Coming up soon is my Engagement Anniversary. Most people don’t celebrate their engagement anniversary, but most peoples engagements do not last over a year. We celebrated the first one in 2006, and decided to take this time, each year, to stop. We take time to enjoy being with one another, then assess our marriage. We honestly ask, what can I do better to serve my partner? What can I do to help grow our marriage? It should be no suprise then, that this time of year gets me thinking about relationships.
Relationships, and particularly marriages today confuse me. Many people are afraid of being alone. They know that they are wired for companionship, but once they get it they take it for granted, or they can’t see the companionship, they just see all the responsibilities that go with it. My wife and I did around three or four different pre-marital counseling programs with a variety of pastors, not because there were deep seated issues from our past that would haunt us through the years (don’t get me wrong, we have our share of baggage) but because I love her, she loves me, and in our love, the relationship itself seems to have a personality.
Our relationship is fun, and easy going. It is introverted, and sweet. Our relationship is kind and sacrificial and loving to each of us. As odd as this comes out, I don’t just love my wife, I love our relationship. This drove me to marriage counseling because, like a child, I wanted to do what was best for this relationship, I wanted to be trained on how to care for and feed a relationship. Furthermore, it actually turned into a lot of fun because in marriage counseling you spend the whole time talking about your relationship! It’s like a forum where they invite you in and say, “Tell me about your baby.” Find me a parent that doesn’t want to talk about their baby! They give you the strangest stuff! “Today little Johnny threw up all over my shirt, it was so cute!” So it was kind of the same way for me. We got to talk about our relationship, tell how cute he is, and all the neat stuff he does, and how I don’t really expect anything specific out of him. I just want him to be good, and Christian, and grow up great. Today, our relationship has grown into a wonderful marriage and I am very proud of him.
I love my marriage, I love my wife, and I found one really huge thing out during marriage counseling: Most people don’t. They don’t love their relationship, they never even though what he was like! Their relationship has no personality (or if it does, they don’t care what it is like) They kind of treat marriage as the song says “two paychecks are better than one, a diamond ring, and it was done.” As though marriage were a series of tax write offs rather than a relationship.
The majority of the training I got in premarital counseling was like what you’d find in a class on parenting entitled ‘How to keep a kid alive’ They say “Feed it, change its diaper, and when it’s sick take it to the doctor, and don’t drop it, don’t throw it, and don’t leave it in the tub unattended, try to use some common sense!” As though that’s all that there is. Ask any mom, it’s not! However, if you quit there, you will be lucky if your kid survives. Its like the combat manual version of raising your relationship.
No wonder we have a divorce rate of over 50%! People are killing their relationships because they fail to have even the basics of feeding watering and changing the diaper! Then there’s the dating scene which is totally sick! It’s the relationship equivalent of a slave market! People show up, usually put money down in exchange for a relationship, and expect it to do whatever they say, and when it doesn’t, when it just starts to get a mind of its own, they kill it and go back to the market for another one. “What’s a girl like you doing in a bar like this?” isn’t a pickup line, it’s a bid in a slave auction. It’s really “Can I have this relationship for a few drinks and some fake kind words?” (notice how they are fake, not pretend, these folks aren’t even getting ready to be kind, they use counterfeit kindness, like counterfeit bills, it shares a resemblance but it’s not worth crap!)
I am so thankful for my marriage, that I have a marriage that I can be proud of, one that is growing and is exactly what God made it to be. If I can be as fortunate with my children, I’ll be the luckiest man in the world!
If you want to grow your relationship or marriage past the battlefield manual of survival, maybe you should start treating your relationship like a person, find out what he’s like, and then figure out what you can do to help him out, instead of just asking what he can do for you!
Finally, I’m utterly convinced that just like a person, you can have a good, loving marriage without Jesus, but it will be a dead marriage, failing to connect with you at your deepest level. You’ll effectively have a Pinocchio: a great puppet that imitates a live relationship but at the end of the day is just made of wood.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Saturday, December 13, 2008
What Is A Linear Arrangement of Waterfowl?
What am I doing at a URL called "quackinthebox.blogger.com"? What is a linear arrangement of waterfowl? Well, while it has deeper connotations, I must state up-front that ducks rank highest as the most intrinsically funny animal.
While the author of “The Far Side” finds cows to be intrinsically humorous and hence you find them often included in his work, I will argue that a duck is funnier than a cow. While cows brag the benefits of udders and various milk jokes, they simply do not have webbed feet, or a bill. Finally, let’s face it. If a cow falls five stories, we get a simple splat. With a duck, we have a comical noise, and a puff of feathers, and are unsurprised to find that the duck is, in fact, alive and well. My hat is off to AFLAK for their commercial endeavor to inform the public of the duck’s intrinsic humor.
More specifically, with “quack in the box” we have a duck in an unexpected place. (an unexpected outcome is another element of humor, often referred to as irony, however this is not all that is involved in irony, but it is the part of irony that Alanis Morissette missed in her song) I enjoy complex, ironical humor. I try to work it into everything I do. Often I only succeed in revealing that I am a big nerd. On the up side, nerds have been recently popularized because we can do your homework and fix your computer.
To tie it all together, a linear arrangement of waterfowl is a fancy way of saying “ducks in a row” (however my preference for the term waterfowl makes room for loons, geese and storks as well). Basically what I want to create here: A place where I can sort things out, bring the complex out of simple issues, draw the unexpected (or expected) conclusions, and line the complexity up like a shooting gallery to then knock them back down into the simple little compartment we started with. An example:
Being a word nerd, I like to dissect words; anyone with some basic greek and latin knowledge can suck the majority of English words down to their roots
(sorry Spanish freaks out there, the roots of all those words that you think are of Spanish origin is actually latin, as English and Spanish are not stand-alones, but rather they are adjectives modifying Latin. Spanish is Spanish Latin [ie. Latin as spoken in Spain] and English is English Latin [Latin as spoken in England] and any overlap is actually from the fact that we are both speaking an evolved variety of Latin, not because the Spanish came over here and the Mexicans taught us how to talk, contrary to 10th grade logic.)
So lets dissect the word “Pretend” quick and simple prefix of “pre-“ core word of “tend” pre meaning: prior to, preceding, or before. Www.m-w.com has a great list of pre words if you search for pre there. Then the core word of tend: to apply oneself, or to work as an attendant to something. To work at something, or to do it. When you tend a garden, you are gardening! So we slap the meanings back together: Pre-tend: before apply yourself. In other words pretending is what we do before we do something. We see it all the time! Little girls pretend to have a family, little boys pretend to fight wars, junior high kids pretend they are in high school, high-schoolers pretend they are in college, and college students pretend they are drunk after one very wet apple-tini.
The implications here are paramount. To be frank, when we are pretending to do something, we are actually in the very first act of doing it. Before you pick the pencil up to write, a thought is formed. Before the star quarterback makes the pass, he sees it in his head, he is pretending, and by pretending he is actually performing the first step of the action. So the kid that pretends to shoot his classmates is actually performing the preparation to shoot them, the girl playing house is actually in the first step of caring for a family, and the little boy playing at war is actually patriotically dying for his country by taking the first step in that direction.
We must know what it is we are pretending to do, and pretend to do only the things that we really want to do, because, in fact, when you pretend you are performing the first step of the action. So don’t take away kids play guns, just get involved and see what they are pretending to do with those play guns, if you don’t let your little boy pretend to protect his family, he’ll fall flat when it’s time to do it, because you robbed him of years of preparation. Giving little girls a play kitchen isn’t “chauvinist training of women to fit an outdated societal role” it is allowing those little girls to pretend to do what they come out wired to do: love and nurture, and when you rob them of that, they fail to love and nurture later, they have had no time to get ready to do it. The less we pretend, the less we will actually do, so let’s make believe our way to a future where we actually do something, rather than demand that the world entertain us with falsehood.
Hopefully you found the quack in the box, and now have our waterfowl linearly arranged!
While the author of “The Far Side” finds cows to be intrinsically humorous and hence you find them often included in his work, I will argue that a duck is funnier than a cow. While cows brag the benefits of udders and various milk jokes, they simply do not have webbed feet, or a bill. Finally, let’s face it. If a cow falls five stories, we get a simple splat. With a duck, we have a comical noise, and a puff of feathers, and are unsurprised to find that the duck is, in fact, alive and well. My hat is off to AFLAK for their commercial endeavor to inform the public of the duck’s intrinsic humor.
More specifically, with “quack in the box” we have a duck in an unexpected place. (an unexpected outcome is another element of humor, often referred to as irony, however this is not all that is involved in irony, but it is the part of irony that Alanis Morissette missed in her song) I enjoy complex, ironical humor. I try to work it into everything I do. Often I only succeed in revealing that I am a big nerd. On the up side, nerds have been recently popularized because we can do your homework and fix your computer.
To tie it all together, a linear arrangement of waterfowl is a fancy way of saying “ducks in a row” (however my preference for the term waterfowl makes room for loons, geese and storks as well). Basically what I want to create here: A place where I can sort things out, bring the complex out of simple issues, draw the unexpected (or expected) conclusions, and line the complexity up like a shooting gallery to then knock them back down into the simple little compartment we started with. An example:
Being a word nerd, I like to dissect words; anyone with some basic greek and latin knowledge can suck the majority of English words down to their roots
(sorry Spanish freaks out there, the roots of all those words that you think are of Spanish origin is actually latin, as English and Spanish are not stand-alones, but rather they are adjectives modifying Latin. Spanish is Spanish Latin [ie. Latin as spoken in Spain] and English is English Latin [Latin as spoken in England] and any overlap is actually from the fact that we are both speaking an evolved variety of Latin, not because the Spanish came over here and the Mexicans taught us how to talk, contrary to 10th grade logic.)
So lets dissect the word “Pretend” quick and simple prefix of “pre-“ core word of “tend” pre meaning: prior to, preceding, or before. Www.m-w.com has a great list of pre words if you search for pre there. Then the core word of tend: to apply oneself, or to work as an attendant to something. To work at something, or to do it. When you tend a garden, you are gardening! So we slap the meanings back together: Pre-tend: before apply yourself. In other words pretending is what we do before we do something. We see it all the time! Little girls pretend to have a family, little boys pretend to fight wars, junior high kids pretend they are in high school, high-schoolers pretend they are in college, and college students pretend they are drunk after one very wet apple-tini.
The implications here are paramount. To be frank, when we are pretending to do something, we are actually in the very first act of doing it. Before you pick the pencil up to write, a thought is formed. Before the star quarterback makes the pass, he sees it in his head, he is pretending, and by pretending he is actually performing the first step of the action. So the kid that pretends to shoot his classmates is actually performing the preparation to shoot them, the girl playing house is actually in the first step of caring for a family, and the little boy playing at war is actually patriotically dying for his country by taking the first step in that direction.
We must know what it is we are pretending to do, and pretend to do only the things that we really want to do, because, in fact, when you pretend you are performing the first step of the action. So don’t take away kids play guns, just get involved and see what they are pretending to do with those play guns, if you don’t let your little boy pretend to protect his family, he’ll fall flat when it’s time to do it, because you robbed him of years of preparation. Giving little girls a play kitchen isn’t “chauvinist training of women to fit an outdated societal role” it is allowing those little girls to pretend to do what they come out wired to do: love and nurture, and when you rob them of that, they fail to love and nurture later, they have had no time to get ready to do it. The less we pretend, the less we will actually do, so let’s make believe our way to a future where we actually do something, rather than demand that the world entertain us with falsehood.
Hopefully you found the quack in the box, and now have our waterfowl linearly arranged!
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