Monday, August 4, 2014

To Your Parents

Hello Everyone,

Today I want to talk to all of you that are parents.  If you are a young person, ask your parents to read this.

Let me start by saying that I am a parent/stepparent to five very wonderful and very different children.  Our children are ages 15, 14, 13, 12 and 10 so we are just hitting the teenage years.  We are hitting the age where they become more and more independent.  But let me tell you this parents, we are also hitting the time of their lives where they begin to dream their own dreams and want to go their own paths.

For many parents this is a hard time.  See we think we have the plan for their lives.  We see them going to college and getting a good job out of school then preparing for a family and in many cases following the same track that we went down.  After all, if it was good enough for us, it's good enough for them right?  Wrong.  They have their own dreams and their own desires.

This past weekend, my wife and I had the opportunity to watch our oldest daughter perform in a theater camp in our town.  It was a wonderful experience for her and she truly enjoyed it.  In the second act, I was hit by part of the performance.  The musical is about kids going through school and it's "target audience" is teachers as they are in the classroom and their impact on the kids they teach.  At one point, four different young men and women describe a boy who writes a poem.  The first poem is named Skip after his dog because that's what it's about.  His teacher gives him an A and a gold star and his mom pins it to the wall.  His dad tucks him into bed and he's enjoying life.

The second poem is called Autumn because that's what it's about.  His teacher gave him an A and his mom told him not to pin it to the wall because the wall had just been painted.  That year he noticed that things weren't as rosy around him.  Then he tried another poem called Question (I think) because that what it was about.  His mom didn't say anything about it and his dad got mad at him when he tried to tuck him into bed.  He wrote his last poem on a matchbook and completely checked out of life.  His parents never knew he was unhappy.

The skit is followed by a song called, "I've Come Home."  It's about children coming home and the place of safety, love and warmth they find at home with their family.  This made me start to think about my own children and I began to wonder if my desire to see grow into the adults that I want them to was clouding my ability to see their dreams and desires.  What part of where they thought they wanted to go was I missing.  Since they are teenagers, their dreams are probably going to change several times over the next few years but that doesn't matter.  I started asking myself what was I doing to encourage them to stretch out and work for their dreams.  What was I doing to help them work hard to achieve the things that God put in their life, not the things that I was trying to put in their lives.  Now I am not saying that grades and their upbringing isn't important and as a parent it's definitely are job to make sure our kids work hard and do their best.  It is our job to help them grow into strong men and women.

Let me close with this.  What if Billy Graham's mom had forced him to be a dentist?  What if Albert Einstein's mom had forced him to be a lawyer?  What if Mother Theresa's mom had forced her to be an actress?  It would be like trying to put a size 8 foot in a size 6 shoe.  It just wouldn't fit.  So let me ask you this parents, what are you doing to help your children realize their dreams?

That's Another Opinion of the Minion

Friday, July 25, 2014

Toothpaste

Hello Everyone,

It's been quite a while since I wrote anything but today I want to talk about toothpaste.  Toothpaste comes in all different sized tubes and in more flavors than I can count.  There is wintergreen, spearmint, peppermint, and the list goes on and on.  Now I am not sure about how it comes packaged in other parts of the world but in the United States, most of the time it comes in squeeze tubes with a screw on cap.  The tubes are normally bright colors to make you feel good about using their brand and to make their brand look good.  It's supposed to be pretty important stuff because it helps us keep our teeth and gums in good health.  I can't remember how many times my mom asked if we had brushed our teeth before we went to bed.  As a grown up dad of five, I can't count how many times I have asked the same thing to ours.

So why am I talking about toothpaste?  It's because we humans have a lot in common with that tube.  At a factory somewhere, there are machines and people that put the toothpaste in the tube but did you ever notice that you don't really know what's in the tube until you take the cap off and squeeze the tube?  You can't see through the tube normally.  As I said a minute ago, you can see the outside of the tube and it may look great but you can't see the inside.

Some of you have probably figured out where I am going with this.  See, we can't really know what's inside a person until there is pressure put on that person.  It's when the pressure comes from all sides and starts to really squeeze that we get to see what's really inside their "tube."  We are all the same way.  We can look great on the outside but have real trouble on the inside.  But let me tell you this.  Whatever you put down on the inside of you is going to come out in words when the pressure is on.  Just like that factory, if you put God's word in your heart and you meditate on it regularly, that Word will come out of your mouth when you get into a tough situation.  If you're putting negative thoughts and ideas down in your spirit then those same negative things will come out of your mouth under pressure.

Let me ask you this.  What kind of toothpaste is on the inside of you?  Is it good thoughts?  Is it based on the Word of God?  Is it something that will help you when the tough times come?  Or are you saying things to yourself like, "I'll never make it.  My dreams won't come true.  I'm not good enough.  I'm not pretty enough.  I'm not smart enough."  If you are doing that, then stop because those negative thoughts are lies.  You are good enough, smart enough, pretty enough and God can make your dreams come true.

Let me end it with this.  Check out what's on the inside of your tube because the pressure will come and it will come out.  If you don't like what's there, then change it.  It's not hard.  Get a good Bible and start feeding on what God says you are and what God says you can do.  Then when the pressure comes, you will start using the words of your mouth to bring you out of that situation and into the place God has for you.

That's Another Opinion of the Minion

Friday, April 4, 2014

Random Acts and Bank Accounts

Random acts, we've all seen them on the news.  Someone gets mad at someone else in traffic and communicates something ugly.  Someone else comes home from a bad day at work and yells at their kids.  Someone else gets really upset and punches someone out.  This list could go on and on.  So what do they have to do with bank accounts you might ask?


Well I am not talking about the bank account you have at Bank of America or Citibank.  I'm talking about people.  Did you know people are like bank accounts.  Every time you do something negative to them, their emotional account gets lower.  Every time you do something positive to someone, it goes up. 


Let me try to illustrate this.  Last week when I went to pick up three of our five kids, our youngest daughter was having a fit.  She was going to get to go where we were because she was sick and it wasn't a good idea.  Now she is 9 years old but was acting more like 9 months and having a toddler fit.  This particular day, I did not have a great day at work.  To top it all off, I was late to get the other two boys to swim practice.  So what did I do?  I did the "natural" thing to do - I lost my temper.  Now I don't really have a bad temper but I did get really mad (for me) at my daughter.  I was so mad, I was raising my voice at her and she was yelling at me. 


It ended with me spanking her and her still throwing a fit.  At one point, she said some really mean things to me.  Because I am her dad and she is a child, the things she said didn't really bother me.  After all, she is only nine.  Her behavior was in appropriate so I corrected it but what if she was 20 years older and said she hated me?  It could really hurt my feelings and damage my self esteem.  Now this wasn't premeditated, it was a random act that could have really drained my emotional bank account.


Let me tell you another random story.  Most of you know that I am from Texas and I still believe in saying ma'am and sir.  I think it's polite and I like it.  It's a way for me to show someone respect.  Now the other day, I was in a Starbucks in a different state (if you know me that's a shock right?).  The person behind the counter asked me a question and I said, "Yes ma'am."  However for a split second, I was mortified because there was a distinct possibility that I just said yes ma'am to a guy.  It would have been a totally insulting thing to do.  Fortunately, it turned out to be a girl so I was safe.  Again a random act but it could have definitely hurt some one's feelings.  That could have definitely drained that person's emotional account.


Up to this point, everything I have discussed centers around not hurting someone and draining their account.  I suppose I could stop right now and say that it's best to be careful that we don't hurt other people and that is certainly true.


But I want to take a minute and talk about the other side of the ledger.  If you take $100 to your bank and deposit in your savings account what happens?  Your account balance goes up right?  So what if we took that same approach and started adding to other people's emotional accounts instead.  When was the last time you walked up to a total stranger and given them a compliment?  Are you too shy for that?  Well let me ask you this.  How would it make you feel if someone in line at Starbucks that you didn't know (assuming you are a lady) that you really looked nice in the dress you were wearing?  How would it make you feel?  How about if you told someone you work with thank you for doing a good job on something?  It's going to make their account balances go up.


So let me encourage you in this today.  Try to find someone and give them a random act of kindness.  Be careful though.  Because whatever you do to someone, it will be done to you.  If you start giving out random acts of kindness, sooner or later, they are going to start coming back to you!


That's another Opinion of the Minion

Monday, March 31, 2014

Pressure Your Pressure

Hello Everyone,

Today I want to talk about something that has been in my spirit for a little while.  Are there things in your life that you are believing God to make happen?  Maybe you are trying to lose weight, get out of debt or make better grades.  It's possible you are dealing with something even much more serious - a loved one who you want to know Christ, deliverance from drugs or something else.  That's what I want  to deal with today.

Have you ever worked hard on something and don't really see results?  You say, I have tried to study more or I have tried to lose that weight and no matter what I do, it won't come off?  Are you feeling pressured to quit the diet, quit studying, stop believing for your loved one?  Well we have all been there.  I know I have.  That pressure is really heavy right?  On top of that, nothing seems to be moving right?

Well there is a law in physics that says something like every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  When you push down on a table, the pressure you put on it will actually cause you to rise.  But if you increase the pressure you are putting on that table, it may look like nothing is happening.  So you push down some more and still nothing happens.  Then you push even harder and nothing happens.  You keep increasing the pressure and finally you hear the table legs start to creek and this encouragement causes you to put even more pressure on the table.  Why hasn't the table broken?  It is putting as much pressure back on you as you are putting on it.

But at some point, if you keep increasing the pressure, the table will buckle.  One minute you are pushing on it and it is pushing back on you.  The next minute the table is not able to exert enough pressure back on you to stand and it falls.

That's the way it is with the problems in life.  The reason we don't see immediate victory is because our problems are pressuring us but guess what, there is no movement.  That means we are putting pressure on our problem!  If we keep it up, sooner or later, the problem will buckle because it can't handle the pressure you are putting on it.

So I want to encourage you.  If you are trying to loose weight, keep at it.  You might not see the results you want immediately but keep pressuring your pressure.  Those pounds will come off.  If you want to get out of debt, keep the pressure on your debt.  It will leave.

If you are using your faith and believing God to bring a loved one into the kingdom or something else in your life then keep at it.  To use a line from a song I heard the Crabb family sing, "Just hold on.  My God will show up and He will take you through the fire again!"

Well, I've blogged myself happy again.  That's another Opinion of the Minion.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

To Fear or Not to Fear

Hello everyone, 

Today I want to talk about fear.  Now we could discuss all kinds of phobias and it seems like there is a phobia for almost everything.  There is even phobia of success.  Can you believe it!  If you Google it, there are a lot of things to say about it.  There's also the fear of failure which is the opposite.  We run around a lot wondering about what happens if we fail.  What happens if we try out for something and don't make it?  Most of the time, nothing really bad happens.  We might get embarrassed if we fail or we might not get something we had our heart set to do.  But other than that, what negative really happens?

Let me ask you this.  What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?  Would you become a professional athlete?  Maybe you would run for President or run some big corporation.  I am digressing from my topic for tonight so I will save this discussion for another day.

Let's talk about fear itself.  It can grip us and stop us in our tracks.  Some people believe that a little fear is healthy for you.  That's almost as intelligent as saying a little cancer is healthy for you or a few broken bones are good for you.  After all, they might teach you something right?  Nope.  A little fear is not good for you because fear connects you to the devil and that's not a connection you need to make. 

Now I can hear some of you saying, "Well Mr. Minion, the Bible says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."  Yes, there are some translations of the Bible that use those words but what it really means that the reverence of the Lord and the respect for the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  It doesn't mean that being terrified of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  For the record, God doesn't want you to be afraid of Him.  That thought is just plain ridiculous.  Are any of you parents?  Are any of you in a relationship?  Do you want your children, spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend to be afraid of you?  Of course not,  I have five children and I don't want any of them to be afraid of me, not even a little bit.

If you think about it for a few minutes, we use the word fear a lot and can make connections to it.  Have you ever said, "That scared me to death?"  how about sayings like, "That ____ will be the death of me yet?"  Some people even sit around and talk about all the bad things that can happen to them.

So is fear a good thing?  Not on any level.  So if fear is so bad for you, what's the opposite of fear?  The answer is faith.  Faith in what?  First and foremost, faith in God.  Second faith in yourself.  Third faith in the plan God has for your life.  When you turn from fear, you're left with faith.  

I can already hear some of you saying, "Well what about what's going on right now in my life?  What if it doesn't work out?"  Not too long ago, I was afraid of losing my job and I was afraid that my new wife wouldn't care for me anymore.  That she might even not want to be with me anymore.  That fear was gripping.  But here's what I finally realized.  Regardless of what she did or didn't do, God would be with me.  He will see me through to the place of victory he has for me.  For those of you who know me personally, you should know that my wife has very strong moral character and I truly believe that she is deeply in love with me and committed to me.  The only thing that freed me from it's grip was to turn to faith in God.  If all those bad things happened, I would still be OK.  

But one thing I learned while sitting in that fear was that I didn't enjoy life.  I was sitting at a place watching everyone around me having a good time and I wasn't.  Why?  Because that fear had a grip on me.  Once I got out of that grip through faith, I started having a good time again.  So if your at this place right now, let me encourage you.  Take a step out of fear and take a step of faith!

That's another Opinion of the Minion

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Fight or Flight

Hello everyone,

This post might not apply to everyone but today I want to talk about your fight or flight reflex.  This is really something I probably already knew but it's something that I have realized about myself recently.  I don't know where I heard this but I have heard it several times lately.  When we face fear or some unpleasant situation, there is a reflex that kicks in almost immediately.  We either want to fight the situation or we want to run away from the situation.  

Before I tell you what I learned, let me say that to go to either extreme is not a wise decision.  There are times when you should fight and there are times when you should simply walk away.  In the words of my mom's favorite Kenny Rogers song, "You've got to know when to hold'em.  Know when to fold 'em.  Know when to walk away and know when to run."  I will soon describe what I have learned about my flight mechanism but before I do, let me say that there are going to be times when you should run away from the problem.  If you find yourself confronted with a gun and you don't have one, RUN. If you find yourself in an abusive relationship, ladies RUN.

But what if you just find yourself in a hard place?  For me, I used to shy away from conflict.  It has taken me several years to realize that this was me running from problems.  I didn't want to hurt any one's feelings and I didn't like when people hurt mine so I would just avoid the conflict.  In some ways, I reasoned that it was easier to just keep walking.  Now if someone calls you a name, that is the best thing to do.  If you don't like the way they treat you, then just keep walking.

But what if the person you don't like is your husband or wife?  Or what if that person is someone who works for you?  Maybe that person is your boss.  You can't just run away from everyone of those types of issues.  Just recently in my own life, I was faced with a situation where my wife did something that I didn't like.  The easiest thing for me to do would have been just let it go and say nothing.  Now we both do that for each other regularly and that's part of a healthy relationship.  But in this case, it was something that really bothered me.  I could sense myself getting mad at her and I noticed that because I hadn't talked with her about this one thing, almost any little thing she did would aggravate me much more than it should.  That's when it finally hit me that I was trying to run from a situation that I needed to address.  Now here's the amazing part of this story to me.  As soon as I recognized what was going on inside me, the little things that were trying to annoy me disappeared!  I was perfectly fine waiting to talk with her about it until we had time.  Here's another thing, as it turned out, it was just a misunderstanding between us.  This particular issue wasn't a big one at all but it did teach me that I need to identify places where I am trying to fly when there are times that I need to fight.

So that's another Opinion of the Minion

Monday, January 13, 2014

Take the Test

Hello Everyone,

Today I want to talk with you about test taking.  We all love to take tests right?  Well I normally don't.  They are a lot of work and what happens if we fail.  We can get a bad grade and if we fail too many times, we have to take the whole class over.

How many of you have a driver's license?  If you do, there is a very good possibility that you had to take a test before you were given one.  In Texas, I took Driver's Education class, I practiced and then I took the test with someone riding in the car with me.  I will never forget that day.  I believe it was my 16th birthday.  It was the very first day that I could take the test and I was sooo excited.  I couldn't wait to get my parents out of the car and hit the road on my own.  It was a day of great achievement.  I could finally drive my mom's 1975 Oldsmobile Omega by myself.  We called this car the splotch because it was many different shades of ugly green.

On that very memorable day, I pulled out of the parking lot with the Department of Public Safety officer in the passenger seat giving me directions.  I was a little nervous but that was OK.  One of the first things he asked me to do was parallel park and I did almost as badly as you can do and still not completely fail the test.  I hit the curb with the car sticking out into the street.  It was bad but not catastrophic yet.  We pulled away from there and drove across Jacksboro Highway into a nearby neighborhood and went through the rest of the test.  I got a couple of points taken off due to the way that I backed down the street and I ended up with a 77 on the test.  It wasn't pretty but it worked!  I had a driver's license.

But what would have happened if I failed the test?  Guess what, I would have taken it again at the next available time and continued over and over until I passed.  Here is something else, the State of Texas would let me take it over again.  So why am I telling you this today?

Well many times life is like that driving test.  There are things in this life that we want to do, have or be.  Maybe you want to be a better friend.  Maybe you want to be a better mom or have God do something wonderful in your life.  It could be that there is some bad habit that you just can't seem to shake.  In times like these, you may feel discouraged and feel like giving up.  You may even feel like God is mad at you.

There are also times when you don't want to do something hard.  Have you ever avoided a conflict because you don't like the uneasy feeling that comes from conflict?  Have you ever wanted God to promote you in some area of your life?

Well most of the time to accomplish any of these things, we have to take a test.  Many times God will test us before he gives us something to see if we are ready for it or not.  What happens if we fail one of those tests?  Sometimes the devil will tell you that it's over.  Whatever you are hoping would happen will not and you should just quit.

Let me tell you that God is a loving God.  He wants you to have many of the things you want and he will never stop giving you chances to take the test and pass!  So if you fell down and didn't achieve your goal, stand back up and dust yourself off.  Then get right back to studying for the test.  Then keep taking the test until you pass!  God will continue to let you take the test as many times as you need until you pass.  He's not mad at you if you fail.  The test isn't impossible to pass.  God can show you how.  Also remember this - He is pulling for you and so am I.

That's another Opinion of the Minion