Daly Focus Blog
This holiday season, give yourself a special gift: take a deep breath, relax, and laugh at yourself.
When I think of seeing the funny side of life, I think of Bill who wanted to cook his family the greatest Thanksgiving meal ever. Instead of a traditional dinner from the kitchen oven, he decided to cook the turkey on his new grill outside, a fancy built-in connected to the house’s gas line. He spent weeks planning the menu, and when the big day arrived, he executed it flawlessly.
Relationships are the most rewarding experiences this side of heaven. But any relationship can present challenges. And when they do, the best approach for restoring peace and harmony is boundaries.
God himself demonstrated why and how to create boundaries. He gave Adam and Eve just one: Don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:17). It communicated four important ideas about relationships:
Boundaries define and protect freedom. God’s boundary protected Adam and Eve for their own good.
Picture this. You’re nine years old, and your mother just died. Your step-dad has abandoned you, so you’ve been taken to live with a family you’ve never met. You’re desperately hoping the man of the house will become the father you never had, but he’s, well, eccentric. Which is why his first assignment for you when you move into the family home is, “You gotta cut the head off a chicken.”
That bizarre scenario actually happened.
When my boys were growing up, my wife and I often talked to them about their goals. Trent and Troy usually focused on things like grades or what they hoped to achieve in sports. Jean and I supported those ambitions, but we also encouraged them to think outside the box, like considering what they could do to develop their character.
Which got my wife and me thinking about setting goals for our marriage. We began having conversations about our relationship in terms of themes, like forgiveness, grace, or patience.
A lot of things in your home are probably fake. And that’s okay. Just don’t let your relationships fall into that category.
Home construction technology has come a long way. In the early 1900s, wood floors made from real trees were standard to home construction. These days, everything from flooring to furniture to back decks are made from composites that only look like real wood. And the fakery doesn’t stop there. We’re surrounded by veneers, synthetics, and man-made stone.
Some things aren’t worth what they cost in the long run. A humorous metaphor for that is an unlucky baseball fan in San Francisco. He tried to catch a couple foul balls at a baseball game, and it cost him a small fortune.
It all started at the top of the second inning when a foul ball was hit his way. He’d just sat down with $25 worth of food after waiting in line for thirty minutes.
The best parenting combines authority with love. It gives children boundaries while helping them to feel cared for and nurtured. Sadly, some parents lean heavy on authority and less on love. That approach reduces parenting to a list of demanding rules that is damaging to a child.
My step-dad, Hank, was all authority. His parenting was as simple as “because-I-say-so.” Break one of his rules, and you’d regret it. It was his way of keeping order, but it didn’t sit well with my older sister, Kim.
Each day seems to bring with it new disturbing videos and reports of individuals and groups behaving badly – from ransacking a supermarket, to brazenly shoplifting from a drugstore, to sucker punching an innocent person on a subway station platform.
Violence is just one symptom of a sick society. Other signs include a disregard or downright hostility toward all things sacred, because of our selfishness, seeing children as burdens rather than blessings, the normalization of aberrant sexual behavior and a general disregard for civility and good manners.
Author Shauna Pilgreen tells her children, “A life of comfort is a win for the Enemy. When you’re comfortable, you’re usually leaning on your own strength, which means you’re leaning less on God’s strength.”
Shauna and her family have been through numerous experiences that have taught them to rely on God in uncomfortable circumstances. It started in earnest when God led the Pilgreens from their cozy suburban life in Missouri to plant a church in San Francisco, where their lives are anything but comfortable.
For decades, sociologists have been telling us how important it is for children to feel loved and cared for. Proof of that concept came in the 1990s after a political revolution in Romania. Over 170,000 abandoned infants, toddlers, and teenagers were housed in a network of government-run institutions known as “child gulags.” The children were provided with food, but very few received loving touch or attention. Most of the children never knew what it was like to love or to be loved.
Jim Daly is a husband, father and President of Focus on the Family and host of its National Radio Hall of Fame broadcast. His blog, Daly Focus, is full of timely commentary and wisdom designed to help you navigate and understand today’s culture. His latest book is Marriage Done Right.
