Entitlement focusses on what you lack or think ought to be yours and what is not happening for you. Gratitude highlights the people who enrich your life and the things that enrich your life and are yours even beyond your deserving.
Entitlement enlarges you (usually only in your own head) and who you think you think you are, and what you need and what you imagine or believe you deserve. Entitlement distorts. Gratitude helps you to see you are part of a whole (a family, a community) and allows the needs and conditions of others to enter your awareness and your experience. Gratitude modifies and delivers you to a beautiful size.
Entitlement may increase your self-importance in your own mind and in the way some people treat you (it can be very subtle) but it will also alienate you (it can also be very subtle) from those who want to know you and befriend you. Entitlement leads to being stand-offish. Gratitude will make you warmer, easier to approach and befriend.
Entitlement may, for a time, get you what you think you want. It may have others treat you in ways you think you deserve. Gratitude will transform you into who you are unaware you could be.
Given that you are “fearfully and wonderfully made” what’s NOT to love? You are a highly complex and powerful person, capable of so much.
Besides, rejecting yourself is draining, tiresome work, naturally flows into rejecting others.
Love all-round rejuvenates all-round.
Loving yourself gives others a fighting chance to love you. Someone has to lead the way. Besides, if you don’t love who you are, how can you possibly expect others to? Loving yourself makes you easier to be with, it’s more fun to be around a self-assured, self-aware person.
Loving yourself makes you safe. Self-loathing people are short fused, quickly triggered, lash-out kind of people.
One benefit of loving yourself is being able to see others more clearly, especially your immediate and extended family. Your family traits, urges, passions, will become clearer to you, easier to accept and embrace them, rather than resist. Self-love helps you to see how terrifically beautiful all other people really are.
Self-love transforms your every perception and how you treat everyone and everything.
Inner conditions are contagious.
Others reap the benefits or feel the sting of what’s going on inside you.
Loving yourself is a prerequisite for loving anyone and anything.
My siblings and I enjoyed each other and a local park….. just prior to my son’s wedding
Everyday, everytime, under all circumstances, no exceptions, you (and I) get to decide what you (and I) will bring to every, yes, every, interaction.
Yes, this one, right here, right now at Wimpy, the bank, with my sons, with your daughter, at this busy traffic intersection.
We have a question we are answering with our behavior 24/7/365: Will you (and I) be agents of love and forgiveness and long-suffering, or will you (and I) settle for the usual combative or irritable or unloving behaviors that seem to come so naturally and easily to so many?
In the heat of the moment – the bad traffic, the wait at the bank, the poor service in the restaurant when you are hungry, whatever – does not make you (or me) unloving or unkind, it reveals who we are.
Challenging circumstances expose, they do not cause.
They reveal.
Love and loving responses take planning, require decisions long before decisions have to be made or require or evoke a response.
Love and forgiveness can only come from you (and me) if love and forgiveness are living within you (and me) already.
What’s within you (and me), will come pouring out, no matter what the circumstances.
I’m always on the lookout for illustrations of how different families build different family cultures.
Your “normal” in your family was probably quite different from other families regarded as “normal.”
A young man raised his hand in a class I was teaching recently. He said he had an illustration of exactly what I was talking about. He told of being invited to spend the night with a new friend from school.
The two boys were playing video games in a room designed for that purpose and the plan was to be up late and sleep in the next morning.
“My new friend’s dad came into the games room very late and hugged my friend and kissed him on the forehead and told him he loved him and that he’d see him in the morning and to have a great night playing games. When his dad left, he also said goodnight to me, I thought someone in the family had died. I asked my new friend if everything was ok. He could not understand my question. I told him that if my dad came and hugged me and said goodnight and that he loved me I would think there was really something bad going on.”
“My dad does that every night,” my new friend said.
It is of this day, of this week, and of this month that you will say in years to come “those were the days” and look back with longing and nostalgia.
Open your eyes to the beauty around you. See that even in the problems, even in the hardships, even in the brokenness, there is an intricate beauty.
Possibilities abound.
Potential untapped surrounds you on every side.
Life itself waits for your involvement, and your involvement trips cogs into action, and action on your part brings forth insight, and the insight, when linked with courage and commitment, ushers in a deep appreciation making a future worth wanting.
Life’s beautiful for the person who can see his own beauty.
This is not some act of self-admiration but an acknowledgement that the miraculous lives within us all.
Want no trivial self-indulgence, for it leads only to a darker pit. Instead, lift you sights to the needs of others, to the joy of children in your life and to the beauty that hides within each and every one of life’s challenges.
This is the day, the week, the month, you will remember if it’s filled with appreciation, courage and adventure.
When parents (married or single) are fulfilled, pursuing careers and interests they love, and are offering meaningful service to their community, it makes a remarkable difference to their children. Under these (admittedly) ideal conditions, childhood can be fully childhood. It can be carefree, safe, and free of the anxieties that come rushing into a child (which sometimes never abate) when a parent refuses to meet the adult demands of his or her role.
It is an overburdened child who must do all he or she can to keep mom sober or keep dad at work — who must do all he or she can to make mom or dad into an adult. It is the anxious child who must take on parental responsibilities, who must function on a parent’s behalf when the parent abdicates the role.
Childhood is appropriately prolonged (as opposed to inappropriately truncated) when mother or father takes adulthood with the dedication adulthood deserves.
When parents take full responsibility for themselves, dedicating themselves to exercising their skills and callings within their greater community, and pursuing and enjoying mutual, respectful, and equal relationships with other adults, childhood, for the children of such adults, can run it full span, and the children can be appropriately oblivious to the pressures of life in the adult world.
My sons racing on the street outside our home —– beautiful times
You will know your young matriculating adult sons and daughters have transitioned into adulthood when:
Your efforts as parents are acknowledged, appreciated, articulated and somewhat or approximately understood. They are aware of the commitments you made to facilitate their arrival at this juncture in their lives.
Your shortcomings as parents are not denied but are not used or held against you as weapons or as excuses for thier own shortcomings. Your sons and daughters are living without blame.
“Thank you” and “please” comes easy and both are expressed near – to you, to family, to loved ones – and far – to strangers and servers and to those who can do nothing for your young adults in return.
You are able to recognize there’s an acceptance of “the way things are” and that within the way things are there exist multiple opportunities and challenges. Some challenges are to be addressed and solved, some will not. Your budding adult is identifying what it means to “go with the flow of life” and when flow ought to be resisted.
Your young adults respond to your calls and texts because they come from you. They may “ghost” others but choose to respond, when possible, to you. They recognize that as parents, you occupy a unique place in their lives, deserving of appropriate and efficient responses.
Amazon may deliver your make-up, your books, even your Thanksgiving turkey and everything else under the sun.
Kroger delivers groceries.
UberEats will deliver french fries to your door at midnight if you need them that badly.
But, and this is a big one.
Who delivered you?
Who delivered the people you love and who have loved you?
Who was the physician who brought you into the world, brought your parents and uncles and aunts into the world? Who facilitated your first cry, cleaned you up for the first time?
Chances are Dr. Phyllis Grant was right there to help you out.
If you came into this wonderful world in the mid-sixites and the momentous event of your birth occurred in Henry County you probably encountered Dr. Grant long before you knew it.
“I delivered approximately 2000 babies and only one pair of twins,” Phyllis texted me — yes, she texts, tell that to your grandmother – when I requested a few details.
Dr. Grant, one of Indiana University’s first female medical graduates, delivered babies here in New Castle for many years and maybe you’re one of them.
Phyllis will be 100 on October 31, 2025.
Let me spell that out: one-hundred-years-old.
A faithful and vibrant member of First Presbyterian Church for many many many years, First Pres New Castle will pull out all the stops in order to honor their sports fanatic doc.
The open house will be on Sunday, October 26, 2025 from 1 to 3 pm at the church building on the corner of 12th and Ray Pavy Street (opposite what is commonly referred to as the “old YMCA”).
Pastor Reverend Katherine Rieder, the Elders, the Deacons, the Trustees and every member of that faith vibrant community invites you to participate whether Dr. Grant delivered you or not.
You’re welcome even if it is to meet Dr. Grant and her remarkable church community.
You read right.
Phyllis is a sports fanatic.
At 99 Phyllis remains that and much more.
Phyllis goes monthly to the symphony concert in downtown Indianapolis.
Only the Lord knows how many Indy 500 races she has attended and only the Lord knows how many trips she’s made to Bloomington for IU Football and Basketball games.
If you are reading this the Open House for Phyllis held by First Presbyterian Church is open to you. You’re invited to drop in, greet Phyllis, indulge in refreshments and spend time with people who may or may not have seen for some time. Perhaps you live in her neighbourhood or have met her at symphony or the Indy 500.
Perhaps you’ll come because she was your grandmother’s good friend.
However your life has intersected with Dr. Grant (or not) the congregation First Presbyterian New Castle at the corner of 12th and Ray Pavy Street welcomes you to celebrate with this remarkable, generous, kind, woman.
But, may I warn you.
If you want to see Phyllis don’t get there after 3pm on Sunday, October 26, 2025.
Dr. Grant has already announced she’ll be out of there by 3pm to get home for the Colts game.
Seek someone who considers himself or herself to be a fellow learner and who is exploring his or her own life and family.
Seek someone who will challenge you to find your true Self which you may have lost in marriage, or parenting, or career. He or she will challenge you to be your appropriate size which you may have compromised to fit in or beloved and accepted. He or she may have to help you to trim down your size after you expanded into bullying behavior during periods of self-doubt.
Seek someone who knows therapy sessions are about process, about reactivity, rigidity, fusions, cut-offs, triangulations, over-functioning, under-functioning and not content.
Seek someone who helps you identify and clarify your helpful and unhelpful attitudes and behaviors so you may gain clarity and self-awareness, pathways to personal responsibility, blame avoidance, greater maturity.
Seek someone who is an expert in the Art of Listening, someone who is curious about you and your life but is not inquisitive about it. Someone who knows the difference between empathy & anxiety, love & worry, thinking & feeling, asking questions & being inquisitive and intrusive.
Seek someone who can engage you and be an advocate for your health and strength and who believes you know what is good and healthy for yourself. He or she will get out of your way, avoid trying to read your mind, and avoid offering you insights and interpretations that you are fully equipped to discover and uncover for yourself.
As a caucasian man traveling alone with my African American son (5) and African American infant I realized I was triggering intrigue in some parts of the world, well, most parts.
“Where did you get your boys?” a person may randomly ask.
Yes, I specifically recall it happening on a plane or two and in an airport bus. It even occurred once in the London underground, where in retrospect, the person must have really wanted to know given the “no talk” rule.
I recall being flippant or playful or casual in my reply and I learned quickly a few ways to express “it’s none of your business.”
But, I did not always respond this way.
Sometimes I detected a longing in the questioner, an ache, and, if there was time enough to really answer the question I did.
I found myself answering fully if children asked.
One morning during Nathanael’s kindergarten days one of his classmates approached me.
“Mr. Smith, where is Nathanael’s mommy?” and as gently as I knew how I told Andrew we did not know (which remain the truth) and that I was Nate’s only parent.
Tears steamed down Andrew’s face and he ran off.
All I could imagine was that the boy, in that brief encounter, had imagined his own life without his wonderful mother.
A fellow parent presented me with this painting of Nathanael and me during Nate’s kindergarten years. I did see her taking a photograph of us a few days before she presented me with this treasured gift.
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