Category: Learning Lifestyle

For his entire life, my ten-year-old has watched me grumble and curse my way through innumerable toilet repairs, installations, and temporary rigs. When the arm snapped in the downstairs toilet tank this week, I had just conquered a devil of a drain clog and was not up for another job. I didn’t say anything to the boys, I lifted the lid and manually flushed when needed.

Then, I heard the toilet flush. Westen emerged from the bathroom and I said, “How’d you do that?” “Do what?” he replied. “Did you lift the lid? The toilet’s broken.” “Oh no, the flusher broke, so I rigged it this morning.”

He’s a little hero. He holds the door for everyone, grabs a child’s hand on unsteady rocks, entertains wherever he goes, and sees problems as opportunities. “Dad, what can we do to help?” might as well be his catch phrase.

When he’s not being a leader and not making a situation better and I call him out on it (usually too harshly), I see the disappointment and embarrassment on his face.

I criticize my sons too much. They’re beautiful, compassionate, mature beyond their years, brilliant, and endlessly creative. But not always, just like any of us.

Today we’re going to adventure and I’m going to concentrate on praising them aloud when it is called for and supporting them when it is needed and loving them through all of it.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

“I’d be a proud father if my son serves in the armed forces.”

That’s where I was ten years ago when my first boy was born. Then I turned off the news. I didn’t want my baby to be exposed to all the negativity, violence, and intensity of the world. I still listened to Rush Limbaugh and read Drudge Report every day, I was an adult after all, I could handle all the negativity, violence, and intensity of the world. I relished in what I thought were intellectual battles around camp fires, on Twitter, and in blog comments. I thought that was how one tested his knowledge and sharpened his mind.

When I was alone with my son I was different. I listened to him and watched my speech for tone and content. I only wanted to share truth with him. I wanted it all to make sense, to be clear, and to help him become the best possible kind of man. I discovered contradictions in my arguments. How had they not been exposed in all those verbal battles? My wit was quicker than my brain. That’s plenty of fun when you’re at a bar and care more about in a social setting than actually getting things right.

Now I had two sons and it was well past time to get things right. War was my first stumbling block. I had supported a lot of violence through my writing and speech, I honored friends who served and died in combat, and one of my best friends was a Marine sniper. How could I now teach the Golden Rule to my sons and justify military interventions overseas?

A lot happened when I left my job as a proofreader to care for my sons full time. In a moment of curiosity about homeschooling I started listening to Tom Woods. He’s a homeschooling parent, Libertarian, and Catholic. I didn’t know this type of person existed. He introduced me to the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). From FEE.org: “One version of the NAP states that while it is legitimate to use physical violence in defense of one’s rights, initiating violence against another person is wrong and can be met with proportional violence in self-defense.”

I try to apply this principle to my politics, parenting, and approach to the world.

Through Woods I found other homeschool voices and my wife, Mary, and I started the conversation to begin our own home education journey. We slowly looked at our own pasts and realized how the school system had been, and remained, unsuited to us. I linked my years in school to my years watching cable news and began to uncover assumptions I had adsorbed over that time. It was this process of deschooling that would fundamentally change my life and save our family. “Deschooling” is exactly that, the process of analyzing internalized assumptions and separating what is useful and what is holding you back from learning. It was the birth of my self-improvement journey and taught me how to face circumstances that I had never imagined.

I reconnected with the inquisitive learner inside that had been neglected. Initially, this was simply to model an energetic learning environment for my children, but I soon found myself experiencing personal enrichment.

It was about this time that Mary questioned me about faith (I said a lot was happening). I had long been acting out and defending Christian ideals from a practical perspective. I saw them as a good set of rules to live by, a recipe for success. But I had not seriously considered what God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit meant to me. Mary embodied an easy faith and I was a hard nut to crack. She was patient as I began to study the Bible, listen to commentaries, and spend hours talking and thinking about Jordan Peterson’s Biblical lectures. I put assumptions aside and took a clean look at the Word. There was a quiet moment during a men’s Bible study meeting when I accepted Christ into my heart. I’m still working on what that means for me, but I began to find peace in that moment. I began to find that love trumps rules and that I didn’t need a prescriptive regimen, but a path towards loving more fully.

It was less than a year from that moment that my wife suddenly died. I had yet to learn how much self-love I was lacking. I had yet to become the man that Mary deserved. I was on my first steps toward realizing my potential. Seventeen months later, assumptions continue to be burned like deadwood, the smoke chokes and blinds me with tears. I feel God with me on this journey. I feel that He has called me for this, even if “this” remains obscured from me.

It has been quite the decade.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason