I Ain't Sugar Coatin'...

I'll let the legendary blue artist Mac Arnold spill the beans on this one:

"Young ladies don't make babies just 'cause you can

Every kid in the world needs to grow up with a man

Young men get busy, act like you care

Pull up your pants, stop showin' us your underwear.

I aint sugar coatin'
I aint sugar coatin'
I aint sugar coatin' 

just tellin' you like it is." 

The hardest thing about being a dad

Man do I love being a dad.  It's fun.  I'm so excited about my three smart, beautiful, kind little girls.

But being a good dad is tough.  It's hard.  Exhausting at times.  It's a balance of strength and gentleness, of fact and faith, of justice and mercy.

I have to let them know that I love them.  They need to feel it, deep in the subconscious brain where feelings grow & values form, way down in there.

Sometimes to give them what they want is to spoil them.  Sometimes to not give them what they want will crush their spirit.  I have to try to know when it's the one, and when it's the other.  Thankfully my wife helps me with that!

If when you get it wrong, you have to be aware of that and be able to adjust, be flexible, even apologize when you really fail.  At other times, you must not adjust to everything they say they want, but hold that ground and not give way.  At times you must be gentle, and other times you have to be very, very firm.

Sometimes I think there is a thing that feels like the loving thing to do, but if I really love them, I have to do the opposite.  Because what they want, and what they need, are at times worlds apart.  There are times I  want to pick them up - but sometimes I have to let them pick themselves up and cheer them on in doing it.  I may want to always hold their hand - but sometimes I have to let go.  Knowing when it's time to hold tight and when it's time to let go are tough; it seems that both can be mistakes and both can be the right thing, depending on the situation.

They have to learn to do things on their own, but they can't learn that without you.  Sometimes, though, their own personal experience is the only way they are going to really get it & learn the lessons they need for life.  And in those moments, your heart breaks.  Why didn't they just listen when I said that the first time?  Don't know, but sometimes we all have to learn things the hard way.

It can take everything you have to do what they need instead of what they want.  I think it is the balancing act, the tension between two truths, that is the hardest thing to get a handle on.  In a way though, it's freeing - the target continually moves, and you just move along with it.

The All Too Short Life of Rachael Scott

Last Wednesday, March 14, Darrell Scott, father of Rachael Scott who was killed in the Columbine, CO school shootings, spoke at ONU.  As a father of 3 little girls, I can't imagine losing one of them in this way.

"We must stop violence in our schools", he said.  Truth.  To stop violence, we must stop hatred & ignorance & apathy.  And we must realize that it begins in each of us.  It begins in me.  Cue the Michael Jackson "Man in the Mirror" music.

He spoke a lot about some things his daughter Rachael had written in a diary that they discovered under her bed after she was killed.  In it, she came up with a challenge - to start "a chain reaction of kindness and compassion", which she called her ethics and codes of life.  That is, she thought that by going out of her way to reach out to those around her with kindness, that this would change their hearts & minds, and in turn give them the ability to do the same.  That people would begin to believe in each other again.

The tone of attitudes and conversations that we hear, that surround us, that we bring, has such a tremendous effect on us.  It is as if our culture does much of our thinking for us.  If we're surrounded by ugly, we'll be ugly - unless we try really hard not to be.  And if we're surrounded by kindness, we'll react the same.  Of course, we can all choose our own posture within the tide, to swim with it or against it.  Rachael believed she could change the swimming direction of the whole school of fish by pointing it, one fish at a time, in the right direction.

I like it.  She was a beautiful soul.

It was heart-breaking to hear her Dad speak.  So much tragedy, so much pain in those senseless killings.  And yet, somehow in the half-hour I listened to him, somehow there was hope.  It was an amazing juxtaposition of sorrow and hope.  It reached down to your gut and twisted everything.

A few more gems:
"Give people three chances before judging them.  Don't rely on first, second, our even third impressions."
"Practice 'pre-acceptance' instead of prejudice."
"Look for the best in others."
"Look out for the the Disabled, new at school, picked on our put down by others.  One person can go out of their way to show kindness."
"Use words that heal, not words that hurt."
"Rachael refused to treat a bully with anything but kindness. She saw through the external meanness.  Don't look at a person, see through."

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Last night my family and I enjoyed the traditional Irish-American meal of corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, & carrots.

Today just this traditional Irish blessing:

May the road rise up to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back,
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields, and
Until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of his hand.

First World Problems

It's easy to complain, isn't it?

That's why the First World Problems meme making its way across the intertubes is so brilliant.  It highlights the thousands and thousands of things people say & do that are "problems" for people who live in wealthy, developed countries.  Your cell phone battery died?  Your fast food order wasn't right?  The video below is fantastic, and if that's not enough for you there's the #firstworldproblems hashtag on Google+ or twitter that will supply you with millions more examples.  And obviously, if these are the worst things we have to worry about in life, then we really don't have much to worry about in life.  Compare these problems to, say, for example, I don't know, maybe, the people of the Nuba mountains in Sudan?  Time to stop complaining & do something good.  Like stop the killings in Syria & Sudan.

But it's too bad he forgot to mention Justin Bieber.