Family Life
Honor Your Mother
During the years when my dad was in the Air Force, he seemed to find himself frequently in jobs that deployed on a regular basis. As a fighter pilot, his squadron was often sent to the desert for 90 days at a time. While it was a somewhat manageable amount of time compared to the length of deployments that other service families have had to endure in the past decade, the frequency was fairly brutal. During those times of deployment, my mom was left mostly alone to care for us.
We hear in the Gospels that we should love our mothers, but I think that too often we don’t recognize the full scope of what they do for us. Watching Alison provide for Benedict in all of the ways that she does gives me greater insight into the time, effort, and attention my own mother gave me.
The fact is, moms go above and beyond. I’m reminded of a [YouTube video released last year about the “World’s Toughest Job]. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB3xM93rXbY) In the video, applicants are involved in a video interview for a position that sounds borderline illegal, only to have it revealed that the job they are interviewing for is that of mom. The nature of moms leads them to be very nurturing, resulting in tireless work.
How can we best honor our moms? Calling her is a good start, but so are random acts of kindness. Flowers, mailed cards, or any associated gestures can be wonderful ways to show your thanks and appreciation for your mother. If your mom is in a Nursing Home, be sure to visit her often and take her on outings.
Being a mom is not easy and we owe so much of who we are to our mothers. Make sure she knows just how grateful you are.
Be Social After Mass
One of my favorite memories growing up was being social after Mass. This likely had more to do with the copious amounts of doughnuts available in the narthex or Parish hall, but there was something fun and refreshing about not racing home immediately after Mass ended. We got to know the people in the pews, made friends, and I would often get a little excited when I saw people from Church out in the world running errands. That’s what good community is.
On the whole, Catholics lag behind our Christian friends when it comes to the social element of Sunday. We’ve got them beat on the substance of the liturgical aspect, but we’ve lost sight of the fact that from the beginning of our Church, we were a community. The early Christians gathered in one another’s homes for the Eucharist and it’s doubtful that they showed up 10 minutes late and left before the final song was over. The focus of Sunday, without a doubt, is the Eucharist, but that celebration is enhanced when we spend more than an hour a week together.
I’ll be the first to admit that my family isn’t doing too well on this front. Our parish has limited gathering space and getting to the gathering space requires leaving the Church and walking downstairs. It’s a lot of friction that’s seldom worth the effort. As I get more involved in the Knights of Columbus Council and as Benedict and I venture out into the world more, we’re starting to meet more people, and hopefully soon we’ll find a friend or two to chat with after Mass.
Connecting with fellow Catholics is fun. I think we tend to believe that there are few others like us in the Church, practicing Catholics who are “normal” or who work in our field. Yet, the Church is bursting at the seams with young professionals and young families.
If you aren’t currently being social after Mass, consider ways that you can be. The focus is still on the Eucharist, but the community is built up and enhanced when we connect with one another on a personal level.
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.