Outtakes

"Amos, look at the camera.  Isaac, keep your eyes open, and try to do something with your brother's head.  Theo could you smile a little less . . . like that?"

"Does this seem like an improvement to anybody?"

"Isaac, what are you--"
"Mom, I don't know why you let him hold the--"
"WAAHHH!"

"Whew.  Good catch, bruh."

"Theo, what kind of photo shoot do you think this is?  And can somebody get Amos's tag?"

"Oh, foley shucking hit."

"Don't you even start, kid.  Don't you even."

Kids to Make a Mama Proud

Dear Moms of all my students:

This past week, while explaining Philippians to my students, I asked them what they would do if they won half a billion dollars in a lottery.  (It was sort of relevant.  You'll have to trust me.)

Everyone that answered said, and I am not making this up, "First I'd drop out of school, then I'd buy a house for my mom, then I'd buy a [insert car/truck here]."

I didn't know how you'd all feel about the dropping out of school part, but I thought you should know that they all put you above even their Lamborghini/Bugatti/Ducati/whatever.

Isn't There A Doctrine About This?

I don't object, in principle, to childless people giving me parenting advice.

One doesn't have to have children to have experience in what good or bad parenting does to children--every adult was once a child himself and is, at least in theory, able to reflect rationally on his childhood experiences and the results of his parents' or caregivers' choices.

And maybe I just have an unusually kind, thoughtful, wise, and good crop of friends, but most of my single or childless friends who reflect on family matters do a pretty darn good job of it.  (It probably doesn't hurt that they're unusually smart, and know enough to pander to a mother's ego by complimenting her children frequently and in great detail.  Spoonful of sugar, medicine, etc.)

So when the young, obviously childfree cashier at the Earth Fare started telling me yesterday about what all children Amos's age were like, and about how I should be feeling about kids that age, and about what he'd be like in a few years, I wasn't predisposed to be offended, simply because she didn't have children of her own.

But all I could think was, "Oh my gosh, lady, you would not say such things if you had any actual 24/7/365 experience with an actual two-year-old."

She said, "Oh, I love seeing kids that age in here!  They are so innocent!  They're just so pure in heart!"

And she had the nerve to look disturbed when I stared at her, wordlessly aghast.  I really couldn't form words to save my life.  (I blame Max, by the way.  It's hard to come up with snappy rejoinders when all the sleep you're getting comes in two-hour chunks.)

She started what sounded like a well-rehearsed speech about cherishing these years and enjoying their innocence and purity because "it gets destroyed all too soon in this world!"

I couldn't stop the snorting that escaped my throat.

And she started looking more and more disturbed by the second, though she didn't trouble herself to press pause and ask why I so obviously disagreed with her pronouncements.

I tried to come up with a story that would show her exactly how "innocent" Amos was.

I tried to come up with the words to describe how he sneaks out of the house at least once a week and tries to start the car.  Before we're awake.  Despite our trying to hide the keys.  And has been for at least a year now.

I tried to think of how to explain how he taunts his older brother when he is sitting in time out--sitting just out of reach, stretching his toes toward Theo until Theo starts crying "Stop TOUCHING me!!!!" and then jerking his legs back so that he can say, "I not touching Theo!  He talking in time out!!"

I tried to call up coherent sentences with which to relate the time he tried to take away Max's baby blanket, four times, while I sat in the rocking chair in the room.  How he tried to come up with convincing arguments. ("But it's mine!" "It's not cold today, Mommy." "He wants another blanket, not my blanket.")  And how in the end he just left the room and waited for me to go to the bathroom, and then darted silently into the room, stole the blanket, and had it completely hidden in his own room before I got back from the bathroom.

But, again, sleep in two-hour chunks.  Words simply would not come.

After a good twenty seconds of incoherent gutteral noises, I finally looked down at Amos and stuttered out, "Are you innocent, Amos?"

He looked at her, looked at me, and looked back at her and said, "No, I not.  I'm Amos."

And he was exactly right.

The Line Must Be Drawn Here! This Far, No Further.

It comes up almost every time we watch Iron Chef together.  He sees something he wants to try, and he asks if we can get some.

Duck breasts, bone marrow, Mexican chocolate, tomato gelato, black truffles, an ebelskiver pan--there's no end to what Iron Chef can make look cool.

Usually I'm non-committal.  Even about the truffles, I said, "Well, if we can find some and if we have a little extra money in the grocery budget some month."

But this time, I draw the line.

"Ooo, that looks cool.  Can we get some?"
"No."
"Please?"
"No."
"We've never even tried it."
"No."
"Maybe it's not too expensive."
"No."
"What if we can find it at the store?"
"Absolutely not."
"I'll bet Williams Sonoma has it."
"No."
"PLEASE?"
"NO."
"We could make ice cream with it!"
"We have an ice cream maker."
"We could make ice cream without having to use the ice cream maker."
"En. Oh.  NO."
"Why not?"
"You'll freeze your fingers off.  And also, because no."
"I'll be careful."
"THEO.  I am NOT BUYING LIQUID NITROGEN.  No.  No, no.  NO."
"Hmph.  I'll bet Mimi will buy it for me."
"Good luck."

Developmental Milestones

I realize that charts of developmental milestones are supposed to be helpful--especially to help parents judge when their child might need some sort of therapeutic intervention.

Usually when I look at them, I'm the one that needs therapy.

I think I scared Theo's pediatrician once, when I openly snorted at her during her checklist.
"Is he able to verbalize his desires, sometimes in ways that you might perceive as defiance?"

She looked at me so strangely, but I really couldn't have formed words if my life had depended on it.  (I'm pretty sure his chart said, "Does not yet show any adverse effects from mother's bizarre affect.")

Anyway, the chart I recently consulted for Amos's developmental milestones had me similarly . . . amused.

"Can your child walk unassisted?"
He can tiptoe down the hallway in complete silence, if there's something he's not supposed to have at the end of it.

"Can your child pull toys behind him while walking?"
He can pull the whole toy bin behind him while walking through the house.  At 6am.
Also, he can pull his seven-year-old brother behind him while running.  This is usually at 6:30am, when he's decided that Theo Has Slept Enough For One Day.

"Can your child carry large toys or several toys at once?"
Do you know how many Thomas trains we own?  And he has to carry every. single. one of them to bed, all in one trip, or else the universe will explode.

"Can your child stand on tiptoe?"
Yes, but he prefers to drag a chair into place and climb up onto the counter.

"Can your child kick a ball?"
I don't know, but he kicks his brothers a lot.

"Can your child climb up and down furniture unassisted?"
Yes.  This is why we've removed all our furniture.

"Can your child scribble spontaneously?"
Have you SEEN our living room walls?

"Can your child turn over a container to empty out its contents?"
This is a milestone? I thought it was a torture technique.

"Can your child point to body parts when you name them?"
Yes.  In a house full of boys, you can imagine which parts get the most practice.

"Can your child use simple sentences, like 'want milk' or 'go for walk'?"
No.  He's more into, "Mommy, my milk cup is empty.  It's time for you to fill it.  Please stop dawdling and get it for me now."

"Can your child follow simple instructions?"
Not unless we make him think they were his idea in the first place.
But he's really good at giving instructions.  Long, detailed instructions.

"Can your child find objects even when hidden under two or three covers?"
Are you serious?  Locked doors cannot keep him out--what kind of moron only uses a couple of blankets?

"Is your child demonstrating increasing independence?"
No, he's already reached the threshold.

"Can your child give his age when asked?"
No.  But he knows the age limits for all the fun activities in town and gives the "right" age for them when asked.  ("Oh, honey, there's an age limit to go on this slide.  How old are you?" "Seven!" "Um . . .")

"Does your child imitate the behavior of others, especially older children?"
Yes.  This is why his older brothers are always grounded.

"Can your child describe things that he did earlier in the day?"
Yes.  We usually end up calling someone to apologize.

"Is he capable of goal-directed behavior?"
He sneaks out of the (locked) front door every morning, gets in the car, and pretends to drive it.  This morning, he took Stephen's keys with him.  He's almost figured out which hole they go into.

"Can your child repeat words he's overheard in conversations?"
Yes.  That's why we've stopped having conversations.

"Does your child speak clearly enough for strangers to understand?"
Unfortunately, yes.

"Does your child speak in sentences of four or five words?"
Oh, I do miss those days.

College-Level Kiddie Lit

I told my ethics students that one of the goals of the class was to make it harder for them to go grocery shopping (or car shopping or pet shopping or spouse shopping and so on).  Being an ethicist--especially one trained in narrative theology--just plain makes it harder to get stuff done, sometimes.

The "narrative theology" part makes it especially hard to just pick up any old kids' book and read it to my poor, long-suffering children.

I infected my students with that bit of insanity this morning--I had them read a few children's books to each other and talk about what a person or community formed by that book my believe or practice or understand.  (I'm grateful to Vigen Guroian for having written on this topic a few years ago.)

I've done this exercise a few times, and the thing that struck me most this time around was the way books don't always do what they purport to do.

For example, we were all a little put off by Hooper Humperdink...? Not Him!, which was supposed to be a fun romp through the alphabet, wrapped in a tidy narrative of inclusion.  The narrator spends the entire book building a fabulous party, while throwing out little asides about not inviting Hooper Humperdink, because he just doesn't like him.

Of course, it's a kids' book, so, in the end, the narrator decides to invite him after all.

Well, you know, that's real sweet and all, but after thirty-two pages of sneering at him, that sort of grudging permission is hardly inclusion.  When I asked my students what children might learn, morally, from this book, one of them rightly suggested that this book gives a child permission to dislike other children, so long as they throw them a few token invitations to participate in special activities.

I think there might be some wisdom in giving children permission to talk about their dislikes of other children--it's a natural enough phenomenon, and the solution (corralling and contravening one's own emotions) is a little unnatural and probably needs some verbal processing.

But that is not the delicate dance that Hooper Humperdink performs.

Richard Scarry, without bothering to wrap his silly story in a tidy moral, actually does a much better job of introducing children to the notion of inclusion. 

His Firefighters' Busy Day is, like all his books, simply a silly story from start to finish.  The four firefighters never seem to manage to get to eat, because every time they sit down to try, the alarm rings and they have to tend to another not-terribly-urgent emergency.  The needy-person-in-distress is always Mr. Frumble, a hapless cat who can't seem to manage his pickle car, or anything else.

Where it gets interesting--far more interesting than Hooper's little morality tale, for all that Scarry is completely uninterested in being morally interesting--is when the firefighters figure out that Mr. Frumble is Busytown's most annoying citizen.  What do they do?  "So that they can finally have a quiet moment to eat, the firefighters invite Mr. Frumble to have dinner with them at the firehouse."


And they prepare him (and themselves) a meal, while keeping him safe there at the firehouse.

I always tell my students that they should run toward their problems (like, a professor whose class they've been cutting or for whom they haven't turned in a bucketload of work), not away from them.  Richard Scarry is telling them to grab their problems and bring them home for dinner.

Now, Scarry keeps it from being a tidy morality play by having the alarm ring once again, just as they were sitting down to dinner with Mr. Frumble . . . and they all leave, wishing Mr. Frumble a good dinner on their way out.

Am I reading too much into this silly story by suggesting that a community formed by this story might just have better resources for dealing with difficult people than a community formed by the Hooper Humperdink story?

Perhaps.  But guess which one I'm going to be reading to my boys way more often than the other?

On Reading Hard Things

I've mentioned my friend's blog here before.

I've recommended it because it's a good read, but it's a hard read.

But perhaps that "but" is out of place.  It's a hard read.  And that's part of why it's a good read.

Not all hard reads are good reads.  Heidegger was a hard read, but I never really broke past the "hard" to any sort of "good."  Nietzsche was a hard read, but I'm pretty sure Augustine already said it all, and better.  Derrida was a hard read, but I'm very sure my time was better spent reading Sarah Coakley.  I remember picking up some book at the library--I can't remember the title or author--that was hard because it was the memoir of an adult survivor of childhood abuse.  I think it was meant to break on through to "good," because the woman did survive.  But she was still so profoundly broken that I was left with nothing to do but weep for her.  Her very survival was nihilistic, dead.

But some hard reads are good reads.  Thomas is a hard read, until you read him enough that he's all of a sudden wonderful and not hard at all (until you read some Thomists, who manage to make Thomas almost impossible to read).  David Bentley Hart is a hard read if you don't have your unabridged OED handy, but if you persevere, you learn something, and it's nice to be able actually to feel your brain cells growing.

I don't think I've done nearly enough hard reading lately.

Except for my friend's blog.  My friend's blog is a hard read, because honesty is hard.  It's a hard read because suffering--real suffering, the kind you don't normally want to blog about--is hard.  It's a hard read because living in a world where babies don't always outlive their mamas is hard.

Many of the things I read that talk about hard things don't talk about them in the way that hard things deserve.

They move too quickly to a moral, to advice, to victim-blaming or -shaming of the sort that is meant to make us readers feel good about ourselves, to feel confident in our ability to avoid that sort of trouble, to write our internal story so that we are all always the hero who lives happily ever after, to assert our intellectual dominance over whatever biological or historical or theological reality may hold sway over us.

They give us the option of continuing on in our daily lives without really having to confront life.  The opiate of the masses is dispensed in blog entries and hip "news" outlets, from popular pulpits and the lecterns of elite universities, through moralizing television and patronizing cinema, and it consists in the experience of playing around with the idea of death just long enough to titillate us (whether with our fear of it, like a roller coaster, or with our lust to control it, like porn).  And then we are herded off to the moral, to the political platform, or to the smug contemplation of our superiority over those backwards folks who need the comfort of a moral or a political platform--children, all of us, doing our assigned worksheets after the teacher's lesson, busywork to keep us from the dread moment of contemplation.

There is nothing titillating about my friend's blog.  There's no playing around there.  Honesty like that does not allow for busywork after.

Was Your Head With You All Day?

"Theo, this note says that they had to give you a free lunch because you didn't have enough lunch money.  What happened?  I sent in two dollars."
"Gosh, I don't know."
"Theo, what happened to the two dollars I sent in with you?"
"I don't know."
"Did Daddy take it out of your bookbag?"
"No."
"Did the bus driver steal your lunch money?"
:giggle: "No."
"So the money made it to school?"
"Yes, I think so."
"Theo, did the money make it to school?"
"Maybe when I gave it to the lunch lady, she looked at the two dollars and only saw one dollar and thought that I didn't have enough."
"Theo, they tend not to employ lunch ladies that can't tell the difference between one and two."
"But maybe she made some kind of mistake."
"Theo, this says they had to give you a free lunch because you didn't have enough lunch money.  What happened?"
"I think the lady just didn't . . ."
"Theo, stop blaming the lunch lady.  Did you have money when you went to lunch?"
"Um . . . I don't remember."
"Theo, did your homeroom teacher steal your lunch money?"
"Maybe when I gave it to the breakfast lady, she forgot to put it on my account and so the lunch lady didn't know about it."
"I don't understand.  It was in an envelope.  It was marked 'Theo's Lunch Money.'"
"I went to school, and I gave the money to the breakfast lady.  Maybe she just forgot to tell the lunch lady about the money."
"Theo, wait, why did you give it to the breakfast lady?  Is that what you usually do?  And she's supposed to put it on your account?"
"Um . . . yes?"
"Theo, I'm really-- THEO!!!  DID YOU SPEND YOUR LUNCH MONEY ON BREAKFAST?!?!"
"Um . . . maybe when I gave it to the breakfast lady--FOR LUNCH!!!--she only thought I was giving it to her for breakfast, and so she only put one dollar on my lunch account."
"Theo, what did you eat for breakfast?"
"Pancakes and eggs and sausage."
"Theo, did you buy breakfast at school?"
"Um . . . well . . ."
"Theo, how much is breakfast at school?"
"One dollar."
"How much is lunch?"
"Two dollars."
"How much did I give you this morning?"
"Two dollars."
"How much did you have at lunch time?"
"One dollar."
"How much did you use to buy breakfast?"
"One dollar."
"Why did you buy breakfast, Theo, when you only had enough money for lunch?"
"My friend on the BUS INVITED ME!"
"Theo, you didn't have enough money for breakfast!"
"But she asked me to go with her, and I didn't want to be rude!"
:long pause:
"What's this girl's name, Theo?"
"I don't know.  She's just my friend.  And she likes when I go with her to breakfast."
"THEO.  HOW MANY TIMES HAVE YOU GONE TO BREAKFAST?!?!"
"Six?"
:headdesk:

Index Cards For Life

I have written elsewhere about my new chore card system, which has been so successful (at least, according to my rather modest standards) that I have looked for ways to incorporate more index cards into my life.

Well, okay, not really.

The chore card system is working fairly well, and in a random pragmatic convergence, index cards have made themselves part of my new meal planning system, too.

My old meal planning system was working just fine.

I had roughly two weeks' worth of general approaches to meals (meat and sides, fried rice with protein, pasta with tomato sauce, pasta with non-tomato sauce, Tex-Mex, etc.).  I plugged in whatever was on sale or whatever I had in the pantry to those basic approaches, and I had two weeks' worth of meals.

It got the job done, and if you need to get the job done, that's the simplest approach.  Ten to twelve flexible, customizable meals, over and over and over.

But I wanted to generate a little more variety and a little more buy-in from the rest of the fam, without sacrificing my control over the dietary and budgetary considerations.

So, I turned to index cards.

I got a 100-card rainbow pack.  That seemed like more than enough variety to me.

I figured that there were special dinners that we'd only have very occasionally because of either the cost or the time involved.  I wanted the guys to feel free to choose them, but I wanted there to be some limitations.

So I put meals like sushi, ribs, cioppino, cassoulet, and boeuf bourguignon on the purple cards.  Mostly, they just sit in the card box and don't even get looked at.  Birthdays, holidays, Grandmom's-coming-to-town, then we pull them out and say, "Let's pick a special dinner!"

I had eighty cards left, in four colors.

So I thought about what sorts of categories would force our diet and our budget in helpful directions.  The categories I came up with are specific to our needs and choices as a family, but they might give you a helpful idea of how to do the same with your own family's needs and choices.

I put all meat-and-sides meals on the pink cards.  (Pink, medium rare meat, it worked for me.)

I put all soups on the blue cards.  (Super-meat-heavy stews, I kept with the pink.  Soups with some meat in them, blue.)

I put all wheat-based vegetarian or very-low-meat meals on the green cards.  (Pasta, couscous, sandwiches, savory pies, etc.)

And I put wheat-free vegetarian meals on the yellow cards.

It really wasn't that hard to fill up all twenty cards in each category, although sometimes it was a matter of varying the details in the same basic plan for two or three cards.  (Veggie chili with cornbread, veggie chili with potatoes, you know the drill.)

Every Sunday night, I have us each pick a meal from one of the four "everyday" categories (Amos doesn't get to yet), and then I fill up the rest of the week's menu with what I need to make it work with our budget and diet.  (I try to use at least three yellow cards per week.)

Once a card has been picked, I pull it from the stack so it won't get chosen again in the near future.

When any one color runs out (usually yellow first, since I'm trying to pull from it most often), I put all the cards back in the stack, even if some colors still have many unchosen meals in them.

Each cycle lasts about a month and a half this way.  I suppose if you weren't pulling heavily from any one color, you could make the cycle last over two months.  But I didn't need that much variety in my life, and I really did want to keep either meat-and-sides or pasta-and-sauce meals from dominating.  (The one tends to take over when you're short on time or mental energy, the other when you're short on cash.)

I won't say the kids have all of a sudden developed a heretofore undiscovered passion for vegetarian chili.  But it has increased buy-in for the non-meat, non-pasta meals, and I've learned some things about my kids' preferences that I didn't really know when I was doing all the picking.  (Isaac loves polenta and really dislikes chicken.  Theo loves rice and prefers black beans to chickpeas.  Stephen . . . always goes along with his wife's crazy ideas, bless his heart.)

You could do this with a fifty-pack instead of a hundred-pack.  (That's still over a month of meals.)  You could do it with fewer colors or more colors.  You could have a much more elaborate version of this than I am capable of even thinking of, and you could probably glitz it up and make it Pinterest-worthy. 

I put the week's menu on a piece of notebook paper, and I put it on the fridge.  Nobody pins that on Pinterest.

But this is working for us.

Dreamers

Some day, my youngest son will ask me why I gave him a name that rhymes with an embarrassing body part and its attendant malodorous function.

I will tell him that his daddy wasn't terribly cooperative with the whole name-generating process, and that this was the best we could do while they were wheeling me into the operating room to deliver him.

And then I will read him (again) the book of the dreamer-shepherd Amos.  And I will tell him that God hates injustice and cares for people who are hurting.

And I will tell him (again) the story of Saint Martin of Tours and his dream.  And I will tell him that God cares for people who are hurting, and that the surest way to meet Jesus is to care for someone who is hurting.

And I will tell him (again) of another Martin who read the book of Amos and found there the assurance that God hates injustice and cares for people who are hurting.  And I will tell him of Martin's dream that people who love God will also care for people who are hurting and will try to do something about the injustice.

And I will tell him that I gave him a beautiful name, and I didn't mean for people to make fun of it.  And if kids make fun of his name, I will be sorry for his pain, and it will hurt me that he is hurting.

And I will tell him never, ever to forget that God cares for people who are hurting, and that God wants us to do something about it.  And that whenever he dreams about his own future, he should ask God for dreams worth having.

So, There Was Someone ELSE On The Stage, Right, People?

My dearest sons:

You all know that your mother is occasionally a little picky about things like table manners and homework and chores and saying nice things to your brothers, but not so picky about penmanship and getting your bed made every morning and wearing a coat when it's a little chilly out.

I haven't yet had occasion to be picky about this issue, so you may not know that it's in the Picky rather than Not Picky column.  But it is, and you need to know this.

Treating Women Right is in the Picky column.  Treating Hurting Women Right is in the Especially Picky column.

When you take a girl on a date, you give her your full attention and you don't ogle other girls.  If Angelina Jolie walks into the room, the right answer is, "Who?  Oh.  Is she famous or something?  Get back to what you were saying.  I'm really interested."

That's Treating Women Right.

When your boss is a woman, you speak respectfully to her and you do what she says and you don't undermine her authority by using the belittling language that men like to use when they're embarrassed about taking orders from a woman.

That's Treating Women Right.

When you are the boss and a woman works for you, you speak respectfully to her and you keep your comments focused on her work, not on her person, and you don't try to keep her subservient and dependent on you by paying her less than you would pay a man for doing the same job.

That's Treating Women Right.

Also under this heading would be things like avoiding gendered pronouns and descriptions for issues that are not sex-determined (like pretty much everything but reproduction and having prostate cancer), assuming you'll be doing a lot of the housework if you ever get married, and teaching your daughter how to read in at least two languages before you teach her how to put on make up.

Your daddy has given you a pretty good example to follow in this regard, and if you just ask What Would Dad Do?, you won't go too far wrong in life in general, nor in the Treating Women Right realm in particular.

You will meet a lot of hurting women in this world.  You will not have been the one to hurt them, I hope, but you will meet them.

Treating Hurting Women Right is not markedly different than Treating Women Right, but it 1) is even more important and 2) requires even more courage.

Treating Hurting Women Right often means going even more against the grain, taking an even more public stand, and sometimes, even, confronting the Hurting Woman herself with her brokenness.

Treating Hurting Women Right means not participating in the sex industry, even if you're in Nevada and the woman is supposedly okay with it.

Treating Hurting Women Right means being ready to shelter an abused woman if she gets up the courage to leave the abuse, or at least offering a ride home to a girl that's getting chewed out by her boyfriend in public.

It means not laughing--pointedly not laughing--when your friends make rape jokes.

It means leaving the party if somebody gets the idea to call a stripper.  It means offering to get the stripper to a safe place if the party next door gets out of hand.

It means being the one to bring up gender issues so that the women in the room don't have to feel like angry bitches all the time when they bring them up.

And when a girl is so hurting, so broken by her past or her present, so caught up in a destructive mix of unrestrained hedonism and even more unrestrained advantage-taking that she thinks performing a simulated sex act on national television is a good thing, it means refusing to be the guy she's grinding on stage.

Let me tell you, sons, if I ever see you doing what whatever-his-name-is did to a girl on live TV, I will not be telling the world how shocked I am at what she was doing.  I will not be telling the world that I didn't expect her to put her butt so close to your groin.  (Because, like, your groin was just innocently standing there when this girl's butt unexpectedly accosted it!)

And I will most especially not be commenting on how sharp your suit is.

You'd better get this one right, sons.  Because the world will not be writing blog posts and tweets and ponderous articles on your behavior.  They'll be heaping it all on the Hurting Woman and not asking themselves or anyone else how she found a guy so unchivalrous as to join her in her public self-degradation.

But I for damn sure will be asking that.

I will be in your face asking in very pointed words and at very loud volume why you weren't the guy telling her she didn't have to do this, asking her not to do it, giving her alternatives, giving her the healthy attention she needs rather than the poisonous attention she's become addicted to.

I love you, and I will love you no matter what, in life, you do wrong.

But don't get this thing wrong.  If a woman is hurting, help her.  If you can't, at least refuse to be the guy that keeps the hurt going.

Don't be that guy.

Don't. be. that. guy.

Whose Will Be Done?

"Mommy, can you set the timer for one minute?"

"Well, sure, dear.  What for?"

"I asked God for a Creature Power Suit with Creature Power Discs, and I told him that one minute from now in the mailbox would be a good time."

"I have no idea what you just said."

"Creature POWER Suits, Mommy, like from Wild Kratts."

"I . . . don't . . . these are . . . can you just explain a little . . ."

"MOM.  I asked GOD . . . for some CREATURE. . . POWER. . . SUITS. . . like in the P . . . B. . . S . . . SHOW.  Where they rescue animals with their CREATURE P - O - W - E - R - S."

"Ohhhhhhh.  Well.  I . . . um . . . Okay.  Well, let me know what happens when the minute is up."

[three minutes later]

"So, Theo, anything in the mailbox?"

"No, just mail.  But I told God that while you were making lunch was an okay time, too.  So maybe it'll come later."

"Okay.  So, what are you going to do if God doesn't give you this Creature . . . thing?"

"Mom.  It says in the Bible that God will give you whatever you ask for."

"Yes, it does.  But it also says that you should ask according to what God wants, not just what you want.  You have to ask in the right way, with the right heart, not just tell God to give you stuff."

"I said please.  I was very polite."

"Oh.  Well, uh, carry on, then.  Let me know what happens."