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Category: Family time (Page 4 of 6)

Back to the Grind! A Way to Leverage the Hectic Life of a Parent

August 2, 2015 / / 0 Comments

One of the reasons I love summer is the opportunity for relationship and quality time as a family.  As the window on summer closes and the school year grind is gearing up, I’ve been thinking about ways to keep a focus on relationships in the midst of the busyness of a school year.  And let’s be honest…

We are busy people.  We have a lot going on.

It’s not just the adults that are busy.  Many kids today are just as busy.  My greatest fear, as a parent, is becoming nothing more than a taxi cab!  As if my only role in life is carting them around to school, sports, friends, and wherever else they think they need to go.

As we gear up for the busyness of the fall, I wanted to share something that I’ve found very helpful.   It’s a chart from the book, Think Orange: Imagine the Impact When Church and Family Collide….  It gives you a way to think thru your day (maybe in ways you’ve never thought about before) and see that you have many opportunities to come alongside your son or daughter and influence, love, shape, and nurture.

Screen Shot 2014-08-21 at 10.49.03 PM

There are times in the day that can be leveraged for relationship.  Can you imagine the last time in a day you were able to establish values, interpret life, build intimacy, and instill purpose???

Meal time, drive time, bed time, morning time are all great opportunities to parent and influence your child.

Here’s the deal:  it’s not that you are going to have to give an impressive speech at each one of these moments everyday.  That’s simply not realistic!  However, the cumulative effect over time of you leveraging these moments (with different levels of success) over the course of a child’s life will shape that life!

This chart helps us think through how we can still find places to influence and parent in the middle of our shuffling around.  It reminds us to slow down and be intentional.  It might even encourage you to try to create some new habits with your kids so you have the times listed above (Anyone getting their kids to sit at the table with them for dinner these days?)

Summer is almost over and the school year is upon us.  I hope this is a practical tool that you can use to be the parent you want to be to your kids!

Have you ever thought about your day this way? 

How can you take one of these ideas and implement into your routine today?

Which role of the of four listed above do you most often play?   Which do you neglect?

I would love to hear your thoughts!

Lightning

May 5, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Lately, I’ve been connecting with and hearing stories from parents, who I consider to have incredible relationships with their kids throughout the high school/college years and into adulthood.  There is depth, communication, and joy in these relationships.  On top of that, they actually look like they enjoy being around one another!

We all know there is plenty of unhealthy forms of this, but this isn’t that type of relationship.  I know that many of us desire this type of relationship, but you might be wondering like I did…“How did you guys do that?”

Andy Stanley, pastor of Northpoint Church, said he and his wife had these two goals in regards to their family life together:
1.  We want to enjoy each other when the kids are gone.
2.  When our kids are grown, we want them to want to be together, and with us, when they don’t have to be.

YES!  That’s it.  Simple, yet these take some work to accomplish.

Connecting with your child takes intentionality. There’s a rhythm there, a pace, a consistency that your child can rely on. Maybe it’s at the dinner table. Maybe it’s every Saturday morning. It looks different for different families.

But there has been a common theme in the stories I’ve heard from the parents I mentioned earlier—it’s not just a one-time thing.  It can’t be.  I think this article will help you think about it in a new way.

LIGHTNING
By Reggie Joiner

It takes a quantity of quality time spent together to create a rhythm of connecting in your family. And the simple reason that it takes quantity of quality time is because significant moments are unpredictable. Most of us want to be there when our baby takes the first step, or our daughter makes her first basketball goal, or our son wins an award, or our child asks an important question. But you just never know when significant moments are going to happen.

If you hope to be present for the significant moments, then you will have to be present for the seemingly insignificant moments.

It’s like when I try to catch a picture of lightning. It’s a tricky thing for a photographer to shoot lightning. You can’t take the shot when you see the light. At that point it’s really too late. By the time you press the shutter release you have already missed it.

The best strategy is to set the camera to continuously shoot, so that it actually stands a better chance of opening the shutter before the lightning strikes. Sure you will get a lot of insignificant photos that way, but it’s probably the only chance you have of catching some incredible moments.

Kids and lightning have a lot in common. If you want to experience some extraordinary moments with your children, then you have to be there for a lot of ordinary moments.

Looking back I am grateful that…

I limited my travel schedule away from home when my kids were young.

I rarely missed attending a school, athletic or church event with them.

I worked to keep my schedule flexible when they were teenagers.

I learned to do those things just in case something came up (and it almost always did).

I’ve never met an older mom or dad, who said, “Yeah if had it to do all over again, I’d spend less time with my kids, and more time doing other things.” They seem to always say just the opposite.

“I wish I had spent more time with my kids …”

Just remember it’s easy to miss a lightning bolt. It happens fast—then it’s gone.

The best way to catch unpredictable moments with your children is to be predictable with how you spend time together.

 

From www.orangeparents.org. Reprinted with permission. © 2010 Orange.

 

If you have a great story to share or a rhythm that worked for your family to accomplish this, please share it with us in the comments!

Seeking the Perfect Picture

December 18, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Does it mean that we are bad parents, if we can’t get that perfect Christmas card picture?

Not a chance, but if your family is like mine, this can be a frustrating experience.  Our girls sense it coming and immediately rebel.  I’ll admit, as a husband, I need to do a better job of making it happen.  If I’m honest I rebel a bit as well.  Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking –

The perfect picture isn’t an accurate representation of who we are!

I worry sometimes that the church holds up perfect pictures (aka that Christmas cards where everyone is smiling and pretty and behaved and…) and say to families, “This is it!  This is what it should look like!”  I greatly appreciate the words of Reggie Joiner and hope they encourage you as well,

“God doesn’t use perfect pictures.  God uses broken people.  God’s desire is to work through every family to bring redemption and restoration.  It’s not about better pictures, it’s about a bigger story.  Family is a platform God uses to demonstrate His story of redemption”

This Christmas season, don’t worry about living up to a perfect picture, just lean into the messy joy of being family.  Lean in  and engage much like our Creator did through sending his son to walk among the messy joy of humanity.  Your brokenness and God’s activity in the middle of it are part of grand story God is unfolding.  Your family is perfect for this task!

I hope you all got the perfect picture for your card this year!  I really do.  But also remember that where there’s a gap between the picture and reality, Emmanuel (God with us) is there to fill it with grace and redemption.

Praying for rest, joy, relationship, and a nearness of God’s presence for your family this holiday season.

Merry Christmas!

 

For a little extra encouragement, here is an excerpt from a post that has been the most popular on this blog.  You can read the full post here:  “I Have Nothing To Wear”

 

There is a temptation as parents to think we haven’t got what it takes.

The truth is you have everything you need to be successful as a parent!  Still, many of us don’t feel this is true in our daily lives.  We are like the person staring blankly into a closet full of clothes and proclaiming, “I have nothing wear!”

Being the Broken Parent a Kid Needs

We are all broken – you, your kids, your parents, your spouse.  The best thing for our kids is for us to own up to this fact.

When we own up to our brokenness we give our kids a front row seat to God’s activity in our lives.  Our kids don’t need to see us be perfect to be the kind of human beings we want them to grow up to be…They need to see God’s redemptive activity in our lives taking what’s broken and making it new.

So let’s make this simple.  You don’t have to be perfect, you don’t have to measure up to whatever comparisons are out there.  You simply need to be willing to grow – to be the person God is calling you to be.  It looks more like surrender than striving.  It’s a matter of being willing to engage more than being an expert.  I love this quote from Brene Brown,

“Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting.”

Forget what you know about parenting, who are you becoming?  How are you engaging the world around you?  How are you growing and seeking relationship?

“Faith is caught more than it is taught” is an absolutely true saying.  Let’s give our kids a front row seat to God taking us, broken people, and accomplishing great things that we could never do on our own.  The world has a way of getting us searching – thinking that we need what we are already have!  But, I promise you this…You have everything you need to be a great parent!!  Now, just lean in, engage and watch God do what He does best!

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