In many ways 2010 was the best year of my life; I got to return to Kenya, which was an amazing experience. I sold a book to a major publisher, which was also amazing. My children both made the international team in Bible quizzing with the Alliance Church, which sounds geeky but really was one of the most fun things we did all year. And I am just having so much fun with my kids as they grow.
But I'm looking forward to 2011, too! I'm hoping to repeat that international Bible quizzing experience, and though it doesn't look like I'll get to Kenya again, I'm really expanding my speaking tours, so I may make it to your neck of the woods! I'll put up more announcements once I know where I'll be.
Yet I thought it might be fitting, at the beginning of this new year, to look back on the top 10 posts of 2010. I'm choosing the ones that generated the most comments (and thus the most controversy), but also the ones that I liked the best. I know over the last few months my following has grown quite a bit, so many of you may not have read all of these. So, in no particular order, here they are:
2. What To Do When Friend's Marriage Falls Apart. An important post for me personally. Do we have a strategy that actually is effective when a friend announces they're splitting up? Here are my thoughts!
3. Does Modesty Really Matter? Probably the most ardent debate on the blog this year. Many readers accused me of blaming women for rape, which wasn't my intention at all. I was just simply saying that women should think about what they are wearing. See what you think!
4. On Day Care, Attachment, God's Will, and More! I don't know why I'm linking to all the posts that had people the most riled up, because I really don't feel like stirring up a hornet's nest again. But this one had a lot of traffic, and if you want to go chime in, go ahead! I can take it.
6. Should a Child's Room Be a Castle? Should kids have TVs and computers in their rooms? Is their bedroom the most important room in the house? Interesting debate!
8. Weird Culture Alert: Definitely the strangest interactions I had all last year. I commented on how promoting pole dancing for health reasons is ridiculous, and then a bunch of pole dancers chimed in. A guy's comment definitely ended the whole thing! Pretty funny.
9. Wifey Wednesday: Learning Not to Dissociate. Usually when we think of porn problems we think of men. But 30% of porn addicts are women, and women have just as much trouble battling images in their heads during sex as men do. Here's the last in a series of posts I did about porn and women, which generated a ton of email to me. I hope it helps!
10. Just Do It. Finally, a post that I wrote near the launch of the new year last year. How do we really accomplish change? Maybe we should stop thinking about it and planning for it and just do it!
I had a ton of other posts I really liked last year, but these are the ones that seemed to get the most response in their respective months. I hope you enjoy them, if you missed them the first time around! And I hope this year that I can keep writing things that make you think, encourage you, and point you to God!
Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here's this week's, just in time for the new year!
Goal setting is big in the business world. Think of the slogans! If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there! To be good is not enough when you dream of being great! Think little goals and expect little achievements; think big goals and win big success! Or, as Tony Robbins would say, setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.
So set goals! Aim high! The sky’s the limit.
Yeah, right. And if you believe that, I have a whole pile of leftover Christmas chocolate that I’m not going to eat, either.
Let’s back up. If goal setting like that is lame in corporate life, maybe all this focus on New Year’s Resolutions can go overboard in our personal life, too. Despite what the business gurus say, much of our goal setting activity sets us up for failure, because we aim too high, and then think we’ve flunked. But as long as you’re heading in the right direction, is it really a failure? To me, your direction is more important than your current location.
For instance, let’s take a guy who looks like he has it altogether. He’s in a stable marriage; his kids are achieving straight A’s; his house is a showcase. But at the same time he’s contemplating having an affair and he’s petrified to look at the credit card bill when it comes in after Christmas.
Contrast that with someone who gave up drinking a year and a half ago. His marriage is still rocky and the kids are still reeling from the dysfunction in the family, but he’s turned his life around. For the first time in a decade he has a stable job and he’s just won two promotions back to back. He and his wife are saving up for a downpayment on a house so they can finally move out of subsidized housing. They’re starting to go to church and get involved in the YMCA.
The first family looks better on the outside; the second family may end up stronger in the end. I don’t think it’s where you’re at that’s important; it’s whether or not you’re moving forward. So if you break your New Year’s resolutions and miss jogging for three days, but at the same time you’ve exercised more in the last week than you ever have before, you haven’t failed. You’re just taking baby steps, which are sometimes awkward. Sometimes you fall down. But at least you’re moving somewhere.
We need to remember that when it comes to goals. Sure, we’ll still have the typical ones. I want to quit my Diet Pepsi addiction, for instance. I hate coffee and I need the caffeine, but I don’t want the aspartame. I want to work my way up to 5 km run (I know that’s wimpy to many, but to me that’s a lot). And I want to get more organized with my menu planning.
But I also know I have far more important goals. I want to become a wiser, gentler person. I want to become a more forgiving person. I want to gossip less and pray more. I want to savour the moments and not rush so much. I want to smile more and laugh more and take more risks.
It’s hard to measure those things, but I hope, at the end of ten years, that I can look back and say that I’ve moved in the right direction. I’ll never really arrive, but maybe we’re not supposed to. Maybe we’re just supposed to keep growing. So I’m going to point forward and take baby steps. As long as I’m moving, I think that’s more important than where I am now.
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After going over in her mind whether or not resolutions are useful, she says this:
However, after some deliberation I have concluded that resolutions serve a valuable purpose. New years, new months, new weeks, even new days present us with the opportunity to do better today than we did yesterday. To acknowledge that who and what we are at the end of the year, for better or worse, is in many ways a referendum on the daily choices we have made as the year began. It is an acknowledgment that we have a choice, a role in the fruit our lives produce, even if we cannot control all of the circumstances that come our way. Sometimes we need to feel the guilt of our laziness and bad choices.
I would agree. But I don't think that having the same resolutions twice or three times or ten times in a row should necessarily lead to guilt. (that's not what Terry ends up saying, either, but I want to use her as a jump off point!).
Let me explain.
I've made extremely detailed plans for my business, but for my personal life and spiritual life I'm not getting that detailed. I know what I want to do. Read the Word before my day really starts. Pray. Exercise. Have fun with my kids. Drink more water.
Easy as pie, right? We know it, but we don't always do it. But at least we're trying!
I think the problem is that we blame ourselves if we have the same resolutions every year, because we feel like failures.
But remember that passage in Philippians 3, that we are straining forward to what lies ahead? That means that we never really arrive; we always need to keep straining forward. We'll only arrive in heaven, not on earth.
So each year we SHOULD have the same resolutions; the resolutions that lead to a better life in Jesus, which encompasses our spiritual life, our physical life, and our relational life.
You're not a failure if you have to resolve the same things over and over again. You're only a failure if you give up trying!
Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a variety of newspapers. Here's today's!
New Year’s Resolutions are traditionally made, and broken, in January. My resolutions, though, tend to rear their ugly heads in September. That’s when I re-evaluate my life, figure out what I want to do differently, and attempt to craft our fall schedules so that these have a modicum of a chance of succeeding.
And every year my resolutions all have to do with the same thing: I’m going to make breakfast more of a priority, rather than being a free-for-all. I’m going to exercise more, and I’m going to stop eating out so much. I don’t know why I bother to plan all of this. I could just thumb through my journal from last year and say “ditto”.
Resolutions have a way of making us feel like pond scum because we never actually live up to them. Lately, though, I’ve been realizing that even if my resolutions sputter, I have come a long way.
If you look at a snapshot of your life from ten years ago, chances are you’ve improved in a lot of areas, too, even if your waistline isn’t one of them. Go back even further and it’s almost laughable.
When I first was married I was overwhelmed with how much my mother-in-law could do that I couldn’t. She could cook a turkey dinner that would serve a small country without the aid of a recipe book. She could keep her house spotless, and still have time to put her feet up at the end of the day. I had crumbs all over my counter and laundry that was never folded.
Over the last decade and a half, though, something miraculous has happened. Every night, those crumbs disappear. The laundry tends to reside in drawers rather than on floors. And I, too, can whip up a turkey dinner without a recipe book.
I used to think that some people were just gifted at doing “life”, and some were life-challenged, like me. But now I realize it’s not always about skills. Sometimes it’s just about practice. And when you’ve been living on your own for twenty years, you figure out how to pay the bills, and how to clean up so you can have company over, and how to dress so you look professional, and how to talk to department store repair people without feeling intimidated. It’s not anything magical. It’s just that you’ve been doing it for so long that you get good at it.
When my children were little the house resembled a tornado touch down. Today it does not. It’s partly because they’ve grown, but it’s also because I’ve learned how to clean. If I were to have babies today, I think the house would be neater (though probably not as fun). I’ve developed routines to get life under control so that it becomes second nature.
If you’re beating yourself up at the beginning of this new year because you feel disorganized, just pull out an old photo album and look at how far you’ve come! Even simple things like how awful that haircut looked back then and how ridiculous your fashion choices were can make you feel immensely better about yourself today. And just look at how frazzled you looked back then!
Maybe, though, you feel like you’re still in the middle of those frazzled years. Don’t fret it. Simply by living, life often gets easier. We get practice. Practice at making a decent meal. Practice at putting our toys away. Practice at sharing our lives and our hearts. Hopefully practice at keeping our wallets—and our mouths—closed when necessary. And most importantly, practice at showing others how much we love them. And practice does a lot more for you than an endless list of resolutions.
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Every Friday my column appears in several newspapers. Here's this week's, inspired by a New Year's post I wrote a while back.
In my New Year’s column, I painted a picture of how common sense has been sacrificed over the last five decades. Boy, did many readers take me to task for being so negative! I didn’t realize how bad things were then. And today life really is a lot better. Their kids are doing great!
And I’m glad for them. Mine are, too! But that’s one of the problems with anecdotal evidence: remember when Nixon’s 1972 presidential win confounded New York journalists, because no one they knew voted for him? They had a closed system of acquaintances, and so they thought the world was other than it was. Similarly, our own little circle may be thriving, but that doesn’t mean that all families are. The rates of family breakdown and delinquency today over fifty years ago shows a definite trend, and it isn’t pretty.
Nevertheless, the readers had a point. Their kids are doing well, and just because our culture may be going off the rails is no reason that our own kin have to follow. On an individual basis, we can challenge the norms and beat the odds. We all know that; that’s why we have so many New Year’s resolutions, even if they do have about as good a chance as being honoured as Dion did at becoming Prime Minister.
Yet have you ever noticed that most of our resolutions concern weight? We’re going to exercise. We’re not going to sneak the kids’ chocolate. We’re going to diet, at least for the next few days before our resolve passes.
Being healthy is certainly an admirable goal, but I’m curious as to why we focus so much on food. Other variables influence our health, too. For men, especially, being married is a health boon. It’s the equivalent to never having smoked. And common law relationships don’t have the same health bonus. Divorce, on the other hand, is a health killer. So if we’re really interested in health, maybe we should focus on our relationships, too!
The same is true for our children. We want them to succeed and do well in life, but we tend to focus on academics, as if that’s all that counts. But if we want to raise kids who will be independent, motivated, and responsible, good marks are no guarantee of anything! We all know brilliant young men with no drive who waste their lives on video games. Intelligence is not nearly the determinant for future success as work ethic and morals are.
I think many parents, though, just assume that their children will turn out okay. They give them the best toys, an easy life, and help them to succeed in school, assuming that this will steer their children into becoming good citizens. But without a real moral foundation, there’s no guarantee that this will happen.
Our culture is spreading a message which is the exact antithesis of real success in life. It says that appearance matters more than ethics; that sex is the way to popularity; that money can buy happiness (and so can electronic gadgets); and that the best thing in life is to have fun, not to be productive. The only way for our children to combat these attitudes is for us to take an active role in their lives and show them the benefits of acting responsibly.
Our New Year’s Resolutions for our children, then, should primarily focus on character. If you raise a child with good morals, the rest will follow. If you raise a self-centred, irresponsible but intelligent child, they’re unlikely to go far. So this year, can you teach them to do chores, so that they learn basic life skills and learn to think of others before they make a mess? Can you refuse to allow your children to call each other names, to gossip about others, or to degrade anyone else? Can you stop watching movies or TV shows that promote the wrong message?
Our society has many dark corners, making it easy to believe that life is inevitably moving in the wrong direction. But we can beat the odds if we start focusing on what really matters. This year, prioritize your relationships. Prioritize character, both in yourself and in your kids. And maybe we can finally build a culture where goodness and kindness are truly valued.
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Have you broken all your New Year's Resolutions yet? I've jogged once, but I'm going to get there. My goal, as opposed to a resolution, is that I be able to run three miles by my birthday in May. I think I can do it! Even better, I think I really am beating that Diet Pepsi habit. I have to get rid of aspartame.
But why is it that we often make these New Year's Resolutions that we never keep? And then we feel so guilty? Today, listen in on my podcast when I talk about what's wrong with many of our resolutions, and how to aim for the right thing! It's not too long, and you can listen while you surf the web. Just click here.
At this New Year junction we're all busy making goals and plans, and those are good things (I have planning sheets you can use here, for FREE!).
But sometimes I think we focus on the wrong things. What really brings success in life? I don't think it's intelligence. I think it's self-control and motivation.
I know many family members and friends who are extremely intelligent but not successful. They did well in school, have a lot of education, but they aren't succeeding super well at work or in their family life because they are consumed with self. It's all about me. And they can't seem to learn to delay gratification.
We're raising a whole generation of boys who are addicted to video games rather than real life. Many of them are highly intelligent. But what are they going to do with their lives that is productive?
It's funny how our New Year's Resolutions are often dominated by things that probably aren't at the top of the priority list overall. They relate to our weight, don't they? We'll lose weight. We'll exercise. We'll quit chocolate.
But in the end, the most important thing we can do is to stress character, and grow closer to Jesus. That's what's key. And maybe your resolutions reflect that, too: I will do my devotions everyday. I will pray more. Good for you!
But rather than just focusing on these simple, obvious goals, I think we need a plan to make sure that our families are moving in the right direction.
For instance, why is it that with our kids we focus so much on academics, and make them spend so much time in homework, but we don't teach them to cook a meal? Don't you think the latter is important, too? Why do we berate them about grades, but we don't make them do chores, which ultimately will do more to help them hold and keep a job than getting good grades will?
We focus on the easy to measure things. We often fail to focus on character issues.
So this year, as you're making your New Year's Resolutions, try to think in bigger terms. What do you want to stress this year? Talk about it with your husband and kids, too! Who do you want to be as a family? Who do you want to be ten years from now? And how are you going to get there?
For most of us, losing weight is probably a healthy idea. Doing devotions certainly is, too! But what about other things that ultimately will impact your family just as much, if not more?
What about teaching responsibility and character? What about starting a real chore system and sticking to it this year? (I have kids' chore charts and a handy system to categorize all household chores here). What about restricting video games and requiring your kids to volunteer somewhere each month? What about starting a savings account for your kids, and teaching them how to use it?
These are key skills which our society has passed by in favour of leisure, fun, and entertainment. Even in the church. And it's not going to serve our kids well in the long run. So as you're making those New Year's Resolutions, don't just worry about the chocolate. Think about character, too. In the end, that's more important.
About Me: I'm a Christian author of a bunch of books, and a frequent speaker to women's groups and marriage conferences. Best of all, I love homeschooling my daughters, Rebecca and Katie. And I love to knit. Preferably simultaneously.
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