I’m serving my daughter stale crackers and a some cubes of cheddar for lunch because I’ve been too busy pushing through another article to go buy groceries. She munches away, but I feel the eyes of the world peering in my large front window, hear their voices saying, “What is she thinking?”

Some days I’m clear. I’m set. I’m confident. Other days I think I must be ruining my children, damaging their psyches, sending them unalterable signals that will make them question my love. I comfort myself in these times by thinking back to my own childhood and realizing how much I don’t remember.

I don’t remember ever feeling unloved, even though my Mom was busy, over the years heading up local and state organizations and running a variety of small business ventures. Sometimes my questions had to wait because she was on a phone call. Sometimes we spent Saturday afternoon helping her stuff mailers for a state-wide convention.

I don’t remember every feeling neglected, though we ate out-of-the-freezer fish sticks or chicken pot pies or canned tomato soup for lunch many days. I don’t remember feeling unimportant, even when Mom was too busy for an hour of coloring with me. Read the rest of this entry »

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Coaching, team development, and personal growth are a big part of business now. I’m not sure I buy into it: seems like a corporate extension of what is often a self-help racket. Can coaching and leadership development really produce increased productivity, magically cooperative team-players, and employees so motivated they beg you for extra projects?

Maybe. Maybe not. As with most broad-sweep solutions to common problems, what you put in is exactly what you get out. A corporation can’t force you to develop yourself any more than you Mom or Dad could. It’s up to you. That said, choosing to exercise discipline, smooth out your rough places, and gain skills is beneficial whether you work in a corporate office or a drive-thru window or from a laptop at your kitchen table. Read the rest of this entry »

Courtship isn’t just that time, pre-marriage, when we spend lots of money on flowers and little stuffed animals and cell phone bills. Courtship is any kind of conscious behavior that displays affection, attentiveness, and attraction toward the one you love. The amazing thing about courtship is that it also tends to produce affection, attentiveness, and attraction from the one you love toward you. That’s what we call a mutually beneficial arrangement.

If you’ve tossed the idea of courtship out as too old-fashioned for your modern dating philosophy or too demeaning for your tolerant mindset or too much work for your stuck-in-a-rut relationship, stop and think. Any successful romantic relationship requires affection, attention, and attraction.The behavior of courtship is the ideal way to demonstrate those traits, whether you are winning a new love or reaffirming an older one. Read the rest of this entry »

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From The Growing Life:

“The process of baselining

involves writing down everything you don’t have to have, be, or do, to live a happy and fulfilled life (for more on this, see here). For example, I don’t have to own nice furniture (thrift store furniture works just fine) or a house, I don’t have to finish graduate school, I don’t have to be able to tell a coherent story about how I make money. If you’re serious about doing a thorough job of baselining, you’ll download this spreadsheet and write down how much money and time you’ll eliminate by doing away with existing possessions, obligations, and self-images…What I’ve found is that my dreams naturally emerge after I’ve eliminated bullsh*t assumptions about what I have to be, do, and have in order to be happy (if this doesn’t happen for you, then simply do some dreamlining after you’ve done some baselining).” Read the rest of this entry »

Say “spiritual gifts” to your average church-goers and they will think “prophets” or “speaking in tongues” or “crazy pentecostals.” They will say, “Oh, the spiritual gifts aren’t for today,” or “Yes, I operate in my gifting; I speak in tongues all the time” or “I don’t know much about them.”

Say “spiritual gifts” to your average non-church-goers and they will think “Huh?” (They will probably say that, too.) Read the rest of this entry »

This week has had two Mondays. I polled a small sampling of the population (two people) and both agreed with me. Monday was Monday, and then Tuesday was Monday, but meaner. Read the rest of this entry »

I tend toward what is easy. Discipline, pain, sacrifice? I shudder at the thought. Yesterday the sermon was on being spirit-led. Sounds nice, but it was uncomfortable: controlling your appetite, saying no to what you want, realizing that the urge toward what is easy, comfortable, and instantly gratifying is probably the opposite of what spirit-led means.

Everything worthwhile that I have done has required discipline, pain, and sacrifice. Think about pregnancy and birth. Even getting married, candy-coated as that time was, required change, which is always difficult, and leaving behind the old life to begin a new one. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been plotting an herb garden for a while. I have the spot: right off the back patio. It gets morning sun, it needs some life, and I can be out of my kitchen and grabbing a handful of parsley in three steps. Read the rest of this entry »

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning. Sir Winston Churchill

Just for the sake of being certain that I am not stripping myself of all sense and meaning, a few unreserved assertions: Read the rest of this entry »