The biggest problem we were having six months ago was the insubordination. I could see surviving the next five years of his time at home with bad grades, but he was yelling at my wife and me, calling us names, telling us to get out of his room, claiming he had all of these “rights”, etc. and it was terrible. I actually had to resort to spankings again, which I hated to do. But frankly, they worked. It helped to establish a bit of the authority structure in our home. One day when he is grown we will be able to talk about this, but I am still surprised that he always submitted to the spankings and never ran or refused to accept one.

The thing with grades is almost as remarkable. He got his first B in algebra this year. The neatest part of it, however, is to see his joy in the success and how hungry he is for more success. He actually came to me to have me help him with his algebra homework EARLY two nights before it was due. I almost made him go through DNA testing to make sure it was really him.

I don’t want to take this time for granted. I also want to remember that it can still go the other way as well. But God is teaching me to live in the moment–not the past or the future–and this moment is really nice.

JoN

Then she got her big break. They were casting a Shakespeare play for the fall and they needed a child. Someone from the original play remembered her and they pretty much offered her the part without even auditioning. At this point she thought that this acting thing was going to be easy.

Then reality set in. She has auditioned for main roles in the last two plays they have done, and she didn’t get the role both times. As a father, I am thrilled because it is not only teaching her that she is not God’s gift to the theater and she will have to earn the parts she gets (don’t get me wrong, she does work very hard for her auditions, but there are always one or two others who are simply better), but it also teaches her to be a part of the entire cast and contribute in other ways while accepting the defeat of not getting the part she wants.

To her credit, she has done great. Last year, she was in the “off-stage chorus”. This meant that she sang with a group of adults into a microphone off stage and no one ever saw her or gave her any credit for the show. Her name wasn’t anywhere in the program. I told her that she was experiencing the life of the stage crew, and it would give her appreciation for what they give to the theater and what they don’t get back from it.

She didn’t get the part this week, but she will be in the kids chorus. I took her out for ice cream last night to celebrate. She did a great job in her audition. She worked hard. She got a call-back, and out of out about 12 girls who were auditioning in the first round, she was probably the second or third on the director’s list. What is impressing me is that she was disappointed, but she also has no regrets about her performance and how she auditioned, and she is happy just to be a part of the show.

Five years ago I was unemployed for six months. Several times, I would be a finalist for a job, but they would pick the other person. It was very frustrating. My wife pointed out to my daughter yesterday that I know how she feels. She was able to see that and even remember a little of how I responded to similar setbacks. Thinking back, I hope I was a good example, and that God used me in those times to teach my kids for what they are facing now.

JoN

Yesterday was my birthday. My wife pointed out to me this morning that my son not only got me a nice present, but he offered to do extra chores the rest of the week in order to make sure I got something nice.

The truth is, I am really proud of my son. We go through these rough spots, but getting past the insubordination that was out of control last fall has made the other things much easier to deal with.

I’m praying through this and trying to get better. In the meantime, I really do like my present!

JoN

1. Submitted relationship to God
2. Strong work ethic
3. Compassion, kindness, humility, and mercy to others
4. Academically successful
5. Wisdom

Okay, maybe I did put that in some sort of order. This would be what I want for my children. If all five of those areas developed in them then they would be the perfect children, right?

I guess what I am being convicted about this morning is that I have focused a lot more on their academics lately (especially my son) than I have the other areas. In particular, the first area has been difficult–complete submission to God.

We moved to our town over four years ago, and we still have not found a church situation that attracts all four of us. Frankly, I[‘m not sure we’ve found one that attracts any of the four of us. I was reading Psalm 122 this morning, and it seems that David is talking about corporate worship. I got to thinking about the importance of corporate worship and how it keeps our fires going in a way that the fire can’t when we are trying to live a spiritually isolated life.

So that’s my conviction today. Perhaps I need to pay a little more attention to number 1 on the list and a little less to number 4.

JoN

When last we left off, things were still going well from the pre-Spring Break breakthrough that my son and I experienced. Well, in essence, his brain never came back from Spring Break, and he reverted back to the same habits of not doing homework, not studying for tests, etc. The trick is that he had to take some state standardized tests this week, and he thinks he might have actually failed the math one. In our state, you get two more chances to take the test, but if you don’t pass then you don’t go to the next grade. Frankly, for someone who is in all honors courses, just failing it once would be pretty embarrassing.

The biggest challenge of this latest upheaval is that my wife and I found ourselves at odds over how to respond to him. For her, maintaining a positive, friendly relationship is paramount. For me, I am not willing to maintain relationship at any cost. In my mind, relationship is a two-way street, and if he is not willing to meet us halfway, then I am not going to simply roll over and reach all of the way to him. After all, God does his best to reach out to us, but we still have to reach back.

At this point, we are still a work in progress and I don’t know how things will turn out. He did let me help him with some math last night. But I am more concerned about my wife and me being on the same page. For the moment, I think we are, but if he is able to divide us against each other then he will have not only won a victory for himself, but he will have caused damage to our relationship for the future.

JoN

One thing I was able to see in my dad this weekend is how gracious he can be. On the second day of our trip I was driving and got into a fender-bender. It was my fault, although I didn’t make an egregious mistake. Now, my dad has a nice car and it is only a couple of months old. But he was gracious through the whole thing. Kind, unaccusing, and benevolent in spirit and attitude. I was feeling terrible about it, and he did everything he could to make me feel better.

If you have a living parent or parents, I challenge you to do something similar. Find something to do and go and do it. It will bless you and them. Now, I just need to see if I can do something similar with my mother. There’s no time like the present and you never know when the opportunity will be gone.

JoN

Why is my ear “trained”? Because it took us a few years to figure out that that is exactly what our daughter would do to our son. We eventually called it “throwing him under the bus”. It’s fascinating not only to see how easily parents can be sucked into the idea that the younger child MUST be protected from the older child, but also how quickly the younger child can figure that out and use it to manipulate siblings and parents.

I talked with my friend about it later as we were returning from the game. He seemed grateful for the insight and to know about what we have been through.

Then tonight, just one night later, I heard my daughter and son start to get into an argument just as they were going to bed. She was doing it again. He might have done something annoying, but she was escalating it so that I would get involved. And I almost did. I almost rushed to her rescue. What is it about me that feels the needs to blindly protect the younger child? Is it because I’m a “youngest child” and I can empathize? I don’t know, but I do know that I resisted, didn’t get involved, and they both went to bed. It could easily have become a situation where I would have taken her side and gotten into a senseless argument with my son. Instead, I stayed out of it, let them solve it, and didn’t create unnecessary conflict with my son.

Hope you have a good weekend. I’ll be out of town for a couple of days.

JoN

My daughter turned eleven today. Kind of hard to believe. My wife told her that she could shave her legs when she turned eleven, so last night she got my daughter some cream and razor blade and taught her how. It is probably the first example I know of where girl shaved her legs AFTER she got permission. I know my sister didn’t wait, and whenever the topic comes up with women I know, they all tell a different version of the same story: I was too embarrassed about my legs to wait any longer.

My son, for his part, is slow to develop facial hair–at least he is slower than he thinks he should be. I don’t remember starting at his age, but he sees other kids able to shave (and need it) so he wants to as well. He came to me tonight (probably inspired by his little sister and her legs) and told me that he had borrowed my stuff to shave. Fascinating.

I have decided that parenting is a series of battlefield promotions (as my dad calls them). We are in the middle of the fight when we get new and scarier responsibilities–not because we’re ready for them, but because the situation makes it necessary. Well, I feel like I keep getting promoted way above my children’s (and my wife’s) needs. Father, help me.

JoN

Then I started to ruminate on that thought a little and my guilt eased. First, she is having a great time, and I don’t think she misses me either. It is okay to have a few days apart and not miss each other. There’s nothing wrong with that. The second thought I had was that what I don’t miss are the conflicts between her and our son. They are often arguing about something and my wife and I have to referee. My wife’s biggest dread of spring break and summer is the arguing between them. With my daughter gone, the arguments are negligible.

Then there are the little things that she does that annoy me. I don’t miss those either. And as I thought about it I concluded that there are probably some annoying things about me that she doesn’t miss either.

Finally, I wondered if she was here and my son was gone for a week, would I feel any different? The answer was that I would feel the same. I would be enjoying one-on-one time with her and not missing my son.

So that brings me back to why don’t I miss my children when they are gone? One of the things I look forward to each summer is when they go to camp for a couple of weeks. That is one-on-one time with my wife and I love it. I am always sad to see it end. But I also really enjoy one-on-one time with each kid. That is fun too. I guess it is the balancing of the relationships that gets fatiguing and I don’t miss. I enjoy the freedom to interact with each person without being encumbered by the others. I wonder what that says about me. I wonder how common that is.

Just heard from my dad that he wants to take my son to an NBA game tomorrow night. Looks like I’ll get my night alone with my wife after all. Yippee!

JoN

I was looking for an opening to talk with my son about sex and the philosophical aspect of a Christian’s perspective against the “world’s” perspective. We were driving down the highway listening to sports radio when they started talking about Tiger Woods and Shaquille O’Neal. What a great opening.

We started talking about how casually the world treats sex–television, movies, the news, and even sex education at school. The lie that is told is that it is natural and no big deal. You know that sports figures have women throwing themselves at them all of the time. There is one prominent player who wanted to marry his college sweetheart and there was no way she would do it because she knew the kind of life NBA players lead on the road. Somehow he convinced her he would be different and twelve years later they are still married so I guess he has pulled it off. But it can’t be easy.

But back to my conversation with my son, I told him that what no one talks about is the psycological connection you make with a person during sex. I told him that, on the plus side, his mother is the only person I have ever had sex with. On the negative side, during our three years of dating, we had sex during the middle year. It was something we both wanted, but while I was feeling guilty and wanting to stop she was unwilling. Now, you would think that most guys would be all for that, but what I found out later was that a lot of her “desire” was coming from abuse issues from her childhood. So while I should have been protecting her and helping her work through these issues, I was instead having sex with her. It was a conversation with the pastor who was set to marry us a year later that helped us both to stop and try to heal as much as we could before we got married.

I think I was able to communicate, at least somewhat, that the things he sees in movies, on TV, etc. are not true. They are not God’s best, and you can talk about avoiding sex to keep from getting diseases and having unwanted pregnancies, but the truth is, you need to save it for marriage because it is God’s best for each of us. I wish I had been able to wait.

JoN