The Most of Every Minute

That big yellow school bus that picked up my older daughter for kindergarten the first day of school was a “big yellow monster” to me, “stealing my baby girl away.” I’ll never forget that day. I knew it was the beginning of the end of my life’s happiest and most-fulfilling days. Something inside me told me that life was now on fast forward and there was nothing I could do to slow it down. I blinked my eyes, and she was packing her room away and headed for college. I had given her a hundred lectures about cleaning her room and none of them had produced a thing! Now, her room was clean and put away in storage boxes. The floodgates opened, and I sprawled out on her bed and laid alone in a pool of my own tears. Taking her to college was worse. My wife made me pull off the highway because I was crying so hard when we left Waco, Texas after giving our last “goodbye.”

Two seconds later, she was graduating from college. Then, like a flashing dream, she was standing in a long, white wedding gown and ready for me to walk her down the aisle. I got the wedding bill, a whole lot of tears, and millions of great memories to process for a lifetime.

Preparing for the Day

Coaching football for Texas A&M gave me one great friend in Gene Stallings, the Aggies’ head coach in those days. I asked “Coach” about this difficult issue with saying goodbye. He, too, had to walk the aisle with his four daughters, and he’s about as big of a softie as I am.

He compared it all to raising a wild animal. (His pet was a precious baby raccoon.) He said, as he laughed about the comparison, that an animal is born to be free and there comes a time when you have to let it go. In his Texas down-to-earth-ness, he went on to say, “In the meantime, you’ve gotta prepare them to leave by teaching them to be responsible. You’ve gotta give them some rope–not enough to hang themselves if they fail, but just enough to make a mistake and still survive.”

Let them earn their allowance with daily chores. Insist that they balance their checkbook at the end of the month. Trust them to succeed on their own every chance you get!

Recently, one of my dear friends was really struggling with his three-year-old. When he gave him “chores plus rewards” his boy took ownership for his actions and his behavior quickly morphed into something beautiful.

Give them time out of the house with a reasonable curfew and ground them when they break it. Make them pay for at least part of the nice things they want. Build difficulty into their lives so they can learn to fly in stormy weather.

One of my favorite Kamp moms, Dr. Selby Harrison, pulled back on her medical career so she could raise her two kids and didn’t regret it for a second. Selby believes that we need to stretch our kids and keep them growing the way you grow a young athlete in the weight room. Selby says that when everything is wrapped around a child’s tennis game or golf game or horse or soccer or gymnastics success, the child rules the family, and that’s a mistake.  This wise mom says, “A good parent can’t create in their kids a sense of entitlement. Parents need to take their kids on work projects and go on mission trips together. My husband and I like to take them to Mexico annually to build houses. We keep underprivileged kids in and out of our house from time to time so our kids can learn to share and to remind them they’re not the center of the world.”

Encouragement for a Job Well Done

Coach Stallings and Selby are both great encouragers. Coach believes that motivating a child to succeed is a lot like motivating his Alabama Crimson Tide for the national championship. He says, “You’ve gotta make your expectations clear, and you’ve gotta convince them that you believe they can win. Don’t compliment them when they’ve done it poorly or they won’t believe you. But when they do something right, let ‘em know you’re proud of ‘em.” Coach dedicated entire seasons to “making the players feel good about themselves.” He was as tough a coach as you could find. His players worked hard as all get-out. But when they did something right, somebody noticed it!

 At SMU, my coach, Hayden Fry, was a genius at this! He won a lot of games with a lot less talent than most schools, because he noticed when we succeeded. He had awards for everything imaginable. He saw potential in me when I couldn’t see any in myself. If players didn’t give their whole hearts, they sat on the bench. But if they gave it all, they’d stand ahead of guys with twice the talent.

The Most of Every Minute

The days are long, but the years are short.

Focusing on tomorrow extinguishes the tiny glimpses of joy that peek into every day. I see it often, and I cringe every time an anxious mom or dad utters these words:

• “I can’t wait till I get them out of diapers!”
• “I can’t wait till I get them into school so I can have time to myself.”
• “I can’t wait till I can get them out of the house.”
• And then, alas, “I can’t wait until I see them again. They never want to come home now that they’re off to college.”

Changing diapers, the toddler years, baby’s first step, first word, first “thank you,” first smile, first homework I get to help with, first broken heart I get to mend, first broken dream I get to hug, first soccer goal, first time home from Kamp–all are treasures, all small glimpses of starlight that slip through the windows and into the home every single day. Thousands and thousands and thousands of moments become mementos when you savor the “now” like there’s no tomorrow.

Wherever you are, be all there.

And if you have to travel, “It’s okay to be gone, but when you are home, you can’t be gone.” (Thank you, Bobby Lloyd, for that one!)

All credit to Debbie-Jo for being such a great memory maker, but when you become a grandpa like me, you’ll cherish beyond words the dozens of pictures on the wall, highlight DVDs in the cabinet, and scrapbooks on the shelf capturing every precious, treasured, celebrated step in this wonderful process of “training up your children in the ways of The Lord (so that) when they are old, they will not depart from them” (Proverbs 22:6 paraphrased).