Pursing A Daughter’s Heart
I wanted a girl. When the ultrasound confirmed it, I was elated. Her name is Felicity and she’s arriving in June.
My brother has two daughters, one who’s two months older than Benedict and another who just turned one. Admittedly I feel jealous when I see how his girls are just completely in love with him. They gravitate towards him, want to be held by him, and want him to play with them. They are totally obsessed with their father.
The relationship between a father and a daughter is incredibly powerful. A strong relationship with her father results in a woman with high self-esteem. A real expert in this field is the renowned Dr. Meg Meeker, a Traverse City based pediatrician who has written extensively on the subject.
All children need a stable home, loving parents, and to have their emotional needs met. It’s especially important for fathers to pursue their daughter’s hearts, to teach them how to love, and to show them that they are loved. When you look at these emotional needs, they have a common thread. The need for a strong sense of self-respect and self-worth in order to live well adjusted lives. These foundations are first built and later reinforced within the context of the parental relationship. Girls innately gravitate towards their fathers to be affirmed and to learn how to love, meaning that as fathers, it’s up to us to help them in this critical area of growth.
Fathers carry the special responsibility of pursuing their daughter’s heart. That turn of phrase is one that I heard frequently while I was studying at Franciscan University of Steubenville. What was an annoyance then has clarity now. Pursuit of your daughter’s heart is about being intentional about expressing the feelings and emotions that you have about her in a tangible way. As men, we tend to be reserved in expressing soft emotions. Our communication style uses fewer words than women and we use signals to express our approval and acceptance of others. Pursuing your daughter’s heart is recognizing that it’s not enough for her that you feel emotions of love internally: they must be externalized.
I was recently at a dinner with Alison’s colleagues. It was around Valentine’s Day and one of the young ladies shared her father’s tradition of giving a Valentine’s Day gift to his daughters until they got married. This particular young lady, a working professional, is still single and related the extremely heartfelt and thoughtful gift that she had recently received to mark this year’s Valentine’s Day. Her father gets it. Make sure she knows that she’s loved and communicate it in ways that she understands.
In order to truly love one’s daughter, it’s important to model a good marriage. We should first look to how we treat our wives and the courtesies that we show to them because our children are always watching. Daughters in a particular way keenly observe the dynamics of the domestic life. Your marriage is the primary relationship in your family from which all other relationships flow. Make sure you’re working hard to have a great one.
Teach your daughters to love, show them that they have dignity and worth, and give them the foundation that they need to life a healthy and well-adjusted life. While you’re at it, teach your sons to reject the idea that women at their disposal. Boys and girls who are given a model of family, marriage, and love will carry those lesson into their own lives and pass them down to their children’s children.
—
It’s likely that after years of dating and marriage, your wife understands you and can intuit that you love her in the times in between displays of affection or tokens of love. Your daughter doesn’t have the benefit of that experience with you, so those times when you’re not expression external emotions or giving her tokens of love, she can discern no sense of love, thus leading to confusion.
Never let your daughter think for a minute that you don’t love her.
This by no means should be taken as weakness or that boys are more self-reliant. Instead, it should be appreciated within the scheme of the grand design. Girls innately understand that they need to learn how to love and they gravitate towards their father for these lessons.
How you express your feelings of approval and love is how your daughter will grow emotional and feel secure. It’s from this place of safety that she can define who she is, answer life’s biggest questions, and learn to process healthy emotions. From this place she’ll learn how to live an integrated life and make excellent life choices.
Fathers must give their daughters special attention because of the gravity of the consequences. If your daughter leaves your house at the age of 18 with a poor sense of self-worth, she’s going to try to find it somewhere else, and typically that’s in the form of substance abuse or abusive relationships. She’ll get into relationships with deadbeats because they display the model of love that was given to her. Your daughter is worth so much more than that.
Antonin Scalia: America’s Thomas More
“In every interaction you have with people, you can either give them life or take some away.” -Toby Mac
The passing of Justice Antonin Scalia is a great tragedy. Although all things are done in God’s time, I, along with many others, selfishly wish that he could have been permitted to remain with us longer. His death raises many interesting lessons that we can apply to our lives. Truly this was a man who lived the haunting words of Christ, “Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you (falsely) because of me.”
Justice Scalia was truly America’s Thomas More. A well-read scholar of the law, he understood the wisdom of the Church and carried his faith with him to work each day. Combining his faith with reason, logic, and knowledge of the law, he followed his conscience regardless of the winds of social and peer pressure. He wrote boldly despite the vicious attacks that he faced in the media, among pundits, and from everyday Americans. This was the life of Thomas More. More lost his head and Scalia lost his reputation. This is the mark of a martyr: unwavering proclamation of truth in the face of power.
Justice Scalia has nine children, one of his sons is a priest of the Diocese of Arlington. I was grieved by the fact that almost immediately, his enemies began to publicly celebrate his passing. The chance to nominate a Supreme Court justice is one of the most lasting impacts of a presidency, but the sinister nature of celebrating the death of one man for the gain of one’s own objectives is both revolting and deeply sad. In this way, I think that Justice Scalia had one more lesson to share with us.
In evaluating my own responses, I was deeply ashamed to realize that if one of my enemies were to die, I would feel a sense of relief. This deplorable reaction is beyond selfish and is a betrayal of what it means to be human. We must consider that there are two sides to every event. While enemies may celebrate, one’s family is in mourning. How callous to dance on the grave while a family is grieving. We’ve lost the ability to divorce one’s actions from one’s personhood and dignity. This is the exact challenge of the Christian life, the call from Christ Himself to love our enemies calls us back to this point. People are not the enemy, actions, decisions, and sin are the enemy. Christ wasn’t calling us to be best friends with our enemies, but rather to recognize that behind the course of action they were pursing was a child of God, created as we are in God’s image and likeness, who has innate dignity regardless of their actions or affiliations.
Our success in the Christian life is based on more than just our personal actions. The things and the people that we surround ourselves with is just as important as the actions we take. Less than 12 hours after the news broke of Justice Scalia’s passing, one of my favorite websites, The Onion had a disparaging headline about the man. They are doubtless a comedy organization and their mode of operation is to push the limits, but by running the headline, I realized just how insensitive they are. I unsubscribed. They took some of my life away and I refuse to give them any more web traffic which can be leveraged into advertising dollars.
The legacy of Justice Scalia is clear. One’s faith should not be left out of the workplace, even the most complex problems can be solved with logic, and the likelihood of being martyred by one’s country should not dissuade us from relentlessly pursing truth. Justice Scalia was a brilliant legal mind, a devout Catholic, and a brave American who would upheld the principles that our Nation was built upon. He was truly our Thomas More who humbly went about his work for the American people. He will be deeply missed.
A Balanced Social Life
The interview season is in full swing for Alison. We’re about 18 months from graduation and her schedule is full of calls, phone interviews, and soon we’ll be travel to conduct site visits. It’s very exciting to finally see all of her work paying off, but it’s also exciting for us on the social front as well.
Medical school and residency are not conducive to a robust social life. Certainly there is time for socialization and many of her classmates have been successful in pursing social adventures. However, the changing nature of the schedule, along with onerous work and long hours preclude us from having the type of social life that we desire.
All of that is about to change. In recent weeks we’ve been talking about our future and our plans, and we’ve come to the realization that our lives are about to fundamentally change in a way that we’ve never experienced in our married life together. Our schedule is about to be our own… how will we use it?
I think that Alison and I both share a deep longing to be an active family in our parish and to connect with other young families. We’ve had some success so far, but not in the way that I experienced as a child growing up. After Mass we’d always spend time standing around and chatting with friends from the parish, our priests would be regular guests in our home, and we often went out and about town on errands.
Now that we have a family, and now that we have two cars again, I’d like to see us step into that level of engagement. It’s the way we as humans are made. We’re social beings who long for interaction, engagement, and connection. I want to share our table with friends and help in the local community.
A social life as a family is very different from the social life of a student or a young professional. It’s refined and has the objective of engagement as opposed to interior objectives. Having a solid social life is more than just beneficial for the parents; it’s a great life for the children who get to experience what it means to be human.
What Great Things Will You Do in 2016
I’ve asked you how you will use the fresh start that the New Year gives you, but today I want to ask you a different question. What great things will you do in 2016?
Achieving greatness requires two things: planning and execution. No project or goal achieves its objectives without a detailed plan. No plan brings results without execution.
A plan is more than just a commitment. A plan shows you how realistic your huge goal is. If you set a goal to lose 40 lbs, you’ll quit. But if you set a goal to lose 40 lbs and then plan on losing 1 lbs per week for 40 weeks, you realize just how possible it is.
Having a plan to lose 40 lbs is great, but if you have your fancy plan and keep eating the way you currently do, you’ll never make it. Execution requires discipline. But there’s a hidden gem in execution. It requires zero decision making. The decisions have already been made in your planning! So you don’t need to decide if you should eat that cake or go for a walk on any particular day. The plan says cake is only on Sunday and walks are every day, so execute!
We get tied up in the belief that we can’t achieve great things, that planning is a bore and execution is a straight jacket. The reality is planning helps us clarify the vision, the execution helps us meet the objective and together, we achieve greatness.
You have the perfect opportunity today to dream big, make a plan, and set it in motion so that in December you’ll have done something truly great with the time that you’ve been given this year. So the question remains, what great things will you do this year?
Stay the Course
If there’s one thing that we can count on, it’s change. Perfectly laid plans are disrupted by unforeseen events and suddenly, they aren’t so perfect anymore. The decision that we must make in times of change is if we’re going to stick to our guiding principles or if we’re going to throw out the playbook and do something completely different.
On April 5, 2005, my uncle took delivery of his brand new Prius. Over the following years my parents bought it and then I did. 10 and a half years and 254,000 miles after he took delivery, I got some very bad news. The check engine light had come on and after diagnostic testing, it was determined that the entire exhaust system needed to be replaced, a $3k repair job on a car that on its best day is worth $2,500. It was the end of the line.
I felt sad. It is just a car and Alison and I had agreed that we’d run it into the ground, but I still wasn’t prepared for it to happen so soon. This was my first car, the car that took me faithfully to and from work as I traversed the countryside. It was the car that became the symbol for my growing business and the star of my rap videos. Yet, as with all good things, it was over.
Alison and I enjoyed our month of being a two-car family. Certainly the budget had to absorb the additional expense, but the ability for us to operate independently, especially for Benedict and I, brought happiness to both of us. We had a choice to make: we could abandon our guiding financial principles and take out a note on a car, or we could stay the course and save up for a new one.
The trouble with financial planning is that it’s impossible to know the future. What’s true today may not be true tomorrow. Layoffs, raises, unknown incomes and medical bills are all a factor, and they all shift on a daily basis. True financial management is about mitigating risk. If you don’t overextend yourself, and if you have somewhat of a fallback position, you’ll be fine. We all get into trouble when we sign ourselves up for things that will work, but only if everything is perfect.
When plans get interrupted and changed, maturity requires reasoned thinking, proactive decision making, and adjustments to keep you on course. This story ended with a twist. Although we planned to be a one car family for half a year or more, a reliable car came up for sale and we bought it. Life happens that way and its best to roll with the punches.
The Entitled, Envious Millennials
I read an interesting opinion article in the Wall Street Journal that took on the issue of a generation of disrespectful children. In the article, the physician writes about his experience of children being overtly disrespectful to their parents during his office visits. While the author acknowledges that not all children misbehave, it’s much more prevalent than it was 20-30 years ago. Interestingly, he cites research that demonstrates that disrespectful children, “are more likely to grow up to be anxious and depressed, three times more likely to be overweight, more likely to be fragile, less healthy and less creative, compared with respectful children.”
Growing up in a military family, respect was a part of my upbringing. That military bearing that includes the “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am” responses that I still give today without thinking has indeed resulted in my not having anxiety or depression, and I find myself to be healthy and very creative. I hope to bring up my own children with the same level of respect not only so that they’ll respect others, but so that they’ll respect themselves.
I think we’re really seeing this theme of disrespectful children all grown up in our society today. Millennials have gotten a bad reputation that is somewhat their fault, but is mostly their parent’s fault. A generation of poor parenting has resulted in perhaps the laziest, most entitled generation that we’ve ever seen. This isn’t just about Millennials seeking a better work-life balance, or a different set of employee benefits, this is about a real sense of envy and entitlement that is pervasive among America’s young adults.
We saw it vividly in Occupy Wall Street and even more recently in the university campus protests. Graduate students protesting because they want better pay, better housing, and better healthcare. We see it in protests in favor of a dramatic raise to the minimum wage, valuing the work of all positions as much as a first year teacher or non-profit administrator after four years of college. We see it in students protesting student loan debt and demanding that the $1.2T+ of outstanding student loan debt be forgiven.
At the heart of these protests is a lack of accountability and responsibility. These young adults are upset that they made a bad deal, based on bad information, and want someone else to fix their problem. Those graduate students who don’t like their benefits aren’t hostages, they’re free to go and get a job that offers the benefits that they want. If you’re unhappy with how much your company is paying you, go find someone else who will pay you more. There are more than a few entrepreneurs with only a high school education out there making way more than $15/hour. The students who took out ridiculous amounts of student loans did so of their own free will and in taking those loans promised to repay them.
Fixing today’s adults is hard, but fixing tomorrow’s adults is easy. Teach your children about responsibility and accountability, instill in them a solid work ethic, and tell them the truth: you are in the best position of anyone to fix your own life.
Cutting Corners is Weak
Personal integrity is a key component to success. In fact, America’s millionaires rated integrity as the number one reason for their success. Laziness is perhaps the greatest human vice. We have so much potential, the power of our minds, the dexterity of our hands, and a multitude of tools that to take all of these assets and not use them for anything is a waste. Our time and our days mean something, though in the moment that may not be entirely clear. Laziness is more than just complete idleness, it’s also cutting corners. It’s acceptable to acknowledge our tendency to find easy ways out. Half of the battle is knowing just who your enemy is. Instead of cutting those corners, and inevitably losing, do the job right.
Consider the corners we all like cutting. We skip exercise, indulge on ice cream, and gain weight. We skip doing the dishes one evening only to find the kitchen overwhelmed the next day. We go easy on our work at the beginning of the month only to have to play catch up and work three times as hard at the end of the month to make our production goals. Cutting corners only hurts us. It may not hurt now, but eventually, it will.
Life as an adult out on your own gives you dignity. Certainly we each innately have dignity as human persons, but there’s something special about having the ability to work and support yourself. Many times in my working life I’ve recognized and appreciated the gift of honest work and have prayed a simple prayer of thanksgiving for that grace. All jobs, whether they be mowing your lawn or washing your car, all the way up the line to your most important project, deserve to be done with the same degree of diligence. The projects that you complete are a personal reflection on you. So if you consistently turn out shoddy work on the job, you’re liable to get fired. If, however, you are known for diligently completing high quality work on time, you’re liable to get promoted.
Your name is put on every project that you complete. The question is, are you willing to associate yourself with that finished product? It’s a lesson that we all learned very young. Our parents counseled us about the danger in cutting corners. It’s a violation of our integrity, it’s a lie, and it ends up hurting us and our reputation in the end.
Random Acts of Service
Last Fall, Alison was on call one night at the hospital here in town. The proximity to our house to the hospital makes things both very convenient and painfully inconvenient. Benedict and I had the car and we planned on taking dinner to Alison shortly after her shift started. As I began to put the dinner together, I felt the urge to do something really nice. Instead of just a main course, I wanted to make her a full dinner. So I grilled up some burgers, packed up condiments, chips, dessert, and a mint. It was a small, random gesture, but one that brought her comfort on her long overnight shift.
I think that we should spend more time observing and noting all of the times that we serve our wives. The smallest and most insignificant acts all add up to something really big. Like St. Therese’s “little way,” we too are building strong marriages and loving homes when we perform these random acts. Part of it is recognizing that we’re doing these acts, and the other part is recognizing them as holy.
Random acts change the script in your wife’s head. They’re unexpected. She walks into the bedroom to see the bed turned down and her pajama’s laid out. She comes home from running errands to find the house meticulously clean and the children playing outside. We all have assumptions and expectations about our days. Learn hers and disrupt them.
If you struggle to remember to perform these little acts of service, schedule them. It may not be a surprise to you, but it still will be to her. This is a great habit to make sure that on a regular basis you’re taking that extra step to strengthen and nurture your marriage.
We’re servant leaders and by performing random acts of service we can remain grounded, grow in holiness, and demonstrated our love and fidelity. While it can be hard to imagine that such a small act could make such a big impact, simply experience for yourself and you’ll see that the proof is in the pudding. Or in this case, ice cream.
A Rich Spiritual Life
What does it mean to have a rich spiritual life? What would your day need to look like in order to achieve that life? We have daily needs in our spiritual life that need to be met in order for us to keep making forward progress and in order for us to live truly free.
I’ve written many times on the topics of sin, temptation, and reconciliation. The theme of sin in our lives is one that we all share. We’re all in the struggle and the struggle is real. The more we resist sin, at least initially, the more challenging overcoming temptation is. There’s pushback, there’s relapse, and there’s getting back up.
I think that many of us, when working on amending our lives, fail to realize just how big of an impact our daily prayer routine and spiritual habits play in our success. The more time we devote to prayer and turning our thoughts back to God, the more resilient we are to temptation. The less we sin, the more free we are. The less we sin, the more we realize just how trapped our sin was making us.
As with all other aspects of our lives, success comes through integration. A rich spiritual life encompasses all forms of prayer at regular intervals throughout the day. It may include the Mass, the Rosary, the Divine Mercy Chaplet, or any number of devotionals. It may include time reading the Bible, meditating, using the Magnificat, or any other spiritual reading. It should include the more informal conversation with God. A combination of all of these types of prayer make up a rich daily spiritual life.
The key to success is not quantity or duration, but rather frequency. Small doses throughout the day help to maintain focus. Small interactions with prayer lead to increased clarity and awareness. When temptation comes, and it always does, you’ll be less likely to fall for it without a fight. Since your prayer routine has you engaged in your thoughts and your work, you’ll reason through the temptation and be able to dismiss it for what it truly is. You’ll be able to logically discern where engaging with that temptation will end up and whether or not it’s something that you truly want to do.
I believe that the most important part of a rich spiritual life is constant change. As you grow closer to God, you’ll change. You will become a new person, more unique than you were before. In the spirit of that constant change, your daily prayer routine should change with you. There will be times when you’re really into a particular type of prayer and other times when you’re not. If your prayer routine doesn’t change, you’ll become bored and more likely to abandon the pursuit of holiness. Change keeps things new, fresh, exciting, and suited to where you are in life.
A rich spiritual life is necessary not only to be the best person that you can be, but in order to be truly free. By engaging in prayer regularly throughout the day, in varied forms, you’ll live your live more alive and engaged with your day than before and be better prepared to reject Satan, and all of his works, and all of his empty promises.
The New Year Slump
It’s about that time of year when people hit their New Year slump. The grand plans, resolutions, and goals have encountered the first wave of resistance and most will return to their old ways. To expect a perfect journey is unreasonable and, frankly, was more crazy than the goal to begin with. Resistance provides the opportunity to reinforce the “why” behind what you’re doing.
There are all sorts of roadblocks to success, but only the diligent win. Instead of viewing the slump as a roadblock, see it as an opportunity. Plans always work out on paper, but translating them into real life can be quite messy. What things do you need to tweek and change in order to get moving again?
Goals are long term and nothing is a bigger threat to success than poor short term decision making. Think long term, make decisions based on the long term, get back out there and win.