Tag / Observations

by Greg

Dealing With Frustrations In Kid Training

As I went downstairs to help catch up on our family’s laundry backlog today, I was shocked (and yet, not surprised at all) to find it in complete disarray. Various articles of clothing strewn everywhere from the steps to the washer and dryer, and then all around both of those.

“Alex!!” I thought to myself, angered and frustrated… and exasperated.

Alex is our now 8-year-old laundry helper. For some reason when he was about 5 years old he volunteered for laundry duty, and so, Mom was happy to employ his services! But, also for some reason—believe me, we’ve asked, but without success thus far—he can not do some very simple parts of it (even with clear instruction).

Now, there are many more important things we want Alex to learn. To consider others better than himself. To know that he is loved more than he can imagine by his Creator. To know that Creator. And plenty of other things we are building into his character, as with all our kids.

But at what point is this a character issue? My dad always taught me, “Do it right the first time!” I still remember it today, and I think I live it. So, I’ve been saying that with Alex on this, too, since we have had to re-wash loads of laundry more times than I can count.

The real character issue is that he seems to try to cover up his “forgetfulness” (when he doesn’t do what he tells Mom that he did do). When is it just a tiny eight-year-old boy learning to do a job that may be beyond his physical abilities right now, and when is it an issue of disobedience and even lying to cover up the disobedience. That’s what we’re trying to figure out.

Anyone reading this have any similar experience, and perhaps a solution or two that worked for you? Everyone is different, so who knows if it would work for Alex, but so far, we have not found any method of correction that has. And at this point the frustration is not just Mom & Dad’s, but also little Alex’s, too. And that’s no good.

So we keep plugging away at this parenting thing. Sometimes we learn a lesson from parents who’ve gone before us. Sometimes we learn from how our Father teaches and trains us. Sometimes we just learn “by accident”. 🙂 (We have a lot of practice!) But, we keep going, because even through any frustrations, there are not any cooler people on the planet than these six that God has entrusted to our care.

(Probably a slightly biased view, but 100% true from my vantage point.) 🙂

by Greg

Olympic Hockey: National Personalities?

Ryan Miller - Team USA
Team USA, on the strength of Ryan Miller’s shut out, and Zach Parise’s two goals, advanced to the Olympic “final four” yesterday. It was a fantastic day of hockey! The Canadian team looked super impressive, beating up on the Russians, 7-3… but making it look even easier than that. (And Russia is loaded with NHL all-stars!) Actually, all of the teams—not just the Russians—are loaded with NHL all-stars.

(Except for the United States team. Fascinating.)

Team USA has had superb goal tending—much like the Buffalo Sabres—and are the only undefeated team left in the tournament. They are also “scrappy” and physical, and they just play like they won’t accept losing. Aside from the Canadian players, it was interesting to see the “personalities” of each nation’s players. The United States players are as I described above. Mostly second and third-line players who are the “heart and soul”, the “grit” of their teams. You can’t win without them. (But usually, you can’t win if they are your whole team… So, we do have Patrick Kane and even Zach Parise, who are more “skilled players” and natural scorers.)

Then there is the Russian team. If you look at their roster, it’s just staggering how much fire power they have. Alexander Ovechkin is the leagues top goal scorer. And right behind him—sometimes in front of him—is Evgeni Malkin, and right behind them in the scoring column is Ilya Kovalchuk. All three are members of the Russian team, along with a handful of other amazing, all-star players.

But what I noticed about these guys was, they almost looked inept. They were definitely not the offensive machines that they are each night in the NHL. Yes, Canada had a good defensive scheme and some pretty talented defensemen (and a talented goalie) but, they face that from most teams in the NHL.

What they were missing was their teammates.

They needed the guys who are on Team USA. The grit guys. They needed the guys on Team Canada, the guys who set up their scoring. They need the skill and experience of the Fins and Swedes… the savvy veterans who set up their amazing scoring plays. Sadly, even their goalies (who are equally amazing) just looked silly, as all these highly skilled scorer try to play defense in front of them.

I just found it really intriguing to see how a country could have a hockey “personality.”

It’s certainly why the Russians lost. For the most part, every NHL team would want any of those top 6 or 7 guys on the Russian’s team… but with a few guys sprinkled in to help them thrive.

The four remaining teams seem to have a bit better balance. (Though, as I mentioned, Team USA is the most unbalanced, with hardly a “star” player on the roster.)

Really fun hockey being played these days. The semifinals are tomorrow. USA vs Finland, and surprising (but talented) Slovokia vs the homeland favorite, Canada. A rematch of USA vs Canada (which team USA won 4-3) would be a fantastic Gold Medal game … but all four of the remaining games should be fantastic. Can’t wait!

by Greg

Drop By For A Visit

Last night as we were closing down for the night in the Campbell home, I shut off the light and said aloud, “I guess I can turn this off now. I always turn our front and back lights on, in case anyone wants to stop by for a visit. Never seems to work, though, does it?” The other Campbells around me agreed.

This is something I have been lamenting for quite a while. (Note: I chose the word “lament” because I don’t mean complain. I mean lament.) Our American busyness has nearly eliminated face-to-face, unplanned interaction with our neighbors.

Yes, we do see each other. We even get together now and again with friends. We Campbells really enjoy spending time with a couple different families who both live about a 45-minute drive from our house! (Definitely hard to “drop by” there.) We even see our friends who live within walking distance of our home, but usually in passing as we both continue with our to-do lists.

I actually completely understand. We’re some of the least busy people that I know, yet, with all of the very young people in our house, everyday life is full enough to allow us very little “down time” in our days. Now add to that every social, athletic, spiritual, community, academic, and assorted other schedules (for every person in the family) and most of us have lives so chock-full that we don’t really get to just “drop by” anymore.

Partly our culture is to blame. We are very individualistic. It’s the “American way” to the core. It starts with the notion that you can (and should?) be responsible for yourself, earn your living, and have a you-can-do-it mentality. (Note: that seems to be slowly eroding with passing generations, though. Current trend seems to be more toward allowing others to be responsible for your living … but I digress…) Wherever it starts, it certainly continues to the point that we rarely even see our neighbors, let alone interact with them.

And so we text. We “Facebook”. We email. (Does anyone besides me still email?) All ways to stay connected despite our disconnected lives.

Sure, we see each other. Most of our busyness is with other people. We are together in our busyness. But moments of just dropping by for a visit—at least from my vantage point—are a relic from another era.

It’s OK to move on, for sure. Everything changes. But have we lost too much? It’s amazing to me sometimes that I really don’t know most of the people around me. (Note: I intend no accusation or placement of blame by any of these comments, merely stating observations. If anything, I can actually take much of the “blame” for this. I could perhaps make more of an effort to just “drop by” for a visit … but am often feeling too overloaded myself!)

Perhaps it’s a winter thing. We do see our neighbors more in the summertime. Perhaps it’s just a “me” thing? (Do you fraternize with your neighbors more than we do?) Perhaps it is a cultural thing that just won’t go away any time soon.

For now, I’ll still leave the lights on.

by Greg

The End of The Aught

For whatever reason, I’ve taken to using the words “aught nine” to describing the end of this year, and even this decade. (Well, the “aught” part.) And lately, Jen was quite confused by my usage of the archaic term… so I explained it to her, but then realized it was odd enough that I should do some investigating myself.

Turns out, many others are confused as well. Is it “ought,” or is it “aught?” Well, from this source, a page attempting to help court reporters know the meaning of words that sound the same (homonyms) so they put the right one into the report … the correct spelling would be “aught.”

Since my sister-in-law is a court reporter to be … I’m gonna trust that answer. She’s pretty smart, so must be right… 🙂

Only a couple weeks left of the aught… then we’re on to the… tens? Teens? What will it be?

I guess it will be the tens, since the world will end just before the teens. 🙂

by Greg

Institutional vs. Relational … and The World of Pretend

There's The Steeple... Here's The ChurchI’ve really been thinking a lot recently on institutional vs. relational life. Some might argue with me that that’s too limiting, that there are more than two ways to live life with other people… but so far, I’m feeling like almost everything I’m seeing falls into one of those two categories. It’s kinda crazy!

It has mostly come up in discussions surrounding politics (well, government), home schooling, and church … but really just our culture in general. Most of us in our culture seem to prefer to do our relating in an structured, institutional way rather than a more informal, familiar, relational way.

We get into a mindset of thinking that there are “experts” and “proper channels” and structures that life must be lived through, and even received from. We see it in all of those areas: government, education, and church. And as I said, across many aspects of life. We like to follow the experts.

I have also still been making my way through the “church book” that I published a couple years ago now, which has still been very enjoyable and so interesting to see what God was showing me then, and where he’s leading me now. The most recent chapter I read was titled, “The World of Pretend” and actually fits right in with the topic of institutional vs relational relating.

Here’s a quote that stood out to me from that chapter:

Wherever you are in your journey with him… be there. Don’t get your light from other Lamps. Live in the Light of THE Light. [I had earlier reminded the readers that Jesus said he is the ‘Light of the World’] Let him live in you, and teach you, and lead you. He is our source. Not the church. Not any pastor. Not any teacher. HE is the Light. HE wants a relationship with YOU. Really.

This may be one of the truths that we Christians most glance over and/or miss completely. “Christianity” is really the “world of pretend” as I put it. The reality is a life full of all that we are, lived in step with Jesus, the creator of all that is. We may try to put structures around that to manage it, but really… unless we’re mainly, mostly (maybe only?) really listening to and following him, then we’re not living in the “fullness of life” that he promised. It may seem helpful and good to get spiritual sustenance from another “smarter”, “more spiritual” person … but we are not the Life. Jesus is. No system can contain the Life. It’s really and truly only found in him. It is him.

I just found that chapter helpful, and strangely connected to the notion of doing life together relationally, vs structuring it institutionally. Perhaps you will, too.

Enjoy.

by Greg

The Church Is The Fruit, Not The Cause

I’m catching up on listening to some old podcasts while I work today, and just thought I’d take note of (and share here) something that was “just” said on The God Journey podcast.

“You get the idea that this didn’t begin with management. It began with life. And that life expanded among a group of people. And that’s how I see it now. I think what the church is is the fruit of something, not the cause of something.”

That was from the show titled, “The Wonder of Real Community” posted on Aug 7th. The discussion centers around life together as the church and how many things can get in the way of open, honest relationships with other people living life with Jesus. Good stuff as always.

I think the part that stood out to me was how quickly we took something that came out of real relationship with the real God (in Jesus) and have attempted to build it, manage it, control it, reproduce it, etc. The problem lies not only in the verbs previously used, but in the word “it”. I’ve said before, as soon as whatever we are part of becomes an “it” then “it” starts to become the focus rather than the life that is found in Jesus, and shared with his church.

I’ve been encouraged by reading through the stuff I wrote a few years ago now in my There’s The Steeple… Here’s The Church book, and the guys who do The God Journey podcast have also been an encouragement along the way. Check out either of those links, I think you’ll enjoy them.

by Greg

Instant Message, Facebook, Texting and Twitter

Means of communication

Recently I was pondering this crazy social and technological trend our society has taken toward communicating in short bits of strangely coded information. We no longer speak to each other in the English language. We’ve shortened it to strange acronyms or just improperly spelled words (often incorporating numerals) and we’ve also limited ourselves to 140 characters.

And that’s not even why I don’t like it. (OK, a little, but not totally.)

I actually took to instant message communication right away. All the way back to my days as an AOL subscriber. (I shudder a bit to admit that, but come on, in 1995 everyone was an AOL subscriber! Just pop in the free disc you got in the mail and away you go! You’re on the internets!!) Instant message was a quick and easy way to send someone a message, discuss current plans, even send files to each other. And, we quickly learned to transition from well-crafted, complete thoughts in e-mail (like when we used to write letters by hand or by type writer… man, I am dating myself in this post…) to short bursts of thoughts, line by line, to the person who we knew was on the receiving end at the same instant we were sending them. It was cool.

Instant Messaging led to texting via mobile phones. As mobile phones became more ubiquitous (and much tinier! [Digression upcoming…] Does anyone remember car phones? My family had one that literally was the size of a large office desk phone that I believe was plugged into the vehicle in at least two or three ways, had a cord(!!) and a large antenna – on the outside of the vehicle? – to boot. Wow.)

So, as cell phones became all the rage, we transitioned instant message communication to phones. You could chat instantly with people wherever you were. And, being like and IM conversation, they could respond whenever they were able. A less intrusive way to communicate. Very cool.

But since the medium of communication was these phone keypads (remember when phones had just a number pad on them? you had to hit buttons two, three, or four times to get the letter you wanted) the words we communicated got even crazier. You’ve seen the shorthand. lol (“laugh out loud”), rotfl (“roll on the floor laughing”), brb (“be right back”), etc. There are so many, many more. It makes sense why, via this mode of communicating, we would need to shorten and abbreviate, but the interesting issue here is that these abbreviations have almost become the standard way to communicate.

Now that we are used to quick, non-English communication, enter social networking sites. First it was MySpace who was king of the hill. MySpace was nasty. As a web designer, I was appalled by the design of the site and its user’s pages. I was equally appalled by the user-generated content of the pages. Because of this, I stayed away.

But then Facebook opened up its pages to the world, and I was curious, so… upon investigation, seeing a much cleaner design, less offensive content (at the time, and to a degree, it still is) and some good privacy controls that limited who could see what on my account, I set up an account in May of 2007. (Yeah, I was a little late to the party, but as you’ve already seen above… I’m old!)

As Facebook grew in popularity in 2008, so did social networking in general. Lots of different sites offering ways to instantly communicate with friends, co-workers, even just people you don’t know. The biggest name to pop on the scene, probably mid-late 2008 is Twitter. You’ve certainly heard of Twitter. What began as a tech-geek adaptation of text messaging has now literally been adapted into our culture and even language. We were watching the NFL Network last night and they unabashedly use the verb “Tweet” throughout their broadcasts.

Crazy.

But why not? It has been a rather natural progression. Letters and memos and notes to e-mail. E-mail to Instant Messaging. Instant messaging to texting. Texting and Instant Messaging to status updates and “wall posts” on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. And then “status updates” via your mobile phone (which goes back to texting) through Twitter.

The difference for me—and the reason why I don’t use Twitter—is the target of your communication. I still use instant messaging… a lot. Probably mostly. But I do use my Facebook account pretty often, letting people know (in brief statements, though not limited to 140 characters) what I’m doing, or thinking, or feeling. The thing is, I know who those messages are going to. When I say something about me or our family, I’m saying it to a group of people I know. If I were to “Tweet” (I can’t believe I just wrote that…) my thoughts, they are literally blasted out publicly to the entire world (at least, available to the entire world) even if I am directing them to a certain person or group of people. The difference with the Twitter platform is that, the target audience.

This blog is broadcast to the whole world. So, it’s similar in that way. But I don’t post things here that I do post on Facebook. Because this is a public forum. I’m not sure if that’s completely it, but I really think that’s the main difference and reason that I still haven’t found a use for Twitter. (And why I am so fascinated by how widely it has been embraced… why are we such exhibitionists today? Perhaps it’s just easier to do, and on a bigger scale today.)

So, pick your poison: IM, texting, Facebook, Twitter… they’re certainly here to stay, and shaping the way we communicate. I’m not sure it’s for the better, but it’s certainly more than a fad. And when these particular ones fade, I’m sure new ones will crop up.

Communication will continue. I’m hoping that coherent, English, grammatically correct, well-presented thought will.

we’ll have 2 c …

by Greg

Humble Scientists

We received a complimentary copy of the latest edition of Creation magazine (the Answers in Genesis folks) and I have been perusing it the past couple days. I really enjoy the subject matter they cover, and I believe that my worldview is similar enough to theirs that I can mostly relate to what they are presenting, so it’s generally a good read.

What makes me sad is that as I read it, I sense the same (or greater?) arrogance that I would get from any staunch “Darwinist” in their writings. Their conclusions—really just most of the words they choose to use—drip with arrogance. Their angle seems mostly to tear down the “prevailing” scientific thought of the day, which seems to begin with the parameter that there is no God (or supernatural) and so all of life happened on its own.

As I said, the arrogance permeates all of science, no matter which fundamental worldview you happen to hold to. Whether you feel the evidence points to evolution and all of those conclusions, or a creator and his creation and all of those conclusions (or somewhere in between I suppose?) why the need for such definitive certainty? In most cases, we just can’t know everything. We know what we know now, and usually that’s only a part anyway.

So I was just thinking, wouldn’t it be cool if there was some organization for humble scientists? Scientists who pledged no allegiance to a theory or a doctrine or, even worse, a financial underwriter or a political party? How great would that be to just have intellectually honest investigation of the facts, based on current theories, and then a neutral (although, can never be completely neutral) presentation of the current conclusions from the current studies? What could be wrong with that?

If I was a scientist, in the scientist community… that’s what I would do.

by Greg

Tips Should Be Tips!

Today as we ate at a sit-down restaurant for the second day in a row (may be a record!) I found myself in the familiar place of attempting to figure out what a “fair” tip would be for our waitress. Generally I do a few dollars, which is probably about the percentage it is “supposed” to be.

But this time I had to pause for a few reasons. First, we have spent a bunch of money this weekend on home school books and other supplies, so, was considering the overall funding. Then, the waitress wasn’t really all that helpful. Aren’t you supposed to tip for excellent service?

That’s when I realized what a crazy system the whole “tipping” thing has become!!

Listen, people… TIPS are BONUS money given for doing a GOOD job!!! They are not a requirement. They can’t be. Then they are not tips!

But, I know. Part of the brokenness of the system is that the employing restaurant does not pay their servers a fair wage. They pay less because they realize that “tips” have become a “required” expense for those doing the dining. So they pay less? How is that fair? Doesn’t make any sense… they should get paid to do the work they are doing!

Some places even have a forced gratuity (for large parties, etc). Come on!!

Hmmph! I am pretty close to deciding to never tip a waiter/waitress/server again. If I’m forced to pay a predetermined amount… how is that a “tip”? How do I get to choose to show someone I appreciated their service with a little bonus? I don’t!

So, that’s my rant for the day. TIPS should be TIPS!

🙂

by Greg

Time Flies When You’re Not Driving a Bus

I realized today just how long it’s been since I drove a school bus.

Jen & I spent a decent chunk of this day driving through the streets of Fairport, NY. It was their annual Canal Days festival, and we were privileged to have a babysitter caring for our kids, so we decided to check it out.

First, we drove through the various side streets of the village looking for a street-side parking spot. This was an adventure! Canal Days are quite well attended on sunny, 75º days! We managed to find a spot, and eventually made our way to the festival.

We enjoyed the fact that we had no kids in tow (AND the fact that I got some Perry’s White Lightning ice cream at a little ice cream shop there!!) – and we enjoyed a nice leisurely browsing of the library book sale. But, overall, not really our thing. (Lots of people, a little too hot…) So, we moved on.

Due to modified traffic patterns caused by all the people, vendors, and other fun stuff from the event, we took a few side streets that I knew of from my bus driving days. As we traveled the “back” roads, I recounted a story or two of my time as a Fairport schools bus driver (bus #190!). I told Jen about the places I stopped, the kids I remembered picking up, and even the long break I had at one of the schools we passed today.

Then all of a sudden it hit me.

None – not one – of the kids I drove on those school bus routes … are still in school!!!

Holy cow. How can that be?? But it’s true. I drove their busses the 1996-1997 school year. That is 13 school years ago. Thirteen! So, even the kindergartners I drove… they have graduated. (Or maybe are this year, I suppose.)

It doesn’t seem that long. It really doesn’t.

The older I get the more I realize that the old people before me were right. Time just keeps going faster, and faster. It really does. Before you know it, it’s been 13 years, and all the kids you drove to and from school are too old to be in school.

Craziness!