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The Road to Peace

Thursday, February 14th, 2013

Every morning on the way to work, I travel a road that seems like a never-ending construction site. Workers have been perfecting this throughway for months, but it seems like there’s no end in sight. The road is down to one lane in several places, bumpy and dusty with heavy-duty vehicles lining the sides of the road and construction workers everywhere. Driving this road is like navigating an obstacle course. Yet I traverse it every morning because regardless of how difficult the drive, the road takes me where I need to go.

Often the road to peace can be as bumpy as a drive through a construction zone.

Jenna and I have four kids with four distinct personalities and four totally different ways of communicating. When everything mixes together well, we have a home full of joy. But let’s be real, the four little people in our house don’t always play nicely together. Arguments happen, and often.

When our kids fight, the quick fix is appealing. “Go to your rooms. You’re in time out. No more Wii for either of you. We’ll deal with this later.”

But when we take a breath and remember that we’re raising adults, we realize that the quick fix doesn’t teach them how to deal with real life, just how to escape it.

When kids are arguing, we have to be willing to put on our hard hats and walk our kids through the messy part of making peace. We can use those broken moments to help them learn how to restore the relationship that gets broken when an argument shatters the peace.

Over the years we’ve tried all sorts of strategies for helping our kids. Some have been great, others, not so much. Here are a few of the ones that have seemed to work:

Imagine a “consequence” that restores what was broken and builds relational equity for the future. For instance, the brother that doesn’t allow little sister to play with him has to invite her to play a favorite board game together before the end of the week. When they see how much fun they have together, it helps build a relationship that might better weather the next squabble.
Have your kids express to each other how they feel about what happened. Encourage active listening by having each of them repeat back what they heard the other say in their own words.

Prompt your kids to apologize and ask for forgiveness. And seal the deal. They don’t have to hug or handshake or even offer a “foot five;” they just need an outward, mutual sign to let the other one know it’s over and we’re all ok now.

It takes a lot less energy to employ the quick fixes. But with the end goal of raising peace-making adults in mind, you can see that it’s worth the time to help your kids practice making peace. By helping them learn how to travel through the bumps in a rocky relational road, you’ll be helping your kids build lasting relationships with each other and setting them up to win with friendships outside of your home too.

Dan Scott works at Orange in New Product Development and is the Art Director and Large Group Director for 252 Basics. Dan and his wife Jenna have four amazing kids: Liam, Ellison, Addison, and Taye.

Discover Your Family’s Rhythm

Monday, February 11th, 2013

Photo by Mark Wilson

A couple once shared with me that they had no balance in their lives. Their home seemed like a battlefield filled with daily conflicts. Their children were frustrated and discontent most of the time. As a husband and wife, they felt like they couldn’t find margin in their lives to do the things necessary to make their marriage and home life better. Frustrated and in tears, they said they couldn’t find peace in the midst of the chaos, and they were about to give up.

After a little more discussion, I asked them if they had any sort of routine in their daily or weekly schedule. The wife responded to me quickly that she had grown up in a very structured home, and now she absolutely did not believe in sticking to any type of schedule. Many couples run from routines and schedules because of a bad experience growing up in environments where they were rigidly enforced. The truth is, a routine or schedule is not a bad thing. But like most things, if not done with moderation, a routine or schedule can be a nightmare on children and their parents.

In the book “Parenting Beyond Your Capacity,” Reggie Joiner unpacks the concept of every family developing their own “rhythm.” While routine and structure might be built on a clock or sequence, a rhythm is based upon the unique dynamics and flow of each individual family. All too often, families try to adopt a schedule based on something they’ve read. But taking a standard approach and applying it to a specific family can be difficult. Every family has its own unique qualities and will need a certain type of flow that fits them specifically, so this approach can feel like putting a square peg in a round hole.

After a while, we find ourselves following a specific routine that doesn’t make sense to us because it was written in a parenting book that could never take into consideration our unique situation. Peace in the home happens when a family understands a certain set of principles and then creates their own rhythm based on these principles. This approach ensures parents and children know what to expect each day and week, creating harmony in the home.

Once I explained this strategy to this particular couple, they developed a calendar for their home based upon their current schedule. They eliminated some events that were breaking the family apart with stress and tension. At the same time, they had room to add some things that would bring their family together, like game night and pancake breakfasts.

This schedule soon created an amazing rhythm they were excited about. In the weeks to come, they found conflicts began to lessen and their enjoyment grew as they finally found some type of balance in their lives.

Life in today’s world can get messy.

If you are struggling in the day to day, try working on your calendar and create a rhythm that works specifically for you.

It doesn’t take much to have peace.

Terry Scalzitti is Associate Pastor for Adult and Family Ministries at First Baptist Fort Lauderdale. He and his wife Jennifer have a son, Connor, and spend their free time enjoying the outdoors and watching Terry’s beloved Chicago Cubs.

252 Update: PEACE

Monday, February 4th, 2013

As parents, we are constantly advised to “pick our battles”. Maybe we let the B in Gym slide so we can focus on the C in English. We know better than to make them cut back on sugary drinks and eat more leafy greens in the same week. We decide not to argue about where we are going to dinner because enjoyable time together is more important than eating something other than fast food for a change. In other words, we have learned the value of Peace.

Wouldn’t it be nice if your kids saw the importance of Peace as well?

What if they realized game night was more about quality time than about the game you play? What if they didn’t argue about picking up their toys because they care more about having a happy mom? What if they ate all their veggies without having to be asked because they valued a peaceful family dinner? Well, we can’t promise miracles but we can promise to give you a great foundation to talk to your kids about the importance of having peace.

This month, at Studio252, we are talking about the life app, Peace. We have defined it as simply, proving you care more about each other than winning an argument. And all month long we will be giving you—the parent—fun tools to talk to your child about peace. For example:

Watch the Studio252 team learn an important lesson about peace in the monthly 252 episode
Have each member of the family share the top 5 reasons they are glad to have the others in their family
Work together to create some artwork
Make a delicious “peace pie” and talk about the importance of being the first to make things right after an argument

You can find all of these ideas and more during the month of February at studio252.tv and while you may not wipe out the familial rivalry altogether, maybe you can all agree it’s better to not only pick your battles but sometimes pick each other over your battles.

Check out the preview video for peace!

Lessons from a Dirty Diaper

Thursday, January 17th, 2013

Rosanna Marie Photography

By Jared Herd

After nine months of painting, hanging, woodworking, assembling, and hammering, my son, Dane Everett, came into the world. The pregnancy process is such a fascinating time, beautifully built into the rhythm of life by God. I thought the nine months would drag on, but we loved and needed those nine months to ready ourselves. And I now consider it an act of grace that one’s wife doesn’t run in with a pregnancy test crying one morning and the next day you are handed a crying infant. That would evoke all the emotions of a car crash for me, and the nine months make it feel like a pot of gold at the end of rainbow.

It was the night of January 8, 2012. I had just finished watching Tim Tebow knock off the Steelers, and like most American males, I was running around the house tebowing. We finished dinner, went to bed, and around midnight Rosanna let out a noise of grimace that only a woman who is two days overdue can make. Subsequently, I ended my tebowing and immediately shifted into The Black Eyed Peas “I Got a Feeling”—in particular, the line that says, “Tonight’s gonna be a good, good night.” This excitement continued as I drove us to the hospital at 3 a.m., on the foggiest night in Georgia history, all the way up until 11:29 a.m., when Dane was born. I was so excited in fact, that the doctor told the nurse to keep an eye on me, because she feared I was going to pass out. As Rosanna pushed and cried, she still managed to laugh.

I don’t remember all of it, but I do remember a complete reordering of my value system the moment he was born. I felt a literal shift in my spirit (and continue to feel it) towards the things of life that matter most. To be more specific, how I spend money, how many hours I work, how much I turn my cell phone off when I walk in the door, how I settle disagreements with Rosanna and others, and many other areas of life have shifted, or perhaps a better way to say it is that things that seemed to have an inflated sense of value have been put into their proper place. That has been a beautiful gift Dane has given to me.

Perhaps the most profound lesson I’m learning is that God’s activity is here in this moment. There are days I want to sprint ahead to Dane’s first steps or T-ball practice, but just like pregnancy is preparation and cultivation, so is this period. God has me in this moment with Dane, not the next one. I see God’s brilliance in that more and more. Perhaps you find yourself unsure of your current place in life, or unsure whether you want to be in it, but staying focused on the present, not longing for the past or just hoping for the future to hurry up, allows us to experience a gift. I look forward to a lot of moments in the future, but for now, I’m grateful for what lessons I find about marriage, life, and humility that come in the form of a dirty diaper.

Jared Herd serves in multiple capacities at Orange. He is also considered by many to be one of today’s freshest communicators, traveling the country sharing the hope of Jesus with a humorous and captivating approach that has reached thousands of teenagers and college students. Jared, his wife Rosanna and son Cane live in Cumming, Georgia.

Bridging the Gap

Monday, January 14th, 2013

By Sarah Anderson

The other day, by the time I walked out the door, I had already lived a thousand lifetimes. I had been awake for two hours, but was ready to crawl back in bed and request a do-over. It isn’t my favorite way to usher in daylight—with chaos, messes and more noise than my non-morning person ears can comfortably tolerate.

Every parent is familiar with those days—when the whirlwind of activity furiously descends before you can even get a sip of coffee in, and it maintains a steady speed and intensity as the hours wear on. The entirety of your waking hours is spent simply trying to catch up. On days like these, my world seems small. Itty-bitty children small. Confined. A little claustrophobic. It is hard to feel sentimental and purposeful about my role as a mom when I can’t keep up with laundry, dishes, and the unexplicably sticky little hands tugging at me.

I read an article the other day detailing the origins and meaning behind a letter from the Hebrew alphabet, vav. Scripture mentions it for the first time in Genesis 1:1. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The letter is said to have connective meaning—like our word “and”. Heaven and earth. But it is more than that too. It is used later to refer to the hooks used to join the curtains enclosing the tabernacle—the earthly dwelling for a holy God. In other words, vav is a clasp, a bond, a method of joining what may not otherwise be fastened together. It brings two realities together and connects them—an unlikely marriage and meeting of two vastly different things.

Days like the one I recently experienced need a vav. I know two realities to be true. Life with toddlers is overwhelming and feels endless. But, life with toddlers doesn’t stay this way forever and will be over far sooner than I know. Two seemingly conflicted ideas, desperate for a hook, for something to bridge what feels like an infinite gap. The messiness of the now and the reality of what I know is coming need a bridge so I can be more present in my present.

For me, the vav comes at night. It comes when the lights are turned off and the toys are put away. It comes when I take the time to direct intentional glances towards the rooms that hold the boys who run me ragged. It comes when I realize, right before my eyes, right under my nose, right down the hall from me, miracles are unfolding. Tiny bodies are growing. Souls are aging. It comes when I can pause long enough to realize I am witness, every day, to the greatest marvel made accessible to humanity. I get to watch babies become boys—who will someday become men.

Vav for me is when I am at peace with the chaos of my days and the understanding that they will pass slower than I would like, but be over faster than I am ready for. It is when I learn to marry the disarray that can be life with toddlers to the beautiful necessity such days are to the bigger picture being created in the blur of this season. I have come to believe that every parent needs a vav—the chance to see outside the overwhelming present to the imminent future. And it is our responsibility to find it and hold fast to it.

Vav is a perspective changer. A reality grounder. And when joined rightly, and hooked correctly, it is a sanity preserver. Tomorrow may find me just as harried, just as tired, just as caffeine-needy as today. But I know, what I will find at the end of the day to make me get up and do it all again. Two sleeping boys. One grateful mama. And a God who joins them both together. A beautiful vav if I ever saw one.

Sarah Anderson writes for XP3 student curriculum at Orange. She is married to Rodney Anderson and is mom to two bouncy boys, Asher and Pace.

252 Update: Determination

Tuesday, January 8th, 2013

Check out this new video where we take a look at the story of God and challenge each kid to show a little DETERMINATION, and be the one who keeps trusting God—no matter what!

252 Preview: The Amazing Race (January 2013) from Orange on Vimeo.

A Simple Plan

Tuesday, January 8th, 2013

It was a simple plan. As a way to spend time with my daughters and give us something to have fun with all summer, we decided to build a tree house.

After the first weekend, it was a few boards stuck to a couple of trees. The second weekend didn’t improve things much. In fact, it looked more like we were building an awkward swing set than a tree house. After a month, we had a small platform between the trees. The girls were impressed. I was disappointed about how slow we were progressing.

We could have stopped there. We had already enjoyed a great time together and it compared well with some other tree houses they had seen, but after a few months we still saw something in our backyard that looked closer to a beginning than an ending. Our fun project had begun to be a work project. The thought crossed my mind more than once to hang up my hammer, tell the girls it was finished, and devote my weekends to watching football, or grilling, or napping, or any of the hundreds of other things that were feeling more fun.

And then something began to happen that wasn’t in our plan. People had been watching as we braved the heat, and the hauling, and the smashed fingers, and the splinters. . .Neighbors began to come into our backyard and watch. Some helped. Many brought materials: pieces of a torn down porch, leftover lumber from a deck, donated hardware from a playground that was being replaced. . . My brother in law and nephew even brought over a workbench top and helped me nail it in as part of the roof.

We kept going.

That summer we had worked so long at the project people began to notice. When they noticed, they wanted to be a part of what we were doing. Sticking with something through the difficult times not only changes you, but it also attracts attention. Things are revealed by determination that cannot be discovered any other way. When you are determined to finish what you start, even something as simple as a tree house, it can produce new relationships and deepen existing ones.

One day, as we were installing some leftover kitchen cabinets donated by another neighbor, I asked my oldest daughter if she thought the tree house was finally finished. She said, “I don’t think it will ever be finished. We can always keep going, can’t we?” It’s been a few years and she’s right. We’re never going to say the tree house is finished. It’s too much fun adding another piece and repairing it together. People still drop by to see how it’s going and still donate pieces to the lifetime project.

This month maybe it’s time for you to find a long term project to do with your kids. It can be as simple as reading a bit of a long chapter book with your kids each night. It could be a backyard building project, or learning to play a musical instrument, or seeking out the recipe for the perfect pizza, or building the model of the 1976 Plymouth Grand Fury Interceptor. Decide together that no matter how long it takes or what difficulties arise that you will finish the project together. I think you’ll be as amazed as I was at what you discover along the way.

Greg Payne is a multi-talented creative writer for Orange and 252 Basics. He has been married for 17 years, has two daughters and two unnamed dogs. He is a grill and smoke enthusiast, tree house builder, vacation planner, and Mario Brothers competitor.

Look Out Your Window

Thursday, December 13th, 2012

by an Orange Parent

As I continue down this crazy journey called “parenting,” I keep discovering that it isn’t just about me. Case in point, this year for Christmas I wanted to come up with something neat that my eight-year old daughter and I could do together to let someone know they are loved.

But, I was kind of stumped. I mean, there are so many people in need all over the world and in the city, I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t know what kind of things I could take an eight-year-old girl to as well (the local shelter suggested kids be at least thirteen before volunteering). I basically was on the verge of doing nothing because there was so much to do, and I was feeling all of this pressure to do something “extraordinary” and come up with it on my own.

So, one day, my daughter and I were in the car headed in to the city when I say, “I‘ve been trying to think of something for you and me to do together this Christmas that would let someone else know how loved they are, but I can’t think of anything. Can you?”

At first, she was silent. So, I asked her, “I mean, can you think of anyone who might need to be loved on this Christmas? You know, so they know that they’re loved?” And just as I finished that sentence, I pulled up to the tollbooth we always go through. And my daughter, looking out her window and seeing the woman in the toll booth (who I wasn’t paying a lick of attention to), said, “What about these guys?” To which I replied, “Who?” “These guys,” she said, pointing at all of the tollbooth operators.

And, in a moment I am not proud of, I said, “The tollbooth operators?” like my daughter had just suggested I run down the highway naked. But she calmly said, “Yeah, I mean. . .they’re all alone in those boxes. What if they have to be in there on Christmas Eve? We should do something for them and let them know we hope they have a Merry Christmas.” I responded with my own silence.

See, my daughter did something that I think I am constantly failing to do. Stop, look around, and see who is standing right next to me. She simply looked outside her window and saw a “neighbor” who might need some reminding that they are loved and remembered.

We don’t know anything about these tollbooth operators. They might not be in need of anything. . . but then again. . .they might be.

Upon my daughter’s recommendation, we are going to go buy all six toll booth operators a gift, and on Christmas Eve around 11pm, we are going to drive up and down the highway so she can wish each operator a Merry Christmas and, in her own words, “Remind them they are loved.” Just because. Who knows what that might do in their lives.

So, I learned two things. First, when it comes to teaching and raising my children, maybe I don’t have to do it all on my own. Maybe part of raising my children is simply listening to them and helping them work through some of their own ideas. And second, I learned that showing compassion doesn’t always have to be a huge and difficult thing. Sometimes showing compassion is as simple as looking out your window and doing something for the people right in front of you.

This Christmas take some time to find those people who you might otherwise ignore and let them know you value them. Just because.

The Gift of Compassion

Tuesday, December 11th, 2012

When your kids hear “Jingle Bells” and see Santa, what’s their first thought? Getting? Or giving? We might be surprised at how fully our children and teens understand the real meaning of Christmas. While we’re sometimes perplexed by the commercialism and the “lost meaning,” kids often have an easier time connecting Christmas and all its ornamentation to the compassionate promise of Jesus. They approach it in a much more simple way: God loved the world so much that He gave us Jesus, and that’s what Christmas is all about. Santa gives. Mom and Dad give. Even the jingle bell ringer in front of the mall is receiving just so he or she can give to others.

When we have compassion, we connect deeply enough with others to really feel what they’re going through. Because we feel what they feel, we’re moved to act in a way that can bring hope and practical relief to them. That can be a pretty big concept for young children, but even the youngest have experienced enough that they get it when we point out how a difficult situation makes life hard for someone in need.

Compassion is “caring enough to do something about someone else’s need.” From the earliest age, we can train our kids to look for the needs around them, then to think about ways they can help meet those needs. Christmas is the perfect time to do that. It’s almost like the entire society, from the music we hear on the radio to the displays set up in the mall, is set up to help us demonstrate this one principle in our families: one of the best ways we can show we love Jesus is by loving others.

As you make your holiday rounds, find ways to let your children see the needs of others, then go the extra step with them in meeting those needs in meaningful ways. Get personally involved, and make sure your children are right beside you in appropriate ways. The meaning of Christmas isn’t as hidden as we sometimes think: the gracious, compassionate Gift of God is all around us.

For more on talking to you your kids about the idea compassion and what we are talking about at 252 Basics this month, go the newfeed.

What are some ways that you and your kids are showing compassion to others this Christmas?