Families Can’t Get No Respect
Having kids makes life a little bit more challenging. It’s not without joy, but things just take a little longer. Gone are the days when you and your wife decide to hop in the car and go shopping. Trips take extra preparation, and they can be a challenge.
A few weeks ago, Alison and I took Benedict to IKEA. We’re in the market for some new furniture for our new home. When we arrived, I began the task of looking for a place to park. I was literally shocked when I saw the signs for the “Family Parking Lot.” The lot was sectioned off from the rest of the parking areas with only one entrance. This safety feature limited vehicular traffic, thus reducing the danger of a child being hit. The lot was right at the front of the store, so we didn’t have to walk very far with our family in tow. The spots were a bit wider than standard spots giving us the room to both park and put Benedict in his stroller. It was perfectly family friendly. But that wasn’t all. The Family Restroom had liners for the changing table and free diapers. Wow. This is just not the kind of treatment that we see among businesses in the United States today.
Couples today are holding off from starting families because they don’t want the “hardship” of children. They’re selfish. There’s no other way of putting it.
Companies use marketing to target children. It makes sense from a business perspective, as children are potential future customers. Then you go to their stores and it’s a nightmare. Parking is difficult, the shelves are overloaded, and it’s just not a good experience. Even traveling via airplane can be difficult. It really all comes down to the TSA employees themselves. At bigger airports, they’re not helpful at all. At smaller airports, you may find that some employees do their best to help parents through screening with all of their extra baggage.
So what’s the deal with all of this. Why am I objecting to the way companies treat families today?
The lack of accommodation is a result of a decrease in respect towards human life.
Kids aren’t considered to be the blessing that they are. They’re an inconvenience to those around us. People hate a crying kid at “their” dinner out. People hate when other people’s kids “ruin” their movie experience. People hate when they’re on vacation and they have a baby in the next hotel room over. Parishioners can’t understand why you don’t take your crying baby to the cry room.
Get over it.
Babies cry. It’s what they do. Kids aren’t robots and they weren’t designed to please other people trying to have a nice night out.
While it may be a bit of a stretch, I’d say that this lack of respect is rooted in the widespread use of contraceptives. Pope Paul IV has been truly vindicated in his predictions.
Contraceptives have reduced families to an annoyance.
Parenting is no longer seen as a noble pursuit.
How do we reverse this negative trend? First, we must show the world the joy of parenthood. Second, we must teach our children that children are indeed a gift from God. Last, we must patiently bear the dirty looks and inconveniences that we experience. Our children are worth the hassle.
We don’t respect families like we should. Let’s find ways to make the lives of parents easier.
Daily Family Prayer
Now that then Lenten season is over, it’s important for us to remember that while the season is gone, the positive steps we’ve taken in our lives should not be. The whole point of Lent is to refocus our attention and help us get closer to the people that we want to be. When the season is over, it’s still up to us to make decisions that keep us going in the right direction.
Growing up, my family always prayed together in the evening. We would learn a new prayer each year, pray the usual prayers, and learn about our faith. My dad would choose sections from the Catechism for us to discuss and learn about. It was a great system. Sadly, as we got older and our lives started to get very busy, we moved away from family prayer time.
Praying as a family has been something that Alison and I have struggled to incorporate, but I think we’re finally getting our routine worked out.
Families tend to be together twice per day. They start their day at home and they end their day at home. After breakfast (sometimes even before!), everyone scatters in different directions. Parents go to work, kids go to school, then after-school activities, social clubs, the list goes on and on. When the family regroups at the end of the day, when everyone “comes in from the fields,” there’s a need for quality time together.
Since we spend so much of our days apart, we need time together to connect, communicate and bond. Prayer can do that. In fact, prayer in community is important!
There’s a dynamic of our faith that focuses on the interior life. We should each have a personal relationship with God and be constantly praying and living out our faith. The Church also reminds us that the community life, and more specifically communal spirituality is also very important. When we pray in community, we further support each other and intercede for each other. The Church so heavily emphasizes the communal aspect of the spiritual life that She has entire communities of religious brothers and sisters living, working, and praying together.
Alison and I have daily prayer time in the evening, typically when the kitchen is clean. We’re not always 100% perfect in having this time, but we’re making an honest effort and are starting to see the benefits. There are three main parts to our prayer. We start with a section of the Catechism and discussion. We talk about what line jumped out at us or make observations about what the particular teaching means. We then each share our petitions. We close our family prayer time with an Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be and then we bless each other.
It’s simple, it’s straightforward, and it’s ours.
Now it’s time for you to make yours. Talk to your wife about her spirituality and design a family prayer routine that appeals to both of you. Then, designate a sacred time and make it happen.
Prayer, like all relationships, can and must change. As time goes on, if things get stale, change it up. Live a vibrant family spirituality!
Praying as a family on a daily basis can be challenging. At the end of the day, it’s all about priorities.
4 Myths About Parenting
It’s truly sad how little we value children today. Modern couples are pressured and even praised for holding off on starting a family for any degree of time. Instead of being seen for the value that they truly have, and without accounting for the sheer joy of shepherding your own child, children are seen as a roadblock. We tell women that they can’t both be a mother and a valuable employee. We tell men that children will ruin all of your fun.
To be honest, those are all lies.
Without being a parent yourself, it is difficult to fully comprehend the true nature and joy of parenthood. As the youngest of 3 children, I didn’t know anything about kids until 5 months ago. Even in my short tenure as a dad, I’ve come to realize how special it is to have a family. There’s nothing better at the end of a bad day than Benedict looking up at me and smiling. Even when it’s immediately followed by him urping all over me.
If kids are so wonderful, what is driving us to delay starting a family and forcing the medical community to divert resources away from lifesaving research to serving our own selfish pursuits? Myths. I want to address four of those myths now.
• You can’t live your dreams. Kids don’t get in the way of your dreams, they force you to find a new way. If you’re not willing to change your plan to reach your dream, you didn’t really want it. If it wasn’t a child’s daily schedule getting in the way, it’d be something else. You might even find that, at the end of the day, the changes you needed to make to your plans worked a lot better than your original ones.
• Kids hold you back. Things get done because we decided that they’re important and we make them happen. Sometimes people will complain that they can’t run a marathon or write a novel, or whatever major goal they have for themselves because they have kids. I can’t help but wonder how many marathons they ran or novels they wrote in all the time they had before they had children. Kids don’t hold you back, they just offer you an excuse. If you really want something, you’ll find a way to make it happen.
• You won’t be happy. Really the only time that it’s a challenge to find joy in being a parent is during early morning feedings. Kids will bring you some degree of happiness, that’s true. They actually offer something much better: fulfillment. Happiness fades, fulfillment doesn’t.
• You’ll never have time to yourself. This one is great. Sure, your child needs your help throughout the day for all sorts of things. They also sleep. So you might not have that 5pm-9pm time slot for “me time” anymore, but 5am-6am is available, so is 9pm-midnight.
Parenting is a great responsibility. Like anything that’s worth doing, it’s difficult. By ignoring the myths and the lies, you can enjoy the experience of a lifetime: bringing forth life into the world and help it to thrive.
How to Be An Awesome Husband
Step 1: Do something that will make your wife’s life easier.
Step 2: Repeat.
Trust the Lord
Life is definitely not always easy. In the human experience we each have times of extreme joy and of extreme sadness. How we deal with the problems in our lives says a lot about who we are as people. One of the people that we often don’t seek out for assistance is God.
This year has been all about change. As my time at work winds down and Alison gets closer to graduation, we’re preparing to move our family and start really a whole new life. We’ve been sick, there’s been stress, and lots of curve balls. As I’ve gone through these challenges, I’ve been considering what it really means to trust in God. In all of the difficulties, I found myself not taking the issues up in prayer. It was quite foolish of me.
There’s a balance that we must find in our spiritual walk. On the one hand, we’re supposed to trust that God will provide for all that we need. He will and He does. On the other hand, we’re not supposed to sit around and wait for God to fix our lives. We are God’s hands and feet in this world. The things we do can cause Him to be felt in our own lives and in the lives of others.
Trust is just a hard concept all around. We want to maintain as much control as we can over the things in our lives, but it’s also healthy to accept that we can’t control everything. Carrying around the stresses and burdens of our lives solely by ourselves is not only bad for us, it’s not the way it’s supposed to be. As children, our parents carried the load for us frequently. We should rely on God the same way.
Each day, in good times and in bad, we should be constantly repeating the phrase “Jesus, I trust in you.” We should say it with conviction and with belief. Because while we are players in God’s plan, we’re not the designer of the universe. We should pray that we are the instruments that God needs us to be today.
God is bigger than your illness. God is bigger than your problems at work. God is bigger than your marital struggle. He has conquered it all. So turn to Him in humility and in trust and let His Will, not yours be done.
Last Words
Yesterday we talked about giving each day to God at the moment you wake up. But what about at the end of the day?
When it comes to my powers of estimation, I’m usually fairly good at recognizing the early warning signs of temptation and sin. During the day, I can be vigilant. At night, while asleep, it can be hard to ward off temptation, even in my dreams. Our dreams, much like the media we watch, can shape our attitudes and decision making. So if in my dreams I’m really mean to someone, when I encounter them during the waking hours, I can be predisposed to really unloading on them. Prayers before bed can be helping in defeating this nocturnal temptation.
The whole idea of prayers sporadically throughout the day and creating a rhythm of prayer in your life is to help you live a balanced life. We need to be regularly praying throughout the day and communicating with a God who loves us, who created us. By having this rhythm of prayer, you can really start to experience a balanced life that will bring you greater peace, satisfaction, and a greater degree of charity.
Praying right before you fall asleep, offering your last words of the day to God, can be the perfect way to both close out your day and protect your mind from dreams that will lead you into temptation. On top of which, I’ve found it can be a great way to ease into sleep!
Your last words close out your day and can help you to reflect on your actions. The goal is to love and serve God better tomorrow than you did today. Through reflection and prayer, you can hope to achieve that goal.
Deciding on your last words can be reflective of your spirituality. I have a devotion to the Divine Mercy, so I pray a few prayers from the Divine Mercy chaplet. I also freestyle a little bit and am usually very close to sleep at the end of the day.
Giving God your last words of the day is a great spiritual exercise. Not only does it perfectly end your day, it reorients your mind towards God.
First Words
There’s a curious phenomena in driving that involves your eyes. When you look in a direction other than straight ahead, you will start to drift in that direction. So, if you look for too long at the side of the road, you’ll soon find yourself there. This occurrence is intriguing because the same thing happens with your thoughts. If you think about things that are good, just, holy, and worthy, you’ll find that your days seem to go a little bit better. If you think about things that are near occasions of sin, you’ll find it’s really quite easy to fall into that sin.
Office morale is a major driving force in job satisfaction. Like all workers, I’ve found myself in environments when morale was high and I’ve also experienced the desolation of a low office morale. In the cases when morale was low, I redoubled my efforts to stay positive on the things I could control. What I found is that I was still able to be successful in spite of the negativity around me. During the times that I participated in the low morale, I too slipped into the darkness.
The first moments of the day can really shape the outcome of the next 12 to 16 hours. So if your alarm goes off and you experience nothing but dread, you’re not setting yourself up for success today. Attitude is everything and if you loathe your alarm clock and waking up, your day is really off to a bad start, too.
One of the spiritual habits that I’m hoping to adopt in the next few weeks is giving my first words to God. In those minutes after turning off my alarm clock and slowly waking up, I want to turn that into a prayer. I’m not very good at starting my day immediately with prayer, but I’d like to get better.
The reason that I want to adopt this practice is two-fold. First, each day is a gift and I’m terrible about taking that for granted. Second, I want to start the day by denying my pride. I only exist because God has chosen to hold me in being. I need as much of His help as I can get!
I plan to start with a simple greeting and then perhaps pray a Morning Offering. Of course, I’ll need to memorize the words first, but I’ve always liked how beautiful the words of the prayer are.
Starting our day by giving it first to God is a brilliant idea.
Subject Matter Authority
Last month I achieved a major milestone for both myself personally and for Catholic Husband. I released my first book, The Transition. I was both overwhelmed and touched with the response! One of the commenters, a veteran of the married life, commented on his first experiences of reading Catholic Husband. He remarked that initially he wondered what he could learn from me, a kid new to the game. It wasn’t meant in a disparaging way, he was just stating a fact. A fact that I fully agree with.
I’ve been married for just a year and a half now. I know very little about what it means to live an authentic Catholic marriage. I know very little about the struggles and joys that await Alison and I as we spend our lives together. I know very little about working through some very complex marital problems that all married couples face.
When I first considered launching Catholic Husband, my lack of experience was a major barrier that I had to overcome. How could I justify adding value to the lives of men who’ve been married 5, 10 or even 20 years?
In that potential weakness, I found strength. I found my focus.
Catholic Husband isn’t meant to be a textbook. It isn’t designed as a self-help book. It wasn’t conceived as a solution to your problems.
Catholic Husband was created to be a discussion. It was created to share my daily lived experience and how we can learn from it. It was designed to encourage. I hope that my experiences and my shortcomings inspire you. I hope they inspire you to keep on sharing the good news of the married life. I hope they inspire you to love your life better than you did yesterday. I hope they inspire you to keep growing in your faith.
So where does my subject matter expertise come from? My experience.
There are no “marriage experts.” There are those who have done a good job in the married life sharing their strategies to success. I don’t pretend to be at that level. But I do believe that we need to be talking about the great life that is the married life. I believe we need to counter the misconceptions about marriage. I believe we need to promote healthy, stable, faithful marriages.
Catholic Husband is designed to do just that.
Why I Don’t Buy Generic Oreos
You can often tell how good something is simple by considering whether or not you would buy a cheaper generic version. Grocery stores all across the nation have entire product lines of generic products. You can buy generic Coke (why bother?), generic dish soap, generic trash bags, and yes, even generic Oreos.
I don’t ever buy generic Oreos.
The problem isn’t the price, it’s the quality. The generic “oreo" could never possibly compare to the taste of the original chocolate cookie and how could they possibly ever hope to match the creamy goodness of that frosting center? Oh, they try, but there’s no way to cheaply replicate the essence of what Oreos are.
The gift of our human sexuality is the exact same way.
I chose to preserve the gift of my human sexuality for my wife, who turned out to be Alison. Making the choice once is the easy part, it’s the daily management of the decision that can present the problem. I dated a few people before meeting Alison, so I was able to experience a spectrum of relationships.
During my high school days and my first year of college I watched (not literally) peers and classmates experiment sexually. It would vary from a one time occurrence to a regular activity. I noticed time and again that they were never satisfied. Something seemed to be missing. Not to mention the complete devastation when their partner moved on.
You just can’t be an observer today, though. My most vivid illustration of this reality happened during my senior year of high school. I was walking down the hall between classes and a classmate, whom I had never spoken a word to in my life, asked about my relationship. After gauging how the relationship was going, he asked quite plainly, “So are you banging her?” Classy.
So what’s the big deal with pre-marital and extramarital sexual encounters? Our culture seems to think it’s fine. People seem to enjoy these temporary relationships. A recent episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine had the charming line “The best way to forget your ex is meaningless sex.”
Here’s the big deal. Sexual encounters outside of the marital bond are the generic Oreos. They’re cheap. They’re fake. They’re made with inferior ingredients. Sure, they have the outward appearance of Oreos. But they’re pretending to be something that they’re not. They’re rooted in imitation.
Our human sexuality is a very powerful and very personal gift. It’s integrated into our whole persons, especially into our psychology. The essence of our sexuality is bonding. Through total sacrifice and gift of self, sex is designed to permanently bind two people together in life giving love. So when we color outside the lines and share this deeply personal gift, we break off a piece of ourselves that we can’t get back.
Every time someone has sex outside of marriage, they give something away. When they finally do settle down with their spouse, they’re not whole. They’re broken and there’s no way to permanently fix it. We can heal and we can be forgiven, but the scar tissue remains. The past cannot be erased.
There are smaller ways that we give away our love to people who are not our spouse that doesn’t have to rise to the level of sexual relations outside of marriage Lustful thoughts, flirtatious relationships, all of these “innocent” acts damage our marital bonds. Thankfully we have the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Through the Sacrament, our sins our forgiven, we’re strengthened to do better, and our marital relationship is healed.
Many people today believe that the Church’s teachings on human sexuality are dated. Since the sexual revolution, we have experienced a radical change in societal sexual norms. There has always been pornography, pre-marital sex, extramarital affairs and sex-trafficking, but not nearly to the level of pervasiveness that we’re experiencing today. Anyone with access to the internet is .0004 seconds away from 1.6M+ Google results for pornography. The war on human traffickers is fought daily, but is lost because we still supply a demand. Birth rates outside of marriage are astronomically high. Marriage rates are dismal and divorce rates, ouch.
The results are in. The Church was right. The use of sexuality outside of marriage is an epic fail.
Pre-marital and extramarital sex are cheap imitations that can never hope to compare with the mind-blowing, Christ-reflecting, life-giving, complete surrender of marital sex. It’s only within the context of marriage that our sexuality can truly be freed to be all that it was created to be. Set yourself aside for the best. Don’t buy generic Oreos.
Rest on the Sabbath
Every year, it seems to go the exact same way. Just a few days before Ash Wednesday and I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do for Lent. I know that Lent is coming, I know that I need to take time to consider what changes to make in my life, and I still don’t give it the time it deserves. This year, I went with something really special.
I once heard a priest describe Lent as a beginning of a life change as opposed to 40 days without something. He suggested that we decide our Lenten sacrifices based on things that we wanted to change in our lives. So instead of giving up sweets, we would work on something enduring, something life-changing.
This year, I really tried to embrace that idea by giving up working on Sundays. My goal is to embrace the call to Honor the Sabbath.
For the past four years I’ve been working for the Boy Scouts of America. At the end of this month, I’ll be leaving the BSA to work on ChetComm, LLC (the media and publishing firm that’s behind Catholic Husband) and be full time caregiver to Benedict as Alison goes to work with her healing hands. Working for the Scouts is a pretty good job with flexible hours. So my schedule looked like this: Monday through Friday I blog in the early morning before work. Then for the rest of the day I go to work. I spend Saturday and Sunday working on cleaning and ChetComm business. There’s a fair amount of work to be done for ChetComm each week. I have blog post goals, book writing goals, social media planning, new product development, and strategic planning. All told, it’s several hours of intense work.
Before this Lent, it wasn’t too much of an issue since I had 48 hours each weekend to work on it. When I decided to give Sunday it’s proper place, I saw that time shrink. Incredibly, it’s been a great change! I’ve been able to more guiltlessly spend time with Alison and Benedict, I’ve been able to actually relax, and it’s given us the flexibility to go on weekend trips. I’ve noticed many other benefits.
• I’m more productive. When your available time window shrinks, you gain the ability to better focus. With just Saturday to work on cleaning and ChetComm, I’m more resilient to laziness.
• I’m less anxious. Sunday can be a double edge sword. It’s nice to have a slow day once a week, but it’s also dangerously close to Monday. That means that the dread of the week ahead and creep into your serenity. I’ve found that when Sunday is a designated family day, I’m less anxious about everything. The day ticking away doesn’t bother me. The unpleasant things that I have to do in the week ahead don’t bother me. I’m just totally present.
• I’m more relaxed. It’s almost as if God had a bigger purpose when He asked us to rest on Sundays. I’ve found that I’m more relaxed during the whole week. I know that if I keep working and pushing for a few more days, I’ll have the down time I need on Sunday. That’s a beautiful thing.
We’re called to not work on Sundays, yet it’s something that we haven’t put much of a priority on. Maybe it’s time we go back to basics.