Stumbling Over the Truth

   When I was just a kid, I have to admit that I was afraid of the dark.  One of the responsibilities I had in our home growing up was to put the garbage cans out for the trash pickup.  Unfortunately, I would put off the simple task until the very last moment.  It was usually the night before trash would be picked up that my mom would scold me about getting the trash out and I would, begrudgingly, gather it up and take it from the backyard out to the curb.  The problem was that I had waited until it was dark outside.  The side of the house that I had to use to accomplish my task was unlit and very dark.  My imagination would always get the best of me.   For those of you who are laughing at me right now, we all know that you had your fears too.  Though we don't like to admit it, we are all from time to time controlled by fear.  After all, we live in a very scary world. We live in a very scary world.     In Matthew...

     Yesterday I came home from work to find that my kitchen light wasn't working.  No big deal, except for the fact that today is my oldest son's birthday.  My wife was intending to make him a birthday cake, but with no light it was going to be challenging.  So we decided that the thing to do was to try new light bulbs and if that didn't work, replace the fixture.  This meant a trip to our local Lowes to get what was needed.  The unique light bulbs took a while to find and then we selected (after a few moments of debating price, color, size, etc.) a new light fixture and went home.        The easy and more inexpensive solution would have been the replacement light bulbs, but when we changed them out the light still did not work.  This meant changing out the fixture.  Though the box of the new light fixture assured me that this was a simple task that could be completed by one person but this proved to be not as s...

I can remember my father telling me that boys are easier to rear than girls. Perhaps for the first ten to twelve years of my son's life I would have agreed. My son is 16, nearing 17 years of age. Lately, I find myself wondering what happened? Mark Twain, I believe, said that when a boy reaches his teen years you should put him in a barrel and feed him through a hole in it, and when he turns 16 you should plug up the hole. There are times that I wonder if I shouldn't have followed Mr. Twain's idea. In retrospect, the issues that I have in dealing with my son come from inadequacies on my parenting. That is what is so frustrating about teens! Young children lull us into believing that everything is wonderful, so all we have to do is sit back and watch them grow. Then, as if out of some horror story, that sweet, fun loving child turns into a teen laden with all kinds of issues. What is hard for parents to face is the responsibility in the shaping of our children when t...