Family Man

I'm a big fan of Andrew Peterson. One of my favorite songs of his is Family Man, not so much because I identify with the person singing, but rather because I wish that I did. Here is a video someone has produced to accompany the song. It maketh me weepy.



"Family Man" from Trevor Little on Vimeo.

From Bonnets to Earrings...

At 10:22 on July 27 of 1995, my first child was born. Months of worry and a lifetime of prayers had led to that moment. I recall vividly in the early hours of the following morning that I sat and gently rocked her, long after the nurses had left and Kadie had finally succumbed to the fatigue of the day and the long night. (I also recall the Texas Rangers snapping an eight game losing streak, but that's not important right now).

So I was the only one in the room, rocking my newborn when the pediatrician came in to give her a check up. He was in his early forties, not too much older than I am today. He paused for a moment as he saw me rock her and he smiled and said “Tomorrow she’s going to be all grown up.”

I considered strangling him on the spot.

But he’s now been proved right. As of yesterday evening, we now have a teenager in the house. May God have mercy on our souls.

Kadie took her to get her ears pierced this weekend. Scooter has been looking forward to that rite of passage for most of her thirteen years. When she would ask why she couldn’t get them pierced any earlier, I always would respond “Because you will have the rest of your life to be a grown up. You can be a little kid for awhile longer.”

After they returned from the mall, she came up to me in the living room, pulled her hair back to display her new earrings and said “How do I look Daddy?”

For just a moment when I looked at her, all I could see was:

"You look beautiful, honey, just like you always have."

A Wordle of Coffeespoons

Wordle is a method of graphically depicting the words from a text (in this case, a blog) and apportioning their size based on frequency of use. So the more often they are used, the larger the text.

Click here for a wordle of Coffeespoons.

Meeting the Candidate

After our series of interviews, the committee reached a consensus on one particular candidate. We decided early on that when we began the second series of interviews, we would focus on only one candidate at a time. Initially, four of us traveled across the state to hear him preach at a church that was half-way between us. When we saw him we were shocked. He’s thirty years old and barely looks that. His wife is even younger. My initial thought was “He’s way too young and the older folks in the church would never like him.” But we introduced ourselves and he made a favorable first impression.

The sermon went well. His style was quite different from our previous minister who often equated volume with passion. While his approach is more conversational, the message was still challenging. Particularly positive from our perspective was that he preached a sermon appropriate to the church. It is a church located in a neighborhood transitioning from predominately white to predominately African-American. But the church shows little evidence of changing to meet the needs of the new community. His sermon was direct and challenging. Surprisingly (to us) the sermon was not directed to a search committee, but it was pointed directly at the church.

Following the service, we took him and his wife (and three kids) out to lunch. It was an enjoyable meal and didn’t feel at all like an interview. We had a very nice conversation with them for over four hours (!?). He and his wife shared their testimonies and provided a compelling narrative covering how God has been working their lives.

After they left, we discussed the meeting and all four of us felt that we had been a part of something very special. We each had an identical first impression (he’s too young) and then our perceptions began to change throughout the service and the subsequent meal. Two of the four who went later shared that at this meal they were convinced that he was the man God was leading to our church. (Lacking such discernment myself, it would only be later that I would reach the same conclusion). But clearly we each felt a rising sense of excitement by the end of the meal.

As we turned our mini-van toward home, I got a call from another member of the committee who had traveled to a different church that morning. Before he could give me a summary of his visit I interrupted him and said “Jim, I’ve got someone the rest of the committee needs to meet…”

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A Review of Love as a Way of Life

I’m not sure that there is a greater marketing gimmick in the world than romantic love. Music, films, books, paintings, all depict love in various forms and glorify, if not deify, the concept of romantic love. As a consequence of this ongoing glorification, I’ve tended to view books on love with a certain amount of suspicion. And so it was when I was contacted to put together a blog review on Gary Chapman’s newest book, Love as a Way of Life: Seven Keys to Transforming Every Aspect of your Life (Waterbrook Press, 2008). I'm also notoriously skeptical of subtitles like this one.

I knew of Chapman’s The Five Love Languages, and he has written his first study of love since that famous work. Love as a Way of Life is his attempt to reframe the reader’s view of love from romantic concepts to realistic ones. He breaks down the concept of love into seven constituent parts, and provides a definition of each one.

Kindness: The joy of meeting someone else’s needs before your own simply for the sake of the relationship

Patience: Allowing someone to be imperfect

Forgiveness: Using honesty, compassion, and self awareness to reconcile with someone who hurt you

Courtesy: The act of treating everyone as a personal friend

Humility: a peacefulness of heart that allows you to stand aside in order to affirm the value of someone else

Generosity: giving your attention, time, abilities, money, and compassion freely to others

Honesty: a loving consistency in speech thought and action

In each chapter he defines that aspect of love. He usually relates a narrative from his counseling experience that illustrates how the individual was either practicing or not practicing that particular trait.

Take his definition of courtesy. It eschews the common concept of the word (saying Thank you and Yes Ma'am) and provides it with a much greater depth. It only takes a minute to see how our lives might be transformed by characteristic of love. How might your day be changed if you treated everyone you encountered as a personal friend? Would it affect the way you interact with the cashier at Wal-Mart? Would it affect the hostile student complaining about a grade? How would it affect the long-suffering secretary in the doctor’s office who is trying to work your sick child into an unscheduled appointment? Would it affect your response to your wife at the end of a busy week when you are both exhausted and the kids are fighting?

Chapman defines the terms and then offers practical suggestions for implementing them. He includes the competitor of each of these characteristics of love (e.g. busyness is the competitor of courtesy) and offers specific suggestions for cultivating these selfless acts.

Chapman rejects the common view that one falls into and out of love as though it were a disease alternately caught and overcome. He argues that anyone who claims to love must translate those words into concrete actions. As he writes, “Love is an attitude that leads to a change in behavior.” Specifically, love bears scant resemblance to popular conditions of romantic love that fades over time in the face of the demands of work, kids, relatives, and even due to high school reunions.

For Chapman, authentic love is not an ethereal feeling, but a concrete series of specific tasks and this book is about equipping the reader for these tasks.

As a joke, sometimes I steal the line from As Good as it Gets and say to Kadie (with appropriate Nicholson inflection) “You make me wanna be a better man!”

Chapman reminds me that wanting to do something is not the same thing as equipping me to do so. This work equips the reader for a life-transforming task. It is probably the best book on personal development I’ve read in the 20 years since I read since Scott Peck’s A Road Less Travelled.

In closing, I told Kadie about the book and she had noticed me trying to work on some of the traits he discusses. Stealing one of Chapman's questions from his section on marriage, I asked her “Kadie, how can I be a better husband to you?” Without missing a beat she replied “Keep reading books like that one.”

High praise indeed!

Now for a little contest. I also received two extra copies of this book! The first two readers to email me the languages of love (all five) from Capman's previous book will get a free copy of Love as a Way of Life.

If you sprinkle...

(I hope the reader (use of the singular is intentional) will forgive a PG-13 digression from the recent run on Pastor Search Committee information.)

The past several weeks, the bathroom that each of the three kids share has smelled. It’s smelled like a men’s locker room. Actually it’s smelled more like a men’s restroom. Specifically, it’s smelled of urine. With a large crack running down the side of the toilet,Kadie and I resigned ourselves to getting a plumber to come out and repair the crack before the raw smell drives the kids crazy.

With that background, Scooter came to me a few days ago and said “Dad, Squealer tinkled on the bathroom seat. You should talk to him about it.”

I sat there silently for a moment and digested this information. Then I somewhat sheepishly replied (with hands held out in supplication):

“Scooter, who among us can possibly cast the first stone at that transgression? I mean, to expect any male in general and a five year old boy in particular to carefully raise the seat every time he...” But she quickly interrupted.

“No, Dad, you don’t understand. He had the seat up! “

My mind turned slowly as I processed this new information. It did not compute, so I inquired further. “But Scooter, how could he urinate on the bathroom seat if it’s up?”

“Dad, he peed on the bottom of the upraised seat!!!”

We were both a little surprised that she used the term “pee”. She’s normally sensitive to the appropriateness of her language. In her defense, however, her brother pushed her over the edge in this instance.

A quick conversation with Squealer revealed the truth of his big sister’s outburst. He had been raising the lid of the toilet, then urinating in a slow circle around its underside, like a meticulous firefighter extinguishing a ring of fire from the circus.

After an extensive conversation, he’s resolved not to repeat the behavior.

Mealtime Interview

As a significant part of our process, the interview over a meal was a necessary evil. It’s natural I suppose, to get to know someone over a shared meal, but in most cases it was painfully formal. In fact, with every candidate except the one we selected, the meeting felt more like an interview than a meal. We would talk with the candidate about the recently observed service and then ask a variety of questions that would tell us about the candidate.

We decided against scripting out questions in advance. We felt that it would be too artificial to try to go through and select certain questions that each of us would ask. This meal was the first opportunity for anyone on the committee (outside of myself) to talk to the potential candidate.

A couple of thoughts:

• As I’ve mentioned before, we decided that every meal we would have a female member of the committee present. This decision invariably helped us afterwards when we discussed how the interview went.
  
• Candidates should always have questions for the committee. It indicates a lack of preparation at best, or a desire to accept any job opening that comes along at worse, when the candidate asks no questions. The candidate we eventually recommended to the church asked some very pointed and difficult questions, which was refreshing.
  
• One candidate had a detailed five step plan that God revealed to him that he was going to implement at Lakeview Baptist. I certainly endorse pastoral leadership and think that the pastor has the key leadership role in setting the vision for the church, but we were surprised that he had such a detailed view when he knew nothing about our church.
  
• We gained a lot of information simply by observing the candidate interact with his wife. We requested that (when possible) the pastor’s wife come to lunch with us. We weren’t so much interested in observing her (I am partial to the demands on the pastor’s wife) but we could more easily see how the candidate treated his wife. This was an area of critical importance to us. One candidate tensed up whenever his wife answered questions and he was clearly worried about what she might have to say. The candidate we eventually called was easy and relaxed as his wife asked us questions or answered questions of our own.
  
• We were also big fans of the waiter test. We watched closely to see how the candidate interacted with the wait staff at the restaurant. (Obviously, I have a soft spot for the wait staff!)
  
• The candidate we selected brought his kids (ages 5 and 2) to part of the meal. I would recommend against that, though in his case the kids were well behaved and didn’t detract from the atmosphere of the interview. But as a rule, I'd recommend getting a sitter (I know I did with MY kids).

Having his kids present certainly didn’t hurt his case when a random couple in the restaurant came up and complimented the candidate in front of us and said “What a fine family!” After the couple left we sat there in stunned silence. Then the candidate turned to us with a grin on his face and said “You have no idea how hard it was to plant that couple in this restaurant before we all got here…”

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