One of my favorite pictures of all time. Jonas and our two new puppies (Sam on the left; Lilah on the right) in his favorite toy.
Mentoring Matters
My little sister Katie and I at the Evansville Icemen Game on Friday night
Just for a moment, close your eyes and picture yourself as a ten year-old. Think of all the adults who helped you be a kid every day.
I think of my mother. My father. My Godparents. My Sunday School Teacher Mrs. Graves. My church choir director Mrs. Barber-Pederson. My school music teacher Mrs. Birk. My fifth grade teacher Mr. Stone. There were others along the way who took time to love me.
I was blessed with a lot of adults who took time to nurture me, encourage me, develop my talents and help me find my way. I realize now how important those relationships were and still are in my life. I can picture people who came alongside me at all stages in my life and mentored me and helped me be a better version of myself. I’m grateful.
I am a Youth and Children’s Minister, a Big Sister with Big Brothers Big Sisters Henderson, a Girl Scout volunteer, and a Boy Scout parent because I realize the importance of adults taking time to build relationships with children and teenagers.
Today is National “Thank Your Mentor Day” and January is National Mentoring Month. Mentoring has always made a difference in my life–in official and unofficial capacities.
We can all mentor and nurture and encourage and love the kids in our lives.
If you’re a parent, be the best parent you can be to your children and look for ways to help them develop other meaningful relationships with their teachers, leaders and family members.
If you’re an adult with time to give (and really–we can always find time if it’s important enough), lead a Scout troop, become a Big, volunteer in a children’s or youth ministry at church, coach a little league team, give lessons, raise money to support organizations related to any of the above.
And guess what? If you mentor, you become a better version of yourself too! It’s really a win-win.
Some Confessions
- Every night, someone (almost always Jason) sets up our coffee pot to brew at 6 a.m. the next morning. I often pass the coffee pot, locked and loaded and give serious consideration to hitting the “brew” button so that the morning’s coffee will brew right now and I can drink coffee before I go to bed. I resist the urge and try to look forward to tomorrow.
- Caffeine rarely affects my ability to sleep anymore. Eating chocolate before bed will mess up my sleep more than drinking coffee before bed.
- When I drive in my car by myself, I’m usually singing loudly to the radio or one of my playlists. Often, the playlist contains music from Glee.
- When books, blog posts or articles get boring, I put the skills I learned in elementary school to use and start “skimming.” It’s not that I don’t care, it’s just what I now am sure is adult ADD.
- I often say that my degree is in Biblical Studies (or I say “Religion with a concentration in Biblical Studies”). This is technically not true because at graduation, I still lacked two Greek classes for this degree. My degree is a Bachelor of the Arts in Religion. However, I took those two Greek classes the next year for no official credit and feel that “Biblical Studies” is a better description of my education so I claim it.
- People often tell me I’m “so organized.” I am mentally organized and good with a three-ringed binder, but I’m not organized in my physical spaces. My office and my side of the bedroom and my shelves and drawers in the bathroom are a mess.
- I own an iron. I keep it in the craft room at church and use it to iron the kids’ bead projects. If my clothes are wrinkly, I throw them in the dryer or hang them outside of the hot shower and hope for the best.
- I have “Desperate Housewives” at the top of my Netflix Queue and am currently in the middle of season 2. I swore I’d never watch it, but finally after the urging of several loved ones, gave in and watched the first episode a couple of weeks ago. I was hooked immediately.
Got a confession? Let’s hear it!
Happy Friday, friends!
The Update That’s Probably TMI
But I just thought I’d give a quick update about my visit with my doctor and the whole “Becky wants to be a runner” thing since I mentioned I was going.
First of all, my blood work came back with mostly gold stars. I totally blame exercise for bringing all of my “numbers” into perfect range. The only problem? I’m now officially anemic. The doctor sent along a prescription for a really high daily dose of iron, but I’m a little worried about nearly sextupling (ha–is that a word? I mean x6…) my amount of supplemental iron. Today I ate an entire bag of steamed broccoli. The other day, the youth group girls made me order a cheeseburger at Applebees (“Eat your iron!” one of them exclaimed when I wondered if I should order chicken instead.). I suppose it’s all about balance. I stopped eating red meat (a great source of iron) to improve my health, but I suppose I should have focused on other ways to get the mineral.
Second of all, I have to go back to my orthopedic surgeon because my doctor feels rather certain that the tumor on my Achilles tendon has come back. Tumors do that, I know, and it was a benign tumor…but I had surgery and everything so I was kind of hoping that was a done deal.
Whatever it is that’s happening with my Achilles is making running (and some days, walking) kind of painful. “Are you limping?” Is a question I hear frequently…because I am actually limping a bit even though I try to walk normally. I’ve stopped running since Thanksgiving weekend and that’s helped the pain some.
When I told my doctor that, he kind of shrugged and said, “Well, I guess that answers that question.” Elliptical, swimming, biking–all good ideas for now. Running–not so much.
Sigh.
But I feel great and I weigh less than I did at my physical last year. I’m giving serious thought to swimming laps at the Y more often and to eating more broccoli, spinach and steak (hey–that sounds good now that I think about it!). I’m sad that it seems I won’t be a runner, but if I’m honest about it, I was probably never going to make a good runner anyway.
And that’s the TMI update!
If The Internet Disappeared
I’ve read the Hunger Games series, and one of the thing that intrigues me about the post-apocalyptic world described in the story is the lack of mention of the conveniences we’ve come to enjoy so easily (at least in the districts of Panem).
One of the things that is missing is the Internet.
Now, the internet has only been in the general public’s consumption for about two decades (hey, geeks–don’t argue. Most of us came in with AOL’s pay by the hour service, not BitNET). I was first introduced to it on my second day at UE in 1996. That’s where I got my first email address (mb48! UE had no use for our full names, just our initials) and learned how to chat. I even made a super-fly webpage that I could actually now provide a link to so you can marvel at my use of font graphics, html code and cheesy stock photos–we were far from the days of me being able to upload pictures of the actual people involved.
Yes–I could provide a link because currently in another window in my browser I’m looking at it. I think they promised me when I signed up that if I didn’t make any changes to it for a year, it would get deleted. I kind of wish they would delete it since it’s been TWELVE years. I was an interesting college sophomore…I won’t provide a link because I feel like that would be pretty embarrassing and the basic idea of the page is that I love Jesus and html code.
Anyway–what if all of a sudden the internet disappeared?
I would never be able to take long trips again because I would have no idea how to get there or how long it would take. In my adult life, I’ve never had to plan a trip without Rand Mcnally’s software or Mapquest or Google Maps.
Also, how would I find and book hotels? How do you do that without the internet? I mean, I could manage going to a hotel and asking if they have rooms, but how would I book a room for a trip? SERIOUSLY–I’m asking you.
Without the internet, I would never know who was in a movie until the credits roll. Or how long it will be until the credits roll. (Yes, I’m guilty of googling a movie mid-way through just to see how much longer I’ll have to sit through it.)
How would I communicate with all my BFF’s and keep up with their lives? Phone calls and mail, I guess. I’m pretty bad at both though. It’s only because I excel at Facebook and email that I still have friends.
Where would I buy my books? The bookstores keep closing! Wait…
I would miss my blog and writing in an online format. I’ve never been great at pen and paper writing or journaling.
I would also miss Facebook, Twitter, Pandora, Pinterest and Netflix. But not Myspace or Google+ or my college webpage–I kind of want out of those!
What about you? If the internet disappeared, what would you have to learn to do without it?
Tuesday Ten: Things I Cannot Explain To You
Need to learn about the following things? I am not your girl!
1. European History
2. The care and feeding of snakes
3. How to grow an awesome garden…or how to keep a simple houseplant alive.
4. Sines, cosines, tangents (apologies to my high school trigonometry teacher!)
5. Fashion
6. Football. I’ve been going to games all of my life and I still don’t understand it.
7. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
8. Computer hard drives
9. Time travel
10. Sewing machines
Eraser
Last night, I finished Stephen King’s “11/22/63.” It’s the first book I finished on my new Kindle and I’m not sure I would have read it so quickly in another format. It’s hard to take an 849 page book to the gym or on a road trip, I’ve found. It’s quite a book, and according to King himself, he’s been thinking about writing it for decades. If you’re a reader, I’d recommend it (and no worries if you’re not a horror fan–it’s one of King’s pieces that doesn’t make you want to hide under the covers!
No spoilers here, but the premise of the book is: What if you could go back in time and change something that happened? What if you could stop a young mother and almost all of her children from being murdered on Halloween night in 1958? What if you could stop a young girl from being paralyzed in a hunting accident later that same year? What if you could be in Dallas on the days leading up to November 22, 1963 and stop Lee Harvey Oswald from shooting John. F. Kennedy?
If JFK were not murdered, would Bobby Kennedy have lived as well? What about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr? What about Vietnam? …9/11?
There’s no saying for sure what would have happened if Lee Oswald had missed…or been killed before that day in Dallas. But it can be said that the events that took place that day did change history in many ways. Some were bad and some were good and there’s no going back with an eraser anyway.
We can all probably look back at history–world history and our own personal histories–and see places we would like to erase or change. Forks in the road where we could have chosen another path. People that we should have been more guarded against. Events that we wish we could stop in time. Places we never would have gone.
I think about my own life. Do I have any regrets? Maybe. If I could erase parts of my history that were painful and difficult, would I? Maybe. But maybe not. Of course I have a long list of mistakes I’ve made from things I’ve said that I wish I could take back to some really dumb decisions I made for my life. I suppose there are things I regret.
But as I now sit far removed from the situations that once caused so much grief and heartache…I realize that these are the situations that made me who I am.
I think about Joseph, beloved son of Jacob and grandson of Isaac in the Old Testament. I think of all of the hell he went through because his brothers were jealous of him and wanted to get rid of him. I think of the maturity and knowledge that caused him to eventually say to the same brothers: ”Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today (Genesis 50:20).”
One of the most hopeful things for me is that I completely believe that God can take the worst situation and cause good to come from it. It’s what I cling to when things are bad in my own life or when a friend or loved one is facing a hard situation. Hold on, something good will come in all of this or of all of this.
But still, I wonder what I would do if I could go back and change the bad things and erase the mistakes.
If you could change the past, would you?
Recent #RunRevRun Posts
- “Hey Stranger, You’re Awesome” December 5, 2011 Greg Bolt
- Get Gear at a Great Price October 4, 2011 Josh Rhone
- 26.2 Miles: Marathon Running and its Questionable Ends October 4, 2011 Adam J. Copeland
- Guest Post: This is Why I Run September 29, 2011 #RunRevRun
- My Gluten-Free Week September 2, 2011 Becky Durham