It seems I’ve gotten on a theme with families this week. Today, I want to talk directly about my family.

There’s lots of things I could discuss about families. For example, I wonder how common it is for a child to follow in a parent’s career choice. I wonder how even less common it is to emulate both parents, which is what I’m currently doing. My mother is a teacher. My dad is a pastor. Right now, I kind of wish at least one of my parents had been a handsome millionaire…

I could discuss how my being born first helped me to become a fearless leader early on, although I was a jerk who had to cultivate empathy for others, while my younger brother worked in the opposite direction.

I could talk about all the statistcs that link the sort of family you come from with the kind of life you’ll lead, and so forth. But I don’t know those statistics.

What I really want to talk about is family feuds.

I’m reading Malcom Gladwell’s Blink, a book about our instinct for snap decisions. He discusses a research firm that looks at 15 minute videos of couple’s discussion of a contentious subject. With just 15 minutes, they can predict with over 85% accuracy who will still be married 15 years later. Sounds like how we fight is pretty important.

Did your parents fight? Everyone says that every couple fights, so my guess is that, yes, your parents had some fights. My parents could fight sometimes, and my brother and I could fight, with each other and with them too. I’d say my childhood was pretty peaceful, but those fights could get pretty serious. Nothing physical, but they were stressful family affairs, nonetheless. Not worth writing a book about, but maybe a blog entry.

I’ll spare you the details, but let’s say this. Our family fights included plenty of the following:
1) Airing of grievances.
2) Feats of strength.

And we all took part in breaking several commandments, us kids included. I mouthed off pretty viciously as a teenager, even enough to make my mom cry once or twice; a fact I was proud of at the time. My mom was toughened by an outrageously obstinate father, so it was a minor victory to be able to get under her considerably thick skin. My parents even came close to divorce. They didn’t go through with it after an extended separation, and I’m not sure why to this day, but I’m glad for it. My parents would have definately fallen into the ’15%’ with the researchers.

Statistically, people who come from divorced parents are more likely to get divorced. I wonder if the same is true for good old-fashioned family feuds.

On the other hand, my wife never saw her parents fight. Never. That seems pretty impressive. But as an adult, she’s been able to detect in her memories the same tensions that exist in every relationship. But they did a good job keeping it quiet, so kudos to them.

Statistically, I should probably be a lot more prone to yelling and stuff than my wife is, but so far, we’ve had very few arguments. We’re just very good roommates, and we hate to raise our voices at one another. That may all change when there’s a little crumb-cruncher crawling around someday. It so hard to disagree peacefully with Elmo on the TV. I think the few serious fights we’ve had happened during Elmo TV commercials.

The thing is, I don’t respect my parents any less for their ‘shortcomings’ when it came to resolving their differences. Sure, a good Christian marriage and family handbook might tell them they were horrible people. Sure, they provided occasional examples to me of what not to do in an argument. But I’ve actually come to respect them a lot more. I say that because I know they haven’t had an easy time living together. They dated a short time, and had a lot to work out as a “blissfully” married couple. Yet, despite whatever happened between them, they decided they were better off together.

I’ll tell you what I learned from my parents, which is the same thing every marriage book will tell you. It’s all about communication. Failure to communicate creates a fight, and a fight escalates the failure to communicate. You never communicate more clearly when you’re fighting. That knowledge has made my relationship with my wife so much easier.

Not that I would recommend fighting in front of your kids, just so you can stay married and make your kids love and respect you, but it did work for my folks. But what do you think? Have you followed in your parent’s footsteps, in your career or in your home? How do you and your mate manage disagreements, or what have you learned from your parents’ or your own divorce? What advice can you share?

Dear Parents of Those Terrible Children at the Grocery Store,

My wife and I don’t have kids yet. We’re thinking and praying about it. I feel like my heart is slowly growing into what it needs to be so I can be a godly parent.

But your little prince or princess scares the unholy H-E-double-hockey-sticks out of us, and all the other young childless couples of the world.

Moms, how can you have five screaming “children” clinging to your near lifeless body as you push that grocery cart carrying six gallons of milk and think, “This will be the next 18 years of my life, and I’m okay with that.”? Dads, is this where you wanted to be when you were captain of the football team? How can you be okay with looking like a complete wimp being pushed around by a five-year-old at the hardware store?

I’m not okay with it. Every time I see a screaming child and an impotent parent, it’s like birth control for another month. It makes me want to start a business where I’ll spank your kids for you. No other ‘nanny’ services. I’ll just walk over and do what you seem unable to do, and you pay me ten dollars. Then I’ll turn you over my knee, and you’ll pay me another ten dollars! You make it look as if everything I have, my ambitions, my job, my happiness, my marriage will all be utterly destroyed by a child. You make all the people who should be parents not want to be parents. Is it impossible to raise socially adjusted children? Is it impossible to take children in public and go home with your dignity in tact? Every part of me wants to believe that the child is not terrible, you are just a lousy parent, that this is not normal. But it scares me…

Let me run down the next couple of decades or so for you.

Your kids will rule you. They will not really respect you. Perhaps at some point, you will decide that they need to ‘learn some morals.’ This brilliant thought will come to you in the form of a Vacation Bible School flyer from the local church. You will be disappointed to find that your child is not ‘fixed’ after an entire week in church. You will discover this after you wasted $800 on a new toy for the child as a reward for ‘being good all week.’ You will reward your child with that new Power Wheels child-size Jeep anyway.

A few years later, another opportunity will arise for someone else to straighten out your now rotten kids. One of their friends will invite them to youth group. You will be more than happy to allow another child’s parent to take your child to youth group week after week. Sadly, after six months of you doing everything you can to avoid meeting the youth pastor or demonstrating any interest whatsoever, or God-forbid, going to church with him, your teen will lose interest. Whatever Pastor What’s-His-Face did, it didn’t do any good, and was a waste of all that money you never tithed! Realizing your teen isn’t coming back will break the heart of Pastor What’s-His-Face.

Perhaps at some point in time, it will occur to you that your family should go to church. Those Bible stories were fun when you were a kid, and you ‘always meant to get back.’ However, you will approach this endeavor with the same half of your butt you have used since you began parenting. You will fill your child’s schedule with so many sports, activities, and weekends at ‘The Lake,’ that you will teach your children a not-so-subliminal message that church is the absolute last priority in the family. You will insist on frequent weekend trips to The Lake, even though it is summer vacation, and you and your spouse are both teachers.

Thus, you even screw up your efforts at passing the buck onto the church to ‘teach your kids some morals.’ You will enroll your daughter in some program which pays her a dollar a day to not get pregnant. You will do this because you cannot articulate to her that there are actual benefits to not getting pregnant outside of wedlock, other than an immediate, capitalistic benefit (see: Power Wheels child-size Jeep.) When your kids go to college, the vast majority of them will not consider themselves Christians. They will discover the joys of binge drinking, recreational drug use, and casual sex. They will eventually grow out of this, but they will not return to church…that is, perhaps, until they screw up their own kids.

Okay, my open letter probably doesn’t apply to a lot of you. I’m on a roll because I just looked up an old friend’s Facebook page. I can count on one hand the number of kids in my old youth group who I know considered themselves Christians and remained active through college. Guess which group this guy was in. And God only knows what happened to all those kids who passed through my youth group when I was running it. It breaks my heart to think about. I feel like a failure to think about it, but there’s nothing a youth pastor can do in two hours a week to stem the tide of what’s happening at home.

What do you think when you see out-of-control kids? To the parents out there: what’s the hardest part of the whole thing? To the non-parents: what scares you most?

I’m sure you’ve got some lovable old folks in your life. Perhaps they have imparted some kind of wisdom to you. They have stories from times and places you don’t remember.

And chances are, they’ll tell you that ‘the good old days’ were a lot better than today. If you catch them on the right day, they’ll tell you about how ‘this country is going to hell’ or ‘that dang teenager needs a hair cut – in boot camp!’ Back in their day, when they didn’t have all these ‘Twits’ and ‘Blogs’ and ‘Internet hoopla,’ and ‘air conditioning’ things were a lot simpler, I tell you. And they were better too! And if you don’t believe that, I’ll box your ears, young person!

I was suspicious of this theory about the ‘good old days.’ If you catch an old person on the right day, they won’t tell you how good the old days were, they’ll tell you how bad they were! Six miles to school, uphill both ways, barefoot, while pulling an apple cart! It was the Depression; everyone was selling apples, dang it! But then everyone grows up, kicks Hitler’s butt and they name themselves ‘The Great Generation.’ Then their kids (us) screw everything up.

I decided to look into that – the good old days. I started thinking about what time period I’d like to live in if I could choose. Turns out the ‘good old days’ is rather dubious.

early 20th century: The Great Depression crashes the Mafia sponsored nationwide party, then Europe totally falls apart, and when that’s done, everyone has a bunch of kids who ‘screw everything up,’ which we call the sixties.

19th century: I know all I need to about this century from playing ‘Oregon Trail.’ Apparently, everyone died of dysentery. No thank you.

18th century: Americans are done sipping tea like a bunch of dandies. Good heavens! I could go for that, but there was, like, nothing to do in America back then. And any century that would inspire Jane Austen to write Pride and Prejudice must be a really uninspiring century.

17th century: A bunch of crap happens in Europe that is so boring, they don’t even make students learn it in school. America doesn’t even exist, so you’re stuck with Europe and Asia.

16th century: Luther doesn’t like going to church, so he blogs about it, which in those days consisted of nailing wastepaper to doors. And Shakespeare lives to ruin the lives of American schoolchildren 500 years later.

5th to 15th centuries: Blarf. This was the worst chapter in history class. Why would you actually want to live in this time?

And to go even further back isn’t even worth it, because if you didn’t die at age six, you died as a thirty year old peasant. And unless your name was Jesus of Nazareth, you probably didn’t matter that much.

Conclusion: The ‘good old days’ never really existed. And they never will. We like to look at the past, our childhoods through rose colored glasses. We gloss over the bad parts of our youth while looking at the bad stuff today under a microscope. We are often convinced that humanity is at its darkest this very day. Every day has been worse than the last.

But that’s not true. And it’s not bad that the good old days never were. It just means that these days hold as much promise (amid all the conflict) as any other time. And look, the 17th century has nothing on the 21st century! Those people are always going to be stuck in the 17th century with their horses and their tin can phones and their non-U2 music. I’d like to see a 17th century person blog about how lousy it would be to live in the 21st century! They’ve got nothing on us!

Would you really like to live in a different time? What would you choose? Do you believe today, we’re at our worst, our best, or somewhere in between?

“You can do anything if you put your mind to it.”

When I was a kid, my parents told me I could do anything I put my mind to. I believed them. They were good parents for encouraging me. My Dad told me I could be the President if I wanted to be. That sounded pretty good for a five-year-old of my skills.

The encouragements of my parents seemed plausible at the time. I was a pretty smart kid, things came easy in school. Once, I signed up for a YMCA softball team. I could do anything, so I could play softball.

I stepped up to the plate at our first practice. The coach was pitching. I took my batting stance. I kept my eye on the ball, just like my old man told me to. There was a slight grin on my face and a gleam in my eye as I prepared to show everyone what I was made of. I took aim and swung the bat as hard as I could.

Long story short, I discovered that day I could not do everything I put my mind to. But Gramps still told me I was special and gave me a Werthers Original.

It quickly became apparent, and was later confirmed by scientific tests, that the unique mix of my parents’ DNA had produced a theoretically implausible child – perhaps the first recorded case – a child with absolutely no athletic capabilities whatsoever. My future was set that day: I would be picked last in gym class for the next ten years. I compensated for this by joining Boy Scouts.

In high school and college, I discovered I wasn’t smart at everything. No matter how I put my mind to Algebra or not getting picked last in gym, I could not master them. I also joined the Debate team in high school, and won some awards, but not before realizing while sitting in a darkened school hallway in the middle of a dismal sophomore year that there were strict limits to my abilities. Even with art, which was the one thing I was really good at had its limits. I also found myself lacking in the charm department, severely limiting my ability to get a girlfriend. But Gramps was always home when I struck out with a lady, ready with a funny story and some ice cold Country Time lemonade.

In the years since, I’ve realized I have no talent for writing romantic mytery novels, running a small boat shop in Mexico, counting cards in Vegas, or impersonating an eccentric eastern European woman…

That seems to be part of growing up: realizing that you may not be able to do everything your parents told you you could. These days, I think parents are especially addicted to encouraging their kids. Everything is self-esteem. I knew a couple of parents who would buy their kid a trophy after every martial arts tournament he attended. Didn’t matter what the tournament was giving out, or if he actually did well, he got a trophy; because he was special. Mommy’s precious baby boy broke some boards and deserves a big shiny trophy!

That’s getting to be the norm though. We like organized sports, but we have stopped liking competition. So there’s no special recognition for exceptional kids, because that would make kids like me who played like turds feel bad. Solution? Give everyone a trophy! Yea! Everyone is equally awesome at everthing!

I’m not saying encouraging your kids is bad. I wouldn’t have tried anything if my parents hadn’t encouraged me. I’m just guessing that parents today have a lot more opportunities to do so than it used to be. In the old days, if a kid decided he wanted to be a ballet dancer on Broadway, his Dad “encouraged” him to get his lazy butt outside and milk the cows.

It’s kind of a let down to realize that you are indeed ordinary, just like the rest of us.

What’s ironic is that as a pastor, I spend my Sundays attempting to convince people that I am NOT special! There is nothing exceptional about me, that they don’t have. I have no special gifts that enable me to read the Bible or pray out loud or serve others any more than anyone else. Sundays are spent attempting to convince adults that they are good enough! We all have the same God! You can do it! You can recieve a calling from God and go through with it!

Alas, so many people will not be convinced. No matter how many trophies or ribbons or praises you give them, they refuse to stop feeling inadequate. I could haul in everyone’s Gramps and 50 gallons of Blue Bell premium homemade vanilla ice cream, and some people would still feel depressed about themselves!

Look at the Bible. Did a bunch of dirty, uneducated fishermen have any special skills to be disciples? I daresay, they did not. They didn’t even have the ability to ‘step out in faith’ half the time. But that’s what’s awesome about Jesus. He takes an adorable group of ragtag misfits and underachievers and pits them against the team of rich suburban white kids with fancy new uniforms, and kicks their butts.

What encouragements did your parents give you? What did you turn out to be just awful at? What actual talents did you discover you had?

They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

At this point, many of you readers have been with me for a couple of months now, and I haven’t shared too many personal stories with you. You may at this point be wondering, ‘Just what is Matt’s deal? What did his mother do to him?’ Either that, or you’re wondering, ‘How does he do it? Where does all this brilliance come from?’

Honestly, I’ve been wondering the same things. Both of them.

Then the other day I was digging through some old boxes which I was required to get out of my parents’ basement. Parents sure like to keep a bunch of stuff from their children’s growing up years, just to inconvenience them with it later. Makes me think of that legend about child-Jesus where he’s sculpting those clay birds. (This one isn’t in the Bible, but it is an actual written legend. It was written by some dude who wasn’t supposed to be writing a Bible. He got on Orpah’s book club, but then his memoir, er, Bible was revealed to be a big phony bunch of lies.)

Dear Jesus, thank you for this good food. Amen.

Thus was the family mealtime prayer at my house for the better part of my early childhood, and an integral part of my spiritual formation.

Last time, I talked about praying and speaking in front of others, and I’m still on this kick with prayer, so we’re going with it. Mealtime prayers or ‘grace’ is a cornerstone of Christian culture. If you grew up in a Christian home, it may be the first prayer you learned besides ‘Now I lay me down to sleep.’ The dinner grace is repeated so often, it fuses itself to the identity of the family, so much so, that every other dinner grace seems wrong.

Consider the following:

The first time I visited my cousins, they recited that old ‘God is great, God is good’ prayer. WRONG.

The first time I had dinner at a friend’s house, they sang their prayer. DOUBLE WRONG.

That prayer wasn’t the first thing to go terribly wrong that evening. I also discovered that other moms set the table differently, prepare mashed potatoes differently, and cut our meat differently. As a child, it’s very hard to accept the strange, oftentimes wrong ways other moms do things, even if the potatoes are better than your mom’s.

Thus, by this anecdotal evidence, I can conclude that God found our grace to be superior, and therefore, our meals were more blessed, nutritious and tasty.

I don’t think it is possible for a man over 40 to say grace without using the line, ‘bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies.’

These days, my wife and I don’t have a set prayer, we just pray ‘as the Spirit leads.’ But sometimes the Spirit seems to be leading my wife for a long time, and I’m secretly afraid the food is getting cold while God is blessing it because I’m a jerk like that.

Sometimes we like to pray ‘at’ each other. Like my wife prays, ‘Lord, bless this food, and please help my husband to stop being such a tool.’

Some pastors exist almost for the sole purpose of saying grace over the potluck dinner. This occurs in the case of a church run by a ‘matriarch’ or ‘patriarch,’ a layperson who seems to own a controlling interest in every aspect of the church.

Pastor’s like to show off how holy their kids are to other pastors and/or test the holiness of other pastors’ kids. So my family is over at another pastor’s family’s home for dinner, and I’m just a little tyke. The host pastor tries to test me, you know, see if my pops is doing his job right with me by saying, “At our house, we pray before we eat.” So I bow my cute little holy head, fold my hands like sweet baby Jesus, and prayed the socks off that dinner. Match point, me.

The prayer which I recited at the start of this post was our grace for several years. Until dad had the bright idea of writing a new grace for Thanksgiving. Which my brother and I would recite. In front of the entire family. Cute.

My grandmother could swear up a storm. Normally it didn’t matter, since Grandpa was deaf. She’d work herself into a frenzy over Thanksgiving dinner. Then, when all was almost ready, everyone would be circled around for grace, and Grandma would tear out of the kitchen looking like she was about to pass out. She was known to get the ball rolling on the meal with the line, “Say the —- prayer!” That sufficiently set the tone for solemnly praising God for the manifold blessings He hath bestowed upon us.

And now, since I’m a pastor, I am the de facto grace giver for every family function on my wife’s side. That’s the thing I do. Aunt Jean knits, uncle Steve gets hammered, and Matt, the new guy says grace.

On my side its different since we have three preachers. If there’s one thing preachers don’t like it’s sharing the spotlight. So we keep it civil. We just keep a strict and carefully recorded ‘grace rotation’ going from one holiday to the next. This Christmas, it’s John’s turn.
Just kidding. We all pray one after another, trying to one-up the last one. Whenever someone throws down and makes the last guy look like an amatuer, everyone goes, “Oooooh,” or “What do you say to that, John?” with their heads still bowed.
Okay, I’m just kidding with that too. We all just pray simultaneously, trying to talk over one another, while holding hands in a circle. Our dinners are very blessed.

Did your family say grace faithfully? What was it? Did it evolve over time? Did every other grace seem somehow less holy?