So, a friend of mine sent me an email last week. Said he was going to be in town (he lives elsewhere) and wanted to get together for a cup of coffee. I immediately started to wonder what it might be about.

He works for a pretty sizable publishing company; maybe he wanted to talk to me about a potential book project. Maybe his church is looking for a new pastor. That happens sometimes. Someone says they just want to have a conversation, but they’re really feeling me out for something.

I managed to put the whole thing out of my head for a few days, but when he called this morning, my brain started racing again. What could he want? What’s his angle?

This was the inner monologue I battled for nearly an hour as we sat inside Starbucks, staring outside at the rain. Why is he asking me that question? Why did he steer the conversation in this direction? When is he going to get around to the real subject he wants to talk about?

And then it dawned on me: Maybe he just wants to sit and talk. Maybe this is just because he and I are friends and this is what friends do.

So many of my encounters with people are utilitarian. It’s easy for people to become commodities. I hardly ever meet with people without an agenda, without wanting to know action items afterwards. What am I responsible to do now? When are we going to meet again? I have this checklist in my head when I’m talking to folks.

Sometimes it’s good to just have coffee and catch up. It may be beyond good; it may be necessary.

How often do you meet with people just to sit, just to talk? I don’t think I do it often enough.

Brant Hansen is weird — as in his brain comes up with odd and funny imaginings, not as in “hide your children from this man” — but I like to read his blog. Recently, he made an interesting observation. He suggests that an individual’s uniqueness can be seen in many ways, but one of the more obvious ways is by looking at the names of artists in your iPod (I suppose it could work with your iTunes, too). His thought is that no one else in the world has exactly the same list as you.

So, he asked his readers to list some odd juxtapositions of artists as they appear alphabetically — artists that normally wouldn’t be found side-by-side but they are on your musical shelf because…well…because you’re you and you like what you like.

Here are some of the oddest in mine:

Andre Previn — Andy Stanley — Annie Lennox

Ella Fitzgerald — Elton John — Elvis Costello

Men At Work — Mendelssohn — Metallica

Miles Davis — Miley Cyrus — Missing Persons

What are some of yours?

I just returned from my final dash to the grocery store in preparation for our Thanksgiving Day feast tomorrow. As I was driving through my neighborhood I noticed that one of my neighbors already has their Christmas tree up and fully decorated. They’ve also got a full-on Nativity scene (with Precious Moments characters) going on in the front yard.

Tonight — the night before Thanksgiving.

People, please! Do we really have to skip over a perfectly good holiday like Thanksgiving to get to the next one? What is going on here?

This is more than just my annual “let’s not break out the Burl Ives Christmas record just yet” rant. I’ll admit that I’m a little bit on edge lately, trying like crazy to finish up this book before my deadline. But still…. This is about something substantial (I think).

Is it so hard for us to stop everything, take a breath before we plunge into the shopping orgy that Christmas has become and reflect on the things we have to be thankful for? Why must we give short shrift to the one holiday that calls on us all to say, “Thank you”?

I’m afraid it’s because we’ve forgotten that so much of what we have comes to us from elsewhere. In our society, self-sufficiency is what we want. We’ve bought into the crazy lie that is the “self-made” man or woman. We think we’ve got what we’ve got because we earned it through our own initiative, cleverness and hard work. But who gave us those skills? We would have nothing without the help of others and the constant provision of our heavenly Father.

Perhaps it is because we have Thanksgiving-sized meals every day now. There was a time when feasting was unusual; it happened only a few times each year. Not anymore. We gorge ourselves all the time, so there’s nothing unusual about this fourth Thursday of November anymore.

Whatever the reason, Thanksgiving just doesn’t get the respect it deserves these days, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.

Okay, let’s curb the rant and try to redeem this post by asking some salient questions.

Do you agree that Thanksgiving become the Jan Brady of holidays?

What can the average person do to slow down and give Thanksgiving its full due?

Okay, so we had a birthday party for Amelia yesterday. A baker’s dozen small children littered our house, literally spilling out onto the front lawn, hopped up on sugar and adrenaline.

There’s this thing that goes on among the parents these days — this one-upsmanship that no one likes to speak of. The most recent birthday party our kids went to featured a young(ish) woman dressed up like a princess who painted faces and performed magic tricks. There was a moon bounce and a pony ride and lots of other carnival-type attractions.

We are not in a position to offer such things.

So, we decided we’d go old school with the birthday festivities. You know — pin the tail on the donkey, musical chairs, that kind of stuff. Except we hadn’t reckoned on something: kids don’t play those games anymore. When we tried explaining the rules to musical chairs we realized that none of the children present had the foggiest idea what in the world we were trying to get them to do. At first, I thought it was because they were too young. Maybe this would be their first exposure to a wonderful game everyone learns to play at some point in time during their childhood.

But as we progressed the awful truth began to dawn: they not only had never played this game before; they’d never played any game like it. You know — where someone wins and someone loses. The concept of losing was completely lost on them. Worse, they all began to cry immediately upon being labeled “out”.

Now, I’m not a huge fan of zero-sum games where, in order for one person to win everyone else has to lose. But still…musical chairs? I quick survey of the adults present revealed that no one had, in fact, witnessed such a contest in any of their children’s classrooms. They simply don’t play games that deal with winning and losing anymore. Everyone’s a winner. Everyone gets a trophy.

The children were baffled at this mysterious thing that was happening to them. “I was walking around and around. Then the music stopped, and I looked around for a place to sit. But someone had taken one of the chairs away. I have no place to sit. Everyone else, but not me. Does this mean I get a prize?”

No, Olivia, it means you lose.

As the crowd of chair sitters grew smaller and smaller, the number of criers grew larger and louder, commiserating with one another at the sheer injustice of it all. “Can you imagine it? A game where only one person gets the prize?! This is terrible! I’m going to be in therapy for years!”

In talking with the other parents present, I asked if any of them remembered playing musical chairs when they were children. Everyone said yes. And did they remember the sting of being called “out”? Of course. Did they weep inconsolably over it? No.

Well…do you think maybe the children are missing a vital life lesson here?

Rant over.

It was four years ago today.

I remember where I was standing when Jill first told me about her. It was a Sunday morning, and we were at North Point Community Church. I was watching a baby crawl across the floor, and Jill asked, “Are you ready to have another one of those?”

My first response was to laugh. Eliza wasn’t even out of diapers yet. We’d just come through a great scare with her, and I was questioning our ability to handle two little girls. The idea of having a third was…well…laughable.

Fortunately, I did not laugh. In fact, Jill says it’s one of the only times she’s ever seen me speechless. It took a full 10 count before it occurred to me what exactly she was trying to communicate to me. I’m not normally that slow on the uptake.

But this was so far beyond anything I was thinking about.

We were poor. I’d quit a job to pursue something. It was slow to develop. I had the rug yanked out from under me. I was confused and frustrated, hurt and angry. If it hadn’t been for Ken Boa we never would have survived.

We chose the name Amelia. It means “industrious”. Amelia Hope. We work with a sense of great expectation. She’s been work, that’s for sure. But we have a strong belief that God has big plans for this little one.

She showed up a little early — while Jill’s regular doctor was away on vacation. We had to use a different hospital from the one we’d toured. We had to use a different doctor from the one we’d come to know and trust. I was supposed to spend the weekend writing a script for KidStuf. I had to call my friend Bill Winegardner and hand it off to him. He wrote a classic, by the way. We called some friends, and we called my parents.

I think Steven and Angelique Allen took the two big girls. It all happened quickly. It’s kind of a blur. Chuck and Laura Thon showed up right after she got there. Hal and Jenny Runkel came the next day. So did Dane and Christy Booth.

She didn’t make a big deal out of her arrival. Unlike her sisters, there was little struggle. She’s always been her own person and does things in her own way.

She’s full of surprises. She makes me laugh, and I find myself doing anything I can think of to return the favor.

It’s hard to believe she’s four. And I cannot wait to see how this turns out.

I just got this from my publisher (Regal). We’re planning a release date of next September or October.

…you hear this sentence:

“Some Amish dude put a goat in my ditch.”

My friend Kevin uttered those words on our way to the Chinese Buffet in Dover, OH. There were mashed potatoes and gravy on the Chinese Buffet. I’m not kidding.

It took me a second for my brain to wrap itself around all the oddities contained within those nine short words.

“Some Amish dude put a goat in my ditch.”

There are just so many things wrong in that statement. Frankly, I was stunned — like a deer in the headlights. Where do I even begin to process what I’ve just been told?

By the time my brain had caught up, Kevin had moved on to his next sentence:

“So, I’m out in my front yard in my underwear at 11:00 at night with a baseball bat.”

…because that’s what you do when an Amish dude puts a goat in your ditch?

God’s agenda for us is that we become more and more godly — not merely more and more biblical. The latter is merely functional as a means to the former, and if we ever find ourselves becoming more biblical but less godly, we can be assured that something has gone terribly wrong!

Furthermore, God’s goal goes far beyond morality. It is possible to be a very moral person and still remain far from God. The Pharisees are solid examples of people who fit both categories; they were very moral and very biblical. But they were so far from God that they couldn’t recognize him when he showed up in person and stood right in front of them!

So, if godliness is the aim for our lives, how do we know we’re hitting the mark in becoming the kind of parents God would have us be? Well, when you start parenting your children the way God has parented you — then you know you’re on the right track. And when your goal for your kids lines up with God’s goal for them, again, you’re headed in the right direction.

But most parents I talk to are more concerned with trying to get their children to sit still at the dinner table, to sleep through the night, to use their manners and stop hitting their siblings. In other words, parents tend to be more concerned with externals than internals, and end up calling behavior modification techniques good parenting.

One of the problems with such a focus on the externals (and there are many) is that you can end up raising kids who suffer from Eddie Haskell syndrome. You know the type of kid I’m talking about, right? You went to high school with someone who was always polite, always well-behaved…until all the adults left the room. Then he was the definition of troublemaker.

Jesus met up with people like this during his life on earth. He said that their outsides looked great, but their insides were rotten. They were like a tomb that had been painted white. It looked so nice and clean, but the contents stunk like you wouldn’t believe!

It wasn’t a new problem for Jesus, though. The prophet Isaiah, back in the Old Testament, had mentioned how the people looked so great as they practiced their religious rituals. But God could see what was really going on inside, and he knew how far they were from him in their hearts and minds.

Jesus’ solution to the problem was interesting. He acknowledged that behavior was important, but he said it wasn’t as important as character.

Jesus was less concerned with behavior than he was with what was going on inside a person. Jesus seemed to believe that people do what they do because they believe and feel certain things. So, he knew better than to focus all of his energies on behavior modification techniques that produce short-term results and “false-positives”. He went to the root of the problem, looking beyond mere externals in an attempt to fix what was going on internally. He didn’t just want his followers to do certain things; he wanted them to become certain kinds of people for whom the right things were done naturally.

So, if we were to allow Jesus to set the agenda for our parenting, we may need to take some of the emphasis off our child’s behavior and put more emphasis on character development.

What might that look like? And why do you think more parents don’t parent from the inside-out?

I grew up in a religious environment that stressed the importance of the Bible. Our church was keenly interested in finding a biblical reason for why we did particular things in particular ways. We wanted to be a biblical church with biblical leaders holding biblical beliefs and doing biblical things.

This is not necessarily bad, but it’s not necessarily good, either. It’s not bad; it’s just insufficient.

Being biblical should never be the goal for an individual Christian or a church. Being biblical is only useful as a means to a greater end, and that greater end is godliness.

For example, a person may “go into all the world” in an attempt to “make disciples” (a very biblical thing to do), but if, as you are going, you are a jerk…well…you may be doing a biblical thing in an ungodly way. Being biblical people is of no use to us if it actually keeps us from becoming godly. And it often does just that when we think we’ve arrived by simply doing what the Bible says.

And here’s why I bring this up now — in the context of a series on parenting: There are a lot of biblical parents in churches. There is a lot of material out there designed to help you become more biblical in your parenting. Books and tapes and seminars abound where parents are given a lot of different Bible verses to apply in their homes.

But what is often missing is the idea that parents are supposed to be godly — not just biblical. And if a biblical parent stops short of becoming godly, a lot of bad things can happen. Bible verses can be used to reinforce an authoritarian battle of wills with our children. Without taking on the mind-set, attitude and thoughtfulness of Jesus (aka “The mind of Christ”) good Bible verses become a justification for taking a power-based approach to parenting — an approach that dishonors God and fails to produce the long-term results we hope for.

In a biblical but ungodly model, “good” children are obedient — never mind that it’s usually passive obedience or merely external compliance. This shortsighted definition of success makes parents feel good, but the long-term consequences are disastrous. This kind of parenting often produces frightened, legalistic children rather than free and secure adults. As those children grow older, the tend to become less and less like Jesus and more and more like the judgmental religious folks for whom he reserved his harshest criticism.

So, the question good parents must ask themselves (and they must ask it often) moves from “Are we biblical parents?” to “Are we godly parents? Are we parenting our children the way God parents us? Would God ever ‘bow up’ on us and remind us that he could kill us and make another one that looks just like us? Would God ever yell at us for spilling milk at the dinner table? Would God call us names or threaten us?”

What are some of the differences you can think of between biblical parenting and godly parenting?