Family Life
Take Care of Your Things
In our disposable culture, there are very few things left that are well made. Quality construction comes at a price, and consumers would rather pay less now for a lower quality product that will need to be replaced than buy a high quality product and simply fix it when it’s broken. This line of thinking applies to everything from cars to blenders.
Regardless of what kind of things that you have, it’s important for you to be a good steward of your material possessions. Things cost money, and that money was not easily made. If you were to do an analysis of how much you’re paid by the minute, and then applied that thinking to a purchase, your spending habits would change. For example, how long would you have to work to buy that particular blender? How many days would you have to work to afford that car?
Being a good steward is done partly when buying a product and partly when caring for a product. I’m pretty intense when it comes to taking care of our cars. I wash them regularly, wax them twice a year, and always make sure to take them in for scheduled maintenance. I do this not only because they’re the biggest assets that we currently own, but because I need them to last. The better I care for them, the longer they’ll be on the road in our family.
This is the secret to wealth. Fix something when it’s broken, and only replace when its unfixable or cost prohibitive. We live in a disposable culture, but we would all be better off if we shift ourselves out of consumption mode and into contentment mode.
A New Baby
I’m happy to announce today that Alison and I are expecting our second child. After two amazing years with Benedict, we’re excited to welcome his younger sibling this June. All is going well so far, and Alison and baby are healthy.
The changes of life continue to march forward and I’m elated that I get to experience the joys of having a baby in the house all over again. While I do expect there to be some degree of change in my work schedule and habits, there will be no interruptions here on the blog.
Thank you for your kind thoughts and wishes. I look forward to filling my Twitter feed with pictures of yet another one of my children.
A Christmas List
Although Christmas is just a few days away, I wanted to share an idea with you that might make next year’s Christmas season a little bit less stressful. While the focus of the Christmas season should be on preparing our hearts to receive Christ, there’s also an element of gifting. Gift giving is a wonderful and generous practice that allows us to show, in a material way, the internal feelings we have for one another. At its heart, gift giving is one person seeking to bring joy or help into the life of another. We give the gift of money to charities to ease the pains and sufferings of others. We give gifts to our spouses and children to meet some need or to bring them joy. We give gifts to our coworkers to thank them for their diligent work. Gift giving only becomes a negative when it takes our focus off of Christ and puts it on to materialism.
A perennial problem with gift giving is figuring out what to give a particular person. We all have those “hard to shop for” people, or even just people that we want to knock it out of the park for. Oftentimes, those people are our children, our siblings, or our parents. The more people that you have on this nebulous list, the easier it is to lose focus on preparing for Christmas.
Thankfully, Alison has a solution for you. Since last year, she’s put together a list of 20-30 prompts that she asks her siblings and I to fill out. The list covers all of the bases when it comes to gift giving. There are prompts for big gifts and small gifts, charitable gifts, homemade gifts, disposable gifts, and of course, those “must have gifts.”
Although she changes it each year, I wanted to share it with you as a way to help bring some clarity to your life. I’ll share it earlier next year, but for now, this list makes a great prompt for gift shopping. In fact, it might even make a great list for birthday presents. We hope it helps!
In Heaven Together
One of the best theological explanations of the Mass that I’ve ever heard is that when you’re at Mass, you’re drawn up into Heaven. When you go to Mass as a family, for that hour, your family is together in Heaven. Incredible! That explanation revolutionized my perspective of Mass and even today still blows my mind.
I think this theology is one of the soundest and best arguments for families to go to Mass together, when possible. What better activity can be undertaken by your family than worshiping God together in the presence of Heaven? What activity could be more important in the weekly rhythm of the family life?
This reminds me of my desire for my family to be together in Heaven. Even though I have no concrete idea of what Heaven will be like, I know that I want to be there with them. That’s the nature of the family. We’re drawn together, through the love of mother and father, to promote the common good and to help and encourage one another on our Earthly journey.
If you want your family to get to Heaven, what do you need to do, starting today, to make that happen?
Change Starts At Home
I want to live in a world that doesn’t have me in the center.
I want to live in a world where men are celebrated.
I want to live in a world where women are cherished.
I want to live in a world that doesn’t use people for the sake of self-gratification.
I want to live in a world that values both the good of the community as well as the good of the individual.
I want to live in a world where people are encouraged to be the best they can, not just enough to make it.
If I want to live in that kind of world, I need to begin in my own home.
Take Pride in Your Car
Alison and I’s Prius is 10 years old this year. Well, technically, I guess it’s 11. We’ll soon cross the 250k mile mark and man, is it in good shape. Looking at it from the outside, you’d never guess that it was that old or that venerable. In general, I think that men love taking care of their cars, but I want us to go a step further. I want us to have pride in our cars.
Your car, for some period of your life, is your single biggest asset. There were times, or there will be times, in your life when the most expensive thing the you own is sitting in a parking space outside of your residence. The best way to preserve any asset is to do a fantastic job maintaining it. Keep your car clean with regular washes and cleanings. I prefer to hand wash the Prius because it gives me the ability to really get the whole car clean as opposed to automatic washes which miss spots. Cleaning the interior is just as important. The more frequent the cleanings, the better.
Maintenance is another big part of having pride in your car. Too often we’re tempted to avoid maintenance bills by selling the old car and buying a new one. That almost never makes financial sense. Find a quality shop that’ll do good work on your car. Make repairs early and always have cash on hand to cover parts that break. If you have the money set aside for “unexpected repairs,” you can make better decisions in the moment when the Check Engine light comes on and just make the repair instead of buying new. Maintenance is about making the car last longer as much as it is about keeping your family safe.
The kind of pride that I want us to have in our car is the pride that leads us to keeping it clean and maintained. Too many of us move way past pride and tie up their entire identity in their car. You likely have seen this around town- guys driving trucks with lift kits, giant tires, huge CB antennas, and twin smoke stacks. At the end of the day, your car is just that; a car. In a moment it could be totaled in an accident and gone forever. The car that you drive is not who you are as a person. You should never feel bad about yourself for driving a particular car. As long as you keep it clean and well maintained, even an old car will run further than anyone expects.
And for Pete’s sake, please don’t have a car that’s nicer than your house.
Finding Wholesome Programming
Lately I’ve been really into movies, books, and TV shows based on real life Cold War era spies. History fascinates me. Some of the stories are so crazy and unbelievable that they’re more entertaining than any story that a writer could make up. I think that’s why I’m so drawn to spy storylines.
I personally think that sex scenes are lazy writing. It’s easy to get people interested and talking about shows that are rich in salacious content, but it’s really just a cheap ploy. The same can be said about vulgarity comedy. Most mainstream stand-up acts today can’t be enjoyed by families because the content is for adults. Again, lazy writing.
The reason why we’re having trouble finding wholesome programming is because, as consumers, we’ve demanded the other content. We’ve demanded more sex, more skin, more drugs, more fantasy. We’ve demanded that writers, actors, and directors create content that could never happen in the real world. We’ve become an audience of voyeurs, enjoying the destruction of people. We got what we asked for.
I wish that there was more wholesome programming available. I don’t define wholesome as something that you’d only find on PBS or the History Channel. I’d say wholesome programming would be shows and movies that focus on the story and the message. Take HBO, for example. Almost all of their original programming is complete garbage. That’s a real waste considering they’re the same people who put together the amazing Band of Brothers series. They’re capable of doing good, they just make more money on the junk.
What you feed your mind has an impact on your overall health and well being. Don’t fill up on junk content.
Cherish Your Father
Benedict has started behaving like a two year old just a few months early. He’s usually loads of fun, but he can also test my patience. He’ll be cute and cuddly at one moment and melting down in the next. It’s all part of the deal when it comes to being a father. This experience of fatherhood has helped me to better recognize a great blessing that I had growing up and still have today: a great dad.
We all have the desire to do something great. We want to be the best, to be esteemed, and to give our wife, our friends, and our family the best version of ourselves. Though this desire burns hotly within us, it’s the difficult path. Life happens, work happens, stress happens, conflict happens and soon we see how far from our goal we’ve fallen. Being a great dad requires tremendous effort and laser-like intentionality.
The life of a father is not one of privilege, but one of sacrifice. Although our sense of self-preservation starts to cringe when the “s” word is mentioned, sacrifice is incredibly freeing. There’s no better feeling than the dozens of times each day that we help meet our children’s needs. We give up that cookie so that they might smile, we refill their cup because they can’t, we endure watching the same episode of Sesame Street for the 18th time, and we “help" clean up their toys in the evening. The life of a father is a front row seat to the miracle of life and it comes with great demands.
Sadly, many children today grow up without the gift of knowing their father. They grow up not knowing the love of the man who helped bring them into the world. You can choose to give the gift of yourself to your children. More importantly, if you’ve been blessed with the gift of a father who tried his best to be a good dad for you, thank him.
Behind Every Great Warrior is A Great Family
We owe a great debt to our current military members and to all veterans who’ve honorably served. While it’s plainly evident that their sacrifice, courage, and willingness to serve deserves to be recognized, we ought not overlook those people who stand right behind them: their families. Families of military members and Gold Star families, those whose loved one died in the line of duty, sacrifice every day right alongside service members. Let’s not forget those who stand behind and in support of our warriors.
The sacrifices of military families most often takes the form of lost time. There are endless missed holidays, birthdays, baseball games, and life’s special moments. While the family is at home taking part in these events, their warrior is deployed to a foreign country, wishing he or she was home. So much of the military member’s time is spent deployed, doing what they were trained to do, that the family must bear the brunt of this absence. Reunions are sweet, but getting to the day when their loved one comes home takes a special kind of patience.
We need to support these families, especially when their loved one is deployed. Each family will need something different, but it’s an almost universal truth that the spouse who’s home caring for the kids needs a break. Offer free babysitting. If the couple doesn’t have kids, invite the spouse out as they’re probably lonely at home. Mow their lawn, drive their kids to soccer practice. Any and all of these acts of kindness are things we should be doing as neighbors, but when we take special care during deployments, we also use these acts of kindness as acts of thanks.
Of course, it goes without saying, that we should pray for the safe return of our service members. These days, it doesn’t matter where a deployment takes them, there’s always some form of danger. Prayer goes a long way. Supporting them and their families through prayer can be a great thing.
Today I offer you this: behind every great warrior is a great family. Take good care of them and don’t forget that sacrifice is not only made by our men and women in uniform, but also by those who support and love them.
Regroup Weekly
I clean our house every Saturday, both inside and out. The laundry is done, the floor is vacuumed, the car is washed, the bathrooms are cleaned, and the lawn is mowed. Saturday evening is a great time of relaxation for me because everything is in its place. By the following Friday, life has happened and the house needs cleaning again. I maintain this weekly schedule because at some point during the week, everything goes off the tracks and I need a reset.
Just as my cleaning routine has a weekly cycle, so too does your life. Once a week, you need to take an hour or so and get your life put back together. Reorganize your to-do list, prioritize your projects, and plan the path forward. Weekly cleaning allows me the time to address the building clutter. We all have clutter that builds up in various ways and while we usually intend to address the issues, there always seems to be a steady encroachment. This weekly planning time is a new chance to maintain cleanliness and to restore order in your home.
Weekly planning gets you ready for the week ahead. Various factors impact your weekly schedule, so taking an hour or two either at the end or beginning of the week will help you to get everything realigned. Sickness may have taken two productive days away from you, a new project may have started, or you may even have gotten ahead on your to-do list. The better prepared you are for the week ahead, the more productive you’ll be. When you feel boxed in by clutter or overwhelmed by a long to do list and no plan for completing those tasks, it becomes easy to fall into a rut. By setting aside time each week to regroup, both in cleaning and planning, you can be better prepared for the week ahead and ensure that small problems don’t become major roadblocks.