Entries Tagged 'inspiring' ↓

I’m not sure how I feel about book publishers trying to use video to promote books, but this book looks pretty cool for my six-year-old daughter.

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My friend, Liz, is thinking about the universe today. She’s like that. And her wonderful essay culminates (for me) with the recognition that everything is interconnected.

With every breath, I change the atmosphere.
With every step, I change the ground we share.

There’s another side to that kind of thinking. Sometimes I like to remember exactly how small I am.

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Mary has already traced this meme to the fifth generation. Impressive! I’m a delayed first generation post. The rules are self-explanatory, but you can read the details at Mary’s original post.

Quick: What were you doing ten, twenty and thirty years ago?

Do you want to know my answers?

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Reading Craver’s post about insane soccer parents, I got to thinking about competitive sports.

This weekend, I went to a preseason Spurs game against the Houston Rockets. It was the last game of preseason, and I’ve never seen anything like a preseason game.

Early in the game, the players were giving encouragement to <i>the opposing team</i> after good plays. Coach Popovitch gave one Houston player a big hug during an early timeout.

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Donna Novitsky of Big Tent says her motto is “Go Big or Don’t Go.” But she also offers some interesting advice for working people with families in the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar. (Click on this link to stream or download the one hour podcast, “From Venture Capitalist to Entrepreneur.”)

The moderator says she has a different worklife balance between her business and her career than most people he knows. Then, he asks her to explain to the students how she finds balance between her work and her family (which consists of a husband, two kids, and a cat).

Here’s Novitsky’s response:

Finding balance is probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do… When you have kids, everything changes. No longer is it solely your agenda, and they move at their own pace, and you need to adapt yourself to their pace. And so that’s just incredibly challenging because I’m used to being able to put in whatever hours it takes to get the A, whatever hours it takes to get another customer. Whatever hours. And now I can’t do that anymore.

One thing I discovered is that you’ve got to think of balance not in terms of a day or a week or maybe even a month. But balance takes place over a long period of time.

For instance, in 2006, I worked only a couple of days a week, spent a lot of time at home, got involved with the kids’ school, got them to make their beds when they go to school, got them to set the dinner table on a regular basis. Some little goals that I had for our family that take time and focus. Building that base allowed me to go at Big Tent, which is basically a 7 am to 7 pm role.

Between my husband and I, John now pretty much is home… So while I work really hard during the week, I also find some balance on the weekends, and I’m a dedicated world class soccer mom out there with the kids. You learn to juggle. You need to change the equation now and then, but who your life partner is is also a key part of that. And understanding yourself and your priorities is an important thing as you make those choices.

I don’t know Novitsky’s faith. But I think there is some real wisdom in this statement: Balance takes place over a long period of time.

Don’t try to balance your day. Don’t try to schedule your work and your relationships into a legalistic regimen of scheduled activities, duties, and obligations. No one needs another ten commandments of parenting.

After all, the law and the prophets come down to two commands. Love God. Love others. That’s it.

I love Monday mornings because now I can get to work. (Just like I love Monday evenings because then I get to be with my family.)

As long as it has taken us to get this blog network started, I could just as easily call this post “The Boy Who Cried Blog!” But you know, we wanted to get as many kinks worked out as possible.

Listen.

There is a time for everything under the sun. A time to blog, and a time to comment. A time to write code, and a time to write poetry. A time to build a network, and a time to launch a network.

This is a time to launch.

AND I NEED YOUR HELP.

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Still “reporting” from the Religion Newswriter’s Association conference. (L.L., is this another serious post?) It is certainly longer than most of what I do here, but I hope readers will stay with me to the end.

On Thursday, I was included in a lunch with D. Michael Lindsay, author of the new book Faith in the Halls of Power.

The book came out today, and I wanted to be one of the first to review it. Let me be blunt. It’s great. Let me be hyperbolic. It’s a masterpiece.

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Oh dear. I didn’t realize I couldn’t be both evangelical and emerging. According to Out of Ur’s latest post, I have to choose one or the other. It sounds to me like David Fitch is talking about fundamentalism rather than evangelicalism.

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Yesterday, I met Bob the Tomato. And Mr. Lundt. And Pa Grape. Any American Christian with kids my age, probably knows those names. They may even know the name Phil Vischer, the founder of Big Idea.

At the Religion Newswriter’s Association Conference last night, Big Idea and Lovell-Fairchild previewed The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything. There’s an embargo on reviews, so I’m not going to review the movie or share spoilers.

But I can say there are…

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To be fair, she’s in the first grade now, but she did begin reading chapter books last year. I was the typical proud dad, but I only recently realized what most kids are reading at her age. The contrast is startling.

I guess I could pat myself on the back about all of the wonderful things we did, including pass down some apparently awesome genes. But that’s obnoxious, and probably untruthful.

So instead of gloating, I thought I would talk about the easy things we do that have probably helped our kids learn how to read. Most of them are accidental. Here they are in no particular order: Continue reading →