Smoldering Wick

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...

Over the past week we've had four snow days from work, which means I haven't been to my office in a week now! Coincidentally, none of the four snow days have actually been prompted by snow -- last week's trio of days off were caused by the polar vortex and today's by a solid  half inch of ice. Inclement weather aside, the unexpected time home has been a very welcome and well timed gift for our family. Last Wednesday was John Paul's third birthday and I was able to spend the arctic triduum with the JP's birthday right in the middle. During our time together, we've been working our way through A.A. Milne's incredibly delightful Winnie the Pooh books. The delightful prose and charming characters have colored what has been a welcome mid-winter staycation of sorts. We've also said about 30 Masses and laid roughly 3,500 miles of wooden train track. The absolute highlight -- and perhaps the all-time highlight of my brief career of fatherhood to date...

Are good leaders born or formed? Earlier this month I had an opportunity to spend some time speaking with some school leaders from around the diocese. I was supposed to give a talk on creating a culture of conversion at our schools, which is a topic near and dear to me. But as the day of the talk drew closer I found myself being drawn in two very disparate directions with what I wanted to do with my allotted time. My thoughts eventually coalesced into a simple equation. To create a culture of conversion you need two things: 1. People who have experienced conversion and value it as a pearl of great price 2. People who want to do whatever they can to lead those in their spheres of influence to the joy and freedom of conversion As I noodled on a method for articulating my equation, I tried to come up with something concrete to give to the leaders in both categories. Knowing full well that God alone can effect conversion -- and not wanting to take for granted that my audi...

Greetings friends -- Last Friday I spent a few extra hours at the office dotting all my i's and crossing all my t's ensuring that I'd be able to take off all of this week. As I cleared my desk, set my out-of-office email response and voicemail, I could feel the weight of a very busy autumn at work falling from my shoulders. I got in the car, started it, turned on the heat and let the engine warm. Chopin's nocturnes came on automatically when I plugged in my phone. The haunting beauty of those slow, fragile melodies filled the atmosphere. I closed my eyes for a minute and absorbed it, breathing the beauty, freedom and peace. As I drove through the snow and dimming light of early evening in the Northwoods, I turned the gaze of my heart and mind homeward. Nine days with Stephanie, John Paul and James Henry lay before me. My favorite thing in the world is getting to do life with Stephanie and the boys -- drinking coffee and praying early in the morning, cooking and ...

Wow. So that was a bit of hiatus… That’s the funny thing about blogs – at least for me – no matter how good the posts are and no matter how consistent they are for a time, I always find myself thinking, “We all know this is just a fad and it’s going to peter out and this blog will eventually just be another URL consigned to the scrapheap of history like Furbies and Billy the Singing Wall-mount Bass. But I digress… Earlier this week I was cleaning my desk at home and rediscovered my 2018 goals. I made about eight or so goals back around New Years and I’m killing it on approximately two of them. The others not so much. One of them, if you’ll recall, was to read 12 books this year and to use my blog as a way of processing and sharing what I am reading. Well, let’s just say that this goal hasn’t proven to be one of the two that I’m succeeding at. But we’re all about second chances, right? Well, over the past few weeks I read two books, one was a Eric Metaxas's biography of the grea...

I'm a fever guy. Ever since I was a kid when I would get sick, I would get sick. No half measures; no ambiguity; no dithering about whether I should take a sick day or not. Like a finely tuned European sports car, my engine accelerates from a cold start at 98.7 to 102.5 without a second thought. High delirious fevers and a few days in bed and normally the problem sorts itself out. All of that to say, when I went to bed on Saturday night last weekend the writing was on the wall. A tickle in my throat and a bit of a cold sweat on the back of my neck. And, Bam! Sunday morning I woke up with a fever of 102. Lots of sick baby/toddler-wearing this week... After a day of watching NCAA March Madness on Sunday (fever still hovering in 101-102 range), come Monday morning I decided to spend my sick days a little bit more profitably. My reading quota (see previous posts) has been coming along pretty well: my reading group finished up Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning , ...

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've committed to reading a shelf-full of books this year. I chose them from amongst the dozens -- aright, hundreds -- of books that we own that I've never read. I specifically asked myself, 'what are the books that I want to have read?' I guess that's sort of my motto this year: what are the things that I want to have accomplished? I've learned that there are lots of things that I want to do  and there is an altogether different set of things that I want to have done -- not in the passive sense of having them done to me, but in the past tense of having done them. For me, reading has always fallen into this category. I wasn't a reader growing up; and even though I attended an awesome liberal arts college (and got decent enough grades), I really didn't thrive academically because I didn't enjoy the act of sitting down and reading. In fact, it wasn't until graduate school that I felt like I ever totally comm...