Smoldering Wick

This past weekend I had the great blessing of attending a memorial service for my late Grandma, Mitzi Esposito, who died this summer. During the service I shared the following reflections. +  +  + A 17 year old Kevin (my dad) comes home far after curfew. He opens the door of the house quietly hoping to come in undetected. He steps in, the living room is dark. Hope rises that he might just pull it off. He turns the knob and sets the bolt silently and proceeds stealthily across the room. But after a few steps he stopped. All at once he noticed the red pulse of a cigarette being puffed by a silent sentry. “Kip, are you on drugs?” “Uh, no, mom.” Mitz certainly knew how to make an entrance. I love that story, but I wasn’t there for that one. The most memorable -- dare I say scarring -- entrance of hers that I remember came when I was an awkward, pubescent 7th grader. Our family was building a fence around our big backyard that summer and we ha

There is this a great scene in Shawshank Redemption when Morgan Freeman’s character Red, who is an old man that has been in prison since he was a teenager, is before a parole board for the umpteenth time. The chairman asks if Red considers himself to be sufficiently ‘rehabilitated’. In Red’s response he says that there isn’t a day that goes by that he doesn’t wish he could talk to his teenage self and impart the perspective that he’s been able to attain through years of hard and monotonous prison life – perspective about the value of life, the nature of good and evil and the importance of responsibility. As I work with young people in the pivotal years of junior high, high school and college – years of self-discovery, transition and commitment – I’m so often reminded of that scene. When I get in front of a group of passionate and gifted young Christians, the message that I find myself wanting to articulate time and again is that we can only experience true freedom through the gra

A huge goal of ours as parents has been cultivating polite responses: please, thank you, excuse me, etc. Our goal is that by instilling that habit from the outset and then modeling it consistently and joyfully we will ingrain it in a deep way in our boys. And our hope is that by doing so they will be free to say please and thank you in earnest.   I think we all can sense when someone is thanking us in a perfunctory way, can’t we? It doesn’t feel good. We ask ourselves, if they’re not genuinely thankful then why bother with the obligatory ‘thank you’? It feels like it’d surely be better to leave it unsaid. Why is authentic gratitude such a big deal to us? One of my favorite quotes from the famous Theology of the Body teaching/speaker, Christopher West, comes from a conversation that he had with his toddler, also named John Paul. He shared this story in a talk I listened to almost 15 years ago and it has always stood with me. He says that one day he