Tag: Marriage

You So Poor, You Can’t Even Pay Attention – Keeping Focus on What’s Important

Life is full of distractions.  Often the tools we have that make life easier can become a burden to us and our relationships around us.  For example, the cell phone is a marvelous tool.  With it, I have a calendar that ensures that reminds me of where I need to be and at what time I need to be there.  It keeps me connected with my family in that I can have nearly instant communication with my wife no matter where I am.  I can work from anywhere as I have email on it to communicate with my customers.  It is a powerful tool with more processing power in it than the mainframe computers used to send astronauts to the moon and back.

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Yet, what do we do with this powerful tool?  Engaging in activities which are time sucks.  You know what I am talking about.  Reading that click-bait article you found on Facebook, harvesting your carrots in Farmville, or posting pictures of your dessert on Twitter.  Are any of these activities bad in and of themselves?  No, of course not.  But when they distract us from being aware of those around us, they can harm our relationships, even when we are trying to do something useful for those around us.

Let me give you an example.  My wife asked me if she could use my PayPal Here device during an upcoming garage sale.  No problems, I said yes.  But, the new phone I have does not support the older PayPal Here device I have.  So I ran down the rabbit hole of looking for a solution.  There was an android tablet that could support the older device that I had.  I sat down while my wife and son were eating breakfast and worked on it.  Installing the app, I tested it.  I became so focused on what I was doing I lost track of what was going on around me.  There my family was sitting in near silence eating while they saw me work on a tablet ignoring them.

To make matters worse, my wife asked me a question I did not even register she asked until I stood up to go use the restroom.  I had become so engrossed in what I was doing; I did not hear my wife even though she was just a few feet from me.  Needless to say that was not meeting my wife’s needs.  When I asked what she had said, I got the dreaded “nothing” answer.

How do you recover from falling into the pit you dug for yourself?  Now this was not the first time I had been so engrossed in something I missed out on what was going on around me.  What can I do?  Well, first acknowledge that I was way too engrossed in what I was doing.

Second, own up to not doing it at an appropriate time.  I should have waited until after my wife and son were doing something else.  One of my goals for this year is to be more intentional about family time.  Put up the phone/tablet/laptop/book/new shiny thing of the day and focus on who I am with when they are with me.  Had it been a situation where there was 20 minutes to the start of the garage sale that might have been different provided I told my wife what I was up to.  But there was plenty of time.  It could have waited.

Third, demonstrate that I am trying to learn from my mistakes.  Wanting to change does not make the change happen.  If desire was all it took, life would be pretty easy.  One thing I am looking to do is to have a basket.  When family time occurs (meals, movie night, times when we are just hanging out), I want to put my electronic tools in the basket.  This way my family has a visual I am being intentional about protecting my time with them.  Words can’t have as great a healing effect without an action to show they are at work.  James wrote that faith without works is dead.  So too can our words be dead if we don’t back them up with actions to show we are trying to change the negative behavior.

Fourth, be careful of being defensive.  This is a problem for me.  What I may view as giving a reason for what I did may just be an excuse to the person receiving it.  The best intentions mean nothing if you are not accounting for how the other person receives what you are doing.  It is human nature want to justify our actions.  It is easy to see ourselves as the victim as we were “just trying to…”  What I have found is any time I try to justify my actions, it’s received as negating my wife’s feelings.  That is not my intent.  It is not an easy thing to stop and attempt to evaluate what my wife is feeling when you are “in the moment.”  Human nature wants to win the argument.  But that strategy is doomed to fail and everyone loses.  But when I stop and take the time to evaluate and try to put myself in her shoes, the results turn out better.  Arguments are never easy and always uncomfortable.  But it can mitigate the pain when you try to understand what the other person is feeling.

What is it you do to pay attention to your family?  How do you avoid distraction?  What are your time sucks that pull you away from those who mean the most to you?

Hello World

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Back in the day, when I first learned the Basic Programming language, one of the first programs you learned to write was the Hello World program.  It was a useless program that just printed the words “Hello World” onto the monitor of your computer.  To put things into perspective, that was back in the day when you still had to type out line numbers for Basic.  Yes, that was a long time ago.

But a blog, like learning a programming language, has to start somewhere. Thank you for visiting. This project was several years in the making.  The title comes from an email conversation I had with someone at least a decade ago. I had given him my opinion on something and he responded with something like, “now there are real pearls of wisdom.” I wasn’t as confident about that and my response was, “Well, more like marbles of opinion.” His enthusiastic response imprinted on my mind ever since.

I hope you will take the time and join me as I try to become the parent my child deserves rather than the one he has.

What I am looking to do is talk about experiences I have had dealing with marriage, fatherhood and faith. Anyone with sense will quickly wonder: what my qualifications are to be an expert on these subjects?

The answer is none other that what I have experienced. In no way shape or form do I claim to be an expert.  Far from it.  Instead, I view myself as a perpetual student who hopes he is learning from his mistakes.

I have several decades of experience in marriage (celebrated my 26th anniversary in 2018). I have only one child, but I think he is pretty special. And I have my beliefs. This blog is a journey of what I am learning about being a husband and a father to the two most important people in my life.

My experiences may differ from yours and that’s OK. I hope you can learn from my mistakes (I’ve made many) and share a few things I have learned along the way.

The traditional marriage vows include “in sickness and in health.” In twenty-six years, we have managed a good deal of both. It has been an exciting journey and I hope I can share it with you.