Sometimes love is just a choice. I was reminded of this a few weeks ago while I was visiting a couple I know. During my visit, the husband was being fairly overbearing towards his wife. She was getting quite angry when suddenly she just turned to him and said, “I love you.” It was obviously not said in a romantic, sentimental way. It was clearly a decision on the part of the wife to love her husband regardless. The best thing happened when she did that. Her husband recognized how he was treating her and changed his tone and attitude. Admittedly, he didn’t apologize but the potential argument was derailed. I realized then that choosing to love someone regardless of their faults is the true secret of a good, solid marriage.

The song says “some say love is a river, a razor, a hunger” but I say the strongest love is the one that chooses to love even when that person has his moments of unloveableness (if Shakespeare can make up words, so can I!).

Every now and then, ‘Advice from Mom’ comes from somewhere besides Mom. For instance, there is a really good piece of advice in Proverbs 20:3. I like the God’s Word translation. It says ‘Avoiding a quarrel is honorable. After all, any stubborn fool can start a fight.’ That’s an interesting statement. I think it should be engraved on a plaque and placed in every home, business and work place in the world. Can you imagine, if we all adhered to that philosophy, how much more smoothly our homes, our offices and even our nations would function?

Avoiding a quarrel. Is it really worth the effort to chase down that pen you had on your desktop and berate the person who has it? Is it actually that important? Is it so important to complain about the co-worker who talks too much, or whose desk is a mess, or who just bugs you for whatever reason?

At home, do we really need to blow up because someone asked us where we left the remote for the tv. Do we have to shout ‘use your eyes and find it yourself!’? Parents of teens almost instinctively know that it is necessary to choose your fights. After all, if you didn’t, you would be fighting non-stop with your adolescent terror. So why can’t we take that stance in all things we do with other family members? You know what your family arguments are. Take a look at them. Is it really necessary to have that mini-war over forgetting to put the milk away?

And then if we could just roll that advice over into our governments and the nations of the world, no one would have to wait anxiously for the time when their sons and daughters returned home from the fighting overseas.

Avoiding a quarrel is honorable. After all, any stubborn fool can start a fight.

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Alfred Lord Tennyson once said that ‘in the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.’ That can pretty much be said of a young woman as well. And parents throughout the country - while watching their children be blinded by the stars in their eyes - are wondering how it is that marriages today manage to even keep a 50/50 chance of survival. So I’m offering a little advice to children of marrying age. Simply stated - it is time to start listening to the wisdom of your parents. Relying on the age-old ‘no man is good enough for daddy’s little girl’ and ‘no woman will ever take proper care of mommy’s baby boy’ just isn’t going to cut it. If that woman you are marrying is, in fact, ‘daddy’s little girl’ and that man you’ve decided to spend your life with is ‘momma’s baby boy’, you’ve got problems. Successful marriages require that the men and women involved be mature enough to live an everyday life after the stars in their eyes have faded and reality has set in. If you’re wanting your marriage to have a better than average chance of survival, take a closer look at the future with the one you believe is the man or woman for you.

Let’s begin with you, ladies. You don’t necessarily need the man that every woman in town is trying to get. Particularly if he has cheerfully allowed himself to be caught by every woman in town. If he likes to play around now with every woman he meets, he might just be stupid enough to keep it up after marriage. Or, is he one of those guys that gets invited to every party? Can he drink all his buddies into the ground? Does he keep every party going all night long? That might be fun now but is being the designated driver every Friday night for 50 years really what you want. Actually, when I think about it, you probably won’t be able to be the designated driver for long. Someone will need to stay home with Junior when he’s teething. The laundry will have to be done, the house cleaned, the yard mowed. Someone will have to have a job to pay the taxi driver who has taken over your designated driver duties.

So find yourself a stable man. One who knows how to have fun but knows when fun interferes with responsibility. One who respects the women in his life enough to not take advantage of every woman he meets. If you find that kind of a man, you’ll know that when he comes to you, his love is real. And then, just for a bonus, if you can find a man who will speak up for those who can’t speak up for themselves and who has the heart to help others, then you’ve got yourself a real keeper.

Guys, I know most people agree that your brain is located a little lower than your head, maybe just south of your belt buckle, but lets assume for a minute that you can actually think on a more intellectual level. Are you really sure the totally stacked prom queen is the woman you want to spend your life with? She may actually be a winner. I’m just saying - is looks the only criteria you have for a wife? Good looks take time. And money. That hairdo she has took a great deal of both at a hairdresser. And that make-up she’s sporting wasn’t cheap either. The dress that shows off her body so perfectly took several days of shopping to find and she maxed out daddy’s credit card paying for it. So lets take a quick peak into the future. The wife looks great! She keeps that way because you have a really great job that pays for the liposuction after the baby’s birth and the personal trainer who keeps her in shape. Your job also needs to pay for the beauty parlor visits, the make-up and the wardrobe that keeps her up to date and stylish. There is also the nanny you pay who cares for your children while mommy is out doing all this shopping, etc. And, of course, someone has to keep the dishes done (not Mommy! It would ruin her nails) so the housekeeper comes in daily to see to that chore and others. But Mommy looks great! Of course, Mommy needs somewhere to go to show off all this glamour and she needs an escort to do it. That escort - we hope - is you so the nanny bills just got higher and the credit cards are smoking from use at all the events you now need to attend.

Let me suggest that a wife a little more grounded would be a better life companion. Someone with goals in life besides being the most beautiful woman on the block. Someone you can present with pride to your friends as, not only one who cares for herself, but one whose career - whether if be lawyer, doctor, nurse, business consultant or homemaker - is of outstanding quality. One who is capable of looking to the future and preparing her family for it. Now there is a woman who can be a companion, a friend, a lover, throughout your life when her beauty has faded and your waistline has expanded.

Marriage is not all about the fireworks and lovemaking that begin your life together. Marriage is about the ‘happily ever after’s. And in order to attain those ‘happily ever after’s you need a couple who are grounded in reality even while they are floating in the clouds. So in this time of weddings and honeymoon preparations, let’s listen to the concerns of our parents. Are the questions they are presenting to you ones that are dangers signs for the things to come? Is so, listen! Be sure you’ve looked at the future with this spouse you have chosen. Does the good outweigh the bad? If it does, congratulations! Have a wonderful life. If it doesn’t, you might want to rethink your commitment before it becomes a lifetime struggle.

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Did you know that Jesus didn’t make no monsters? My 4 year old told me that a while ago. He had been worried about those monsters so his older sister had explained this to him. And I confirmed this when he told me. Jesus didn’t make any monsters. I’m thinking today of Katrina, of the earthquake in Haiti, of the tornados that come through our state regularly every spring. Most of all, I’m thinking of all those people who call these things God’s judgment. And I’m thinking that they might be wrong. If Jesus didn’t make any monsters, would he really make the monstrous disasters that come to our world so regularly? I doubt it. Maybe that’s an over simplification of a bigger theological study but Jesus did say we had to come to him as a child. I’m not a minister. I’m not a priest. I’m not even a student of theology. And I don’t really have a point to make here. I’m just throwing out a little food for thought. Maybe all those disasters that come to us are just life. And it’s just human nature that, when something goes wrong, we have to have somebody to blame. So we tell people it’s their own fault God had to punish them.

 I think that I prefer the ‘Footprints’ sentiment. When we are the farthest down, when the earthquakes, floods and tornadoes level our homes, destroy our lives and kill out loved ones, it is then that He carries us. May He carry us in our need.

Haiti has been devastated by an earthquake. I cannot tell you the anger I felt when I heard that a leader of the Christian faith is blaming God for this disaster to these people. No wonder so many want to disavow their Christian stand. Who would want to stand with the ‘you got what you deserved’ group?

More likely we would stand with the group from Allentown, Pennsylvania. This is a group of Christians desperate to help an orphanage they support. They compiled supplies, a vehicle, an interpreter and weapons to defend themselves and are headed into Haiti. Their driver will first try to get them past the legal checkpoint. But they know another place that has no checkpoint if they need it. The roads may be impassable, they may end up hiking and carrying supplies but those children they have committed to and the workers who care for them will not be abandoned. Now that, my friends, is a picture of Christ. He said ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’ Here on earth these people continue to try to carry on his legacy. They are headed into that chaos knowing that their physical safety is at risk. They are knowing that, at the very least, this will be a difficult task. They are risking themselves for people to whom they have made a commitment.

May we all be Christians like that.

In the words of Bart Simpson, TV has betrayed us.  We are a generation of adults, dissatisfied with our childhoods.  In perfect harmony, we complain that we were mentally, physically or otherwise abused as children.  Our parents  - who loved us and did the best they could for us -  just simply couldn’t compete with June Cleaver.   Our fathers didn’t always know best.  And our parents never, ever gave us the freedom to roam as Timmy and Lassie had.  If we were punished, it was never the gentle, lenient punishments meted out by the perfect television parents.  We were grounded, spanked, made to do chores, write sentences and numerous other sadistic things our parents came up with.  Sometimes our parents even went so far as to punish us for things we didn’t do but they thought we did! 

Can I just point out what a load of tripe all those abuse allegations are?   June Cleaver had a bevy of screen writers making sure that every move she made and every word she uttered were perfect.  Father always knew best because he had an entire studio of helpers keeping him on track.  Our parents, on the other hand, were just winging it by the seat of their pants.  They were looking at their kids and wanting what was best for them.  They were looking to our futures and trying to be sure we were properly trained to live productive lives.  They were determined to teach us respect for authority, respect for education and decent work ethics.   They were determined to give us the hopeful future we are trying to give our own children. 

I can agree that our parents made mistakes.  They punished us in anger sometimes.  They may not have told us they loved us enough.  They may have gotten so tied up in the necessities of daily living that they forgot the emotional needs of their children.   But I would like to submit to you that most of what we are calling abuse and neglect were neither of those things.  They were mistakes in parenting on the part of our mothers and fathers.  And our calling them abuse trivializes actual abuse. 

It’s time we all realized that television families can’t be used as a standard for actual families.  It’s time we start realizing that parents don’t have to be perfect.  And it’s time we stop blaming them for our mistakes!  What happened in your childhood was years ago.    Get over it!   If we can actually look back at our childhood’s and say ‘that is why I do what I do today’, then we know why we’re making our mistakes.   If we know why, then we can learn from it and control ourselves.  So let’s take responsibility for who we are and what we’re doing.   And – most importantly – let’s turn the tv off long enough to look around and see what we have.  Maybe it’s better than we realized.

I was thinking about that Itsy Bitsy spider.  The one that keeps trying to get to the top of the waterspout.  People say that we could learn a lot from that spider.  Mainly they think we can learn about persistence.    But I’m thinking persistence is a bad thing on the part of that spider.  What’s the point in getting to the top of the spout?  Next time it rains, he’s going to get washed out again.  Rain is inevitable.  It comes.  But then again, he’s made it to the top.  So we should hail him as a success.  Right?  What’s up there, though?  He’s made it to the top.  He can build a nest there.  But is his family secure?  It’s a pretty precarious spot to be.  The rain keeps coming and he and his family are going to get washed down again.  Maybe some of them will be injured or even killed.  Certainly they will all be on a constant roller coaster dependent on the whims of the weather.  I think the persistence of that spider could have been used in the pursuit of a better goal.  Maybe he should have looked first and said ‘do I really want to get to the top of this spout?  Is that really the best location for me?’

I think we can extrapolate that to any number of areas in our lives.   You can start with looking at the home on the top of that hill with the really nice view that can strap you financially for years.  So is it really what you want?  Or that on-again, off-again relationship that you keep trying to make work.  Do you really want that type of relationship to become permanent?  What about that career choice you’ve made?  It gives you a nice six figure income but is it really worth it when you consider that 50 or 60 hours a week are being spent at the office leaving you so little time with your spouse, your children and other loved ones.   

These aren’t all the issues we face in life but I think you can see my point.  Persistence is a good thing usually.  Persistence is necessary when we face difficulties in reaching the goals we’ve set for ourselves.  And setting goals is necessary so that we can succeed – so that we can have the life we’ve always dreamed of.

All I’m saying is, if you’re that itsy bitsy spider on your way to the top, be sure the top is  where you really want to be.