself in an adult relationship with a non-adult student. The teacher is unable to distinguish these feelings from real love, a commitment to the better good of the beloved, and makes choices that give them short term gratification while bringing the long-term destruction that no sensible person would choose.
What continues to bother me is the alarming frequency of these incidents showing up in the news. I suspect that many more of these incidents go unreported or under-reported. My heart questions why our society places adults in a non-familial role that produces such strong feelings of intimacy in the first place. I don't want to hit this too hard, but the Bible instructs parents, not teachers, to teach their children. Although most parents won't admit to as much, I believe that when we drop off our kids at church or at school, we are rolling the dice and hoping our children won't be exposed to this abuse. We're better off keeping them with us at both places. Putting parents back in the classroom is a good start. Keeping the kids with us at home is better.
On a related note, Tia Linscheid blogs on Home Where They Belong about what else students are being asked to keep from their parents.
I'm watching the Colorado Rockies in the World Series. After the dark days of so many seasons with not one playoff berth, I find it amazing that I'm even typing that. Watching the series coverage on Fox is painful. I'm confused: is their tag line "Viewer Discretion Advised"? I'm having to yell at my kids, "Eyes!" because while I can mute the guy with the dark and mysterious voice, the only way I can block the shocking stuff on the screen is to put up a graphic on the screen or turn the whole thing off. Given Fox's putrid stench, I might just institute a blackout and listen to the game on the radio. If the 1st inning break is as bad as the other breaks thus far, the radio it will be.
Anita Renfroe has been on Bananas Comedy show on Skyangel and now it appears her video below is "going viral" after Yahoo featured it on their site. She's got the mom part down, that's for sure and my wife can relate to most of it, except for the shoving your kids off to the school bus. (Our school bus is parked in the garage.) Have a seat and enjoy this rendition of the William Tell Overture.
(Yes, the video is choppy. Just listen, don't watch)
Here's the version from AnitaRenfroe.com. (The site may be crashing because of all the traffic, so be patient).
As an (amature) historian, I drive down streets or highways wondering how many have gone there before me and who they were. I notice changes and realize that buildings that looked to last for a century were gone in a decade or two. Mountain towns that boasted thousands of residents, mostly miners, now are nothing but a few ruts and meadow for elk to wander through. Psalm 103 brings home the impermanence of life.
As a father has compassion on his children,
so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him;
for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.
As for man, his days are like grass,
he flourishes like a flower of the field;
the wind blows over it and it is gone,
and its place remembers it no more.
But from everlasting to everlasting
the LORD's love is with those who fear him,
and his righteousness with their children's children-
with those who keep his covenant
and remember to obey his precepts.
The LORD has established his throne in heaven,
and his kingdom rules over all.
The transient nature of our lives was keenly felt as I went by my old neighborhood today. I was amazed at how much had changed. I had been back before because I still have family nearby. Still, the community has changed so much. I pointed out the changes time and again to my wife, only to realize that she and I were the only ones in the car to really know what we were talking about. Every one of our kids had only vague notions and shadowy recollections, if anything. My dad and mom used to do the same thing when we would drive through downtown. One year, my folks decided to track down the old family cigar store that my father remembered visiting as a kid. In a strange twist, we found that the site of the store was marked with nothing more than a phone booth! On a slightly happier note, a year ago at Christmas, my father received a gift from my brother-in-law: a photograph of the store from the 1920s purchased after a chance discovery.
Back as a kid, I thought my parents were nuts. Why go around chasing down phantom stores and old places like that? Somewhere between driving by the hospital where I was born and the discovery that a third mall had been knocked down for "redevelopment," I had the realization that it wasn't so much about places and buildings as it was about people. The old movie theater was the place I would go to see movies with my dad. The park with the huge trees you remember as saplings was host to a summer picnic with dear friends long since moved out-of-state. Reminiscing and visiting these places is not so much about the details of what went where but about who we were with.
My eight year-old son, who couldn't have been much more than two years old at the time, recalled from the outside of his grandparents' former home that there was a picture of Jesus over the fireplace and that the kitchen was off to the right. This tells me more about my son than the fact that he has a good memory. It tells me that he remembers his grandparents and time spent with them, even if it was only having snacks and watching VeggieTales. It was about love. It was about time.
And someday, my grandson is going to think my son is nuts too. At least, he will if I can help it.
When I was growing up, video games were more or less a novelty. Pac-Man, at right, made a lot of money in the arcades, mostly in quarters (remember cash?), but no one really considered a home gaming market, mostly because the technology didn't exist. Today, a wildly popular game such as Halo 3 grosses $170,000,000 in the first week of sales, out-pacing the figures for Harry Potter books and film releases. It is cultural currency of the highest order. It's also rated M for mature by ESRB, and with good reason. According to the experts, it's a violent, gory first-person shooter.
This game is a boon to anyone looking to train skilled commandos willing to dispatch their targets with extreme prejudice. It's not so helpful for parents who are trying to raise normal, healthy human beings. What's even more troubling is the fact that some churches are incorporating this game into their youth activities. I realize that some times that youth leaders are using some unusual tactics to build community with the kids, but some ideas are not worth pursuing, like bobbing for goldfish (wasn't that an old frat trick?). I have to wonder at the wisdom of incorporating WWJBA? into any program (What Would Jesus Blow Away?). Whose decision is it to expose any child to the violent imagry in this game?
