Daly Focus Blog
Life just keeps moving faster and faster for all of us.
With jobs and kids and all that goes into running a household, daily life can be difficult to balance.
Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to make that task a little easier.
The first idea comes from my friend and former Focus board member, Al Mohler. Like most of us, he leads a busy life. And it was busy in the early years of his family as well.
I often hear from folks who want to reprioritize their lives. They just don’t know how.
I get it.
The world is moving faster and growing more hectic for all of us. It’s easy to feel pressured to do it all. From our jobs and the bills to school plays and soccer practice, everything seems important. But all that busyness leaves us with crumbs of time to scrape together for family and friends, and, yes, even God.
Every so often it’s good to get little reminders that serve as something of a reset button for what’s truly important in life.
I recently experienced that when a colleague of mine shared some thoughts he found online from a palliative care nurse.
As you can imagine, when each work day is spent caring for folks in the final weeks of their lives, the subject matter tends to dip below the surface to what’s truly meaningful.
In a previous blog post, I wrote about passing along a faith that lasts to your children. That post focused on the most important thing parents can do: live out a vibrant faith themselves.
Today I want to share with you additional research that suggests another helpful dimension to helping your kids inherit your faith.
As it turns out, that element has a lot to do with Dad.
The power of love and affection
In a New York Times article that ran earlier this year, Prof.
The headline certainly draws you in: “Don’t Call Me Grandma: Births to ‘Older’ Moms on the Rise.” The report from NBC News highlights the growing trend of women over age 35 who are having their first baby.
Delaying pregnancy has become the new normal, and there are many reasons why this is so. First of all, men and women are both marrying at an older age. Another reason is many people – most markedly, women – are pursuing college or advanced degrees that pressure them to dedicate time to developing their careers instead of starting a family.
In my latest book, “The Good Dad,” I spent a lot of time and pages on the importance of dads simply “being there” for their kids.
“Our kids aren’t asking for perfection,” I wrote. “They’re asking for our presence – to show up for the job each and every day. They’re asking us to be there for them, to guide them, to hug them.”
When we’re there with them, accompanying them in the trenches of everyday life, we’re able to serve as a guiding influence over our children.
The title of “teacher” is a great one. It conveys passing along wisdom, knowledge and nurturing.
Most of us, looking back, can identify at least one teacher who poured into us. It might have been the elementary school teacher who comforted us, or the high school teacher who encouraged us to believe that God made us capable of achieving our dreams. Whatever it was, their care made a big difference in our lives.
He saw my potential
I remember my “teacher.” He was my high school football coach, Paul Moro.
They call them “fur babies,” and many couples in the U.S. are opting for them. One headline aptly described it this way: “Americans are having dogs instead of babies.”
The United States isn’t unique in this trend. We’ve seen for a while now how birth rates worldwide are plummeting and the number of pets are increasing. Japan, a country where sales of adult diapers outnumber those of baby diapers, has a population of more than 22 million pampered pets versus only 16.6 million children under 15.
While we’re still a few weeks from the official start of summer on June 21, the Daly Family already has a summer kind of mind.
My wife Jean snapped this picture of the boys and me after we had enjoyed some time boogie boarding in Corona del Mar, California and were at the Shake Shack to watch the sunset.
We make it a point to spend some family time just having fun every summer – after all, laughing and playing together is a great way to make some treasured memories.
Focus on the Family Radio Theatre’s production of the Charles Dickens classic “Oliver Twist” won the 2014 Audie Award for Best Audio Drama.
An Audie is a significant achievement for anyone involved in spoken word entertainment. The special recognition is the genre’s equivalent to the Academy Awards given out to exemplary movies and films.
So in a sense, it’s like saying Focus on the Family’s “Oliver Twist” won an Oscar. And it’s our fifth Audie Award from the Audio Publisher’s Association.
Jim Daly is a husband, father and President of Focus on the Family and host of its National Radio Hall of Fame broadcast. His blog, Daly Focus, is full of timely commentary and wisdom designed to help you navigate and understand today’s culture. His latest book is Marriage Done Right.
