What's Important

This past weekend was a bittersweet time for me.  I watched as my daughter’s boyfriend proposed to her.   Many emotions flooded over me as I watched him get on his knee and ask her to spend the rest of her life with him.  The excitement I saw on her face as she accepted his proposal was one I had seen many times.  One of my favorite pictures of her is seeing that same excited face as I was baptizing her and she was committing her life to Christ. 

As I looked at her that sunny afternoon, I was taken back to that day when she decided to live her life for Christ.  My thoughts quickly moved forward to the future as I imagined how proud I would be to see her raise Godly children with her new husband. 

For 22 years now, God has given me the responsibility of protecting and caring for her.  Now I will willingly pass that God given responsibility to another man.  It has come with much prayer and many sleepless nights.  It is hard to hand my little girl over to someone who doesn’t have the life experiences I have or who hasn’t gone through the stresses of budgets, marriage, children, etc.  Yet this is the guy I have been praying for.  I have asked God to provide her with a man who will lead my child and grandchildren to a closer relationship with Him and I ask for someone who will step up to the plate through those same difficult situations I started experiencing for the first time 25 years ago.  

At the end of the day, I have so much to be thankful for.  I have children who seek the Lord and want to follow Him.  I have children who truly grieve when they fall short and want to restore a life that honors Him when they slip up.  I have children who want others to see Christ in them.

There are a lot of things that we want for our children.  We want them to be financially taken care of.  We want our children to be successful in their career.  We want them to be respected among their peers.  We want them to be good at sports, art, drama, etc.  Yet with all of that, the only thing that is of the utmost importance is that our children honor God and grow up to live their life for His Kingdom.  If the only thing my children accomplish is honoring God, then I will truly feel like a successful parent.    

Be Quick But Don't Hurry

I am going to continue my conversation from my first blog with more lessons from John Wooden.  Coach Wooden ran one offense all year long.  If he had a small line up he ran a fast game.  When he had Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton, he ran everything through the post position.  He ran one defense - man to man.  His players would always pull up and take a 15 foot jumper on a fast break.  His thinking was to keep it simple.  If you ran too many plays, then you had to spend time practicing to learn all of them.  The more plays you ran, the less attention each play received.  However, if you only had one play on offense and one play on defense, then you could spend you entire practice perfecting it.  As a result, Coach Wooden did very little coaching in the game.  He rarely called a timeout and he didn't give his players instruction.  In fact, if they had allowed him too, he would have preferred sitting in the stands and watching the result of his player’s incredible preparation.

In almost every practice, Coach Wooden would preach, "Be quick but don't hurry."  This was the key to his team's preparation and execution of these plays.  What Coach Wooden preached was to be quick to the ball but don't rush the tempo.  He knew that prepared players would respond quickly to the opposing offense or the basketball.  However, he also knew that people who hurry things and get into a rush make mistakes because they are off balance.  This entire concept is based on quickness with balance.  This is a lost concept in the world we live in today.  We are told we have to react quickly and we should expect fast results. 

We expect it when with our sports teams.  Coaches get fired if they don’t produce quick results. 

We expect it with our transportation.  What is the quickest flight to get us from point A to point B. 

We expect it with our food.  We look for dinner recipes that are under 5 minutes.

However, if we look at reality, it tells us that rushing things gets us inferior results. 

Coach Wooden was one of the most successful coaches in history but it took him 16 years to win his first championship.  Tom Landry expected to be fired in his third season. Instead he received a 12 year contract and subsequently produced 20 consecutive winning seasons, 5 Super Bowl appearances, and 2 championships.

Car trips are long but so much is missed when you take a plane.  The experience is lost of seeing all of the sights between here and your destination.  Sometimes the journey is better than the destination.  Watch this clip from Cars. 

 

The difference between a baked potato in the microwave and a baked potato in the oven is significant.  My son recently experienced bacon in a frying pan instead of from the microwave and now he wants to cook it the old fashioned way all the time.

In life the things that take more work are the things that help to build a firm foundation on things that are better and last longer.  When we hurry we lose quality and make mistakes. 

The same is true in parenting.

Don’t complicate things.  Keep it simple.  Work on the basic things with your children every day.  Don’t get too caught up in the latest book or parenting idea.  Spend every day measuring what you expect from your child against the two most important principles of all time.  Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind.  Love others as yourself (Matt. 22:37-39).  If you focus all of your parenting on these two areas your children will be prepared for the game of life.  And in doing that, be consistent and don’t make compromises. In more simple terms, look at yourself as a coach like John Wooden.  Keep your practice and preparation simple and focus on perfecting Matt. 22 principles.  In doing that, follow these simple guidelines:

1. Be purposeful with lessons and activities and look for ways to tie their activities to these two principles. 

2. Be organized and make sure you have the day prepared and focused on these principles through prayer, Bible study and application.

In doing this you will prepare them for game time – the game of life.  At that time, if done successfully one day you as a parent/coach will be able to watch from the sidelines.

Riding the Pine

I have recently read a couple of books about John Wooden.  If you don’t know John Wooden, he was the coach of the UCLA Bruins Basketball team from 1948-1975.  During that time he won 10 National Championships in 12 years and was named the Coach of the Century by ESPN in 1999.  He retired with the highest winning percentage of any other coach.

Coach Wooden considered himself a teacher rather than a coach.  He never disciplined his players with wind sprints or extra basketball drills.  These were things he worked on in practice not as a punishment but as conditioning.  His only form of dealing with disobedient players was to let a player “ride the pine” (sit a player on the bench), or dismiss them from the team.  He would meet with players who struggled to do things his way and simply tell them, “Do it my way or play for someone else.”  He once told Bill Walton, the perennial All American and Hall of Famer before the first practice of the season to either come back before 4:00 PM with a haircut or be kicked off the team.  Walton (who was the nation’s best player the year before) said he ran as fast as he could to the barber shop to get his hair cut because he knew his coach was serious. 

When people asked Coach Wooden the key to his discipline, he responded by saying he never had to discipline his players.  His job was to set the boundaries or the rules and the player’s job was to discipline themselves to work within those boundaries.  A player never had to follow the rules. Coach Wooden said he never forced them to follow his rules.  He simply gave them a choice.  Discipline yourself to follow these rules, “ride the pine” or go somewhere else.  It was always the player’s choice.

That is the way discipline should be.  Set clear boundaries and clear consequences for not following those expectations.  Explain the consequences if those boundaries are crossed, then give the child the choice of whether or not they want to cross that boundary.  Be consistent in holding them accountable.  I consider this my role as an educator and as a parent.  Students I have dealt with understand that I am not disciplining them, they have chosen to discipline themselves by not following the rules.  The choice will always be theirs.  They will always decide if they want to discipline themselves to follow the rules or face the consequences.  It is always better to be proactive as a parent than reactive.  Giving your child the choice and clearly explaining consequences helps you be proactive rather than reactive to situations.  This helps you lead your child in the direction they should go.