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Confessions of a Sports Parent: The Scoreboard
As the holidays have come and gone, and most of us are back into our routines, it can only mean one thing…back to driving our kids all over creation to their respective sporting events. As a result, I thought it would be fun to resume writing about the random thoughts I sometimes have while sitting on a sideline as a parent. This week, I pondered a topic that always provokes heated debate among parents and organizations: the scoreboard. How important is it? What does it mean? Do you think it’s even needed? Is it the only thing needed? Like most things in our culture today, the two extremes rule the…
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Confessions of a Sports Parent: The Parent Zone
If you are anything like me, I sometimes lose sight of my boy’s childhood, which is flying by. We go from one season to the next, making it difficult to enjoy the time in front of us entirely. It is hard to stay in the moment and present, knowing the next game, season, or sport is approaching. That said, whenever I catch myself adrift from the moment, I approach each game or match with the end in sight. It sounds contradicting, but it has helped me stay in the present. One of the interior freedoms that occurs after mid-life is the ability to see things in a non-dualistic fashion. For…
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Confessions of a Sports Parent: Sports Wounds
(This is the second part of the series; it might be helpful to read the first here) We have all heard flight attendants tell adults and caregivers, especially parents, to apply their oxygen masks before helping others. The idea, of course, is that if you run out of oxygen yourself, you can’t help anyone else with theirs, especially children. That is a good image for me when I try to stay balanced as a sports parent. When I find myself out of balance, it usually happens when my old sports wounds, fears, or anxieties rear their ugly heads. I refer to these things as my shadows. Consequently, when I watch…
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Confessions of a Sports Parent: Sports Balance
We know there is no rule book for parents. We learn on the fly, and many cultural influences affect our decisions and values, not to mention our personal history, both positive and negative. Furthermore, for those of us who have children playing sports, the same premise exists…there isn’t a rule book, yet the same influences exist. Gone are the days of signing up at your local league and you play a season for just that team alone. The rise of travel and specialization has changed the landscape of youth sports. As a result, most of us are trying to navigate an ever-changing world of youth sports to ensure our children…
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A Scandalous Christmas
We have become accustomed to reading about scandals in the 24-hour news cycle. Whether political scandals, celebrity scandals, or the scandals we like to talk about in our small communities, we have become addicted to them, and I’m not sure that is a good thing. That said, every year on December 25th, we arguably celebrate the most scandalous story ever told. Over the years, we have domesticated the Nativity story in many ways. I am as guilty as anyone. We paint the picture through our “nice,” often middle-class, everyday lives. Not to say that any of that is terrible. I heard someone say the other day that all of the…
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Some Random Thoughts at 44
Every year around my birthday, I love to come up with random thoughts that strike me at this stage of my life. Reviewing what I came up with last year, I realized how much I am still in the same mindset. (I’m not sure if that is good or bad.) So, with a few add-ons and clarifications (all in bold)…here are a few things that strike me this year: Cheers to another year ahead, which involves daily gratitude, grace, and humility.
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Moments in Time: Dingle, Ireland
As many of us celebrated St. Patrick’s Day this week, we are on the Dingle Peninsula in southwest Ireland. Dingle is the largest town on the peninsula in County Kerry. The magnificent road that winds around the peninsula is called Slea Head Drive. A little side note: The westernmost part of the peninsula not only brings a spectacularly beautiful view of the rough surf of the Atlantic, but the islands off to the west are the closest part of mainland Ireland that you can get to the United States. A statue of the Cross is nestled in the rock just off the road. The scene from the crucifixion sits facing…
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The Human Balance
I recently found myself in multiple conversations about how to strike a balance between recognizing times when we need to be alone and the moments when we need nothing more than to be with others. Needless to say, I didn’t get very far, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized there wasn’t a recipe to strike the balance. That could be because the balance is innate, engrained within the fabric of our beings from the beginning. The very nature of being human is to be ourselves within the constructs of community. Therefore, the truth lies in the paradox. Life has a way of dictating our needs.…
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Beyond Croatia’s Beauty
Living in Switzerland has allowed us to travel to many places in the world that we may not have otherwise been able to see. However, seeing is one thing; experiencing these places is something else. Some places can give you an aura or feel about them beyond that in which the eye can see. Sometimes, their natural beauty may point to and radiate something more to life than what we can visualize. Other times, it might be the architecture that can tell the stories of their past in ways only our subconscious can fully articulate. And then there are the places still wrestling with their own identities as a country,…
