family

The Day After I Turned 40

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I never know 100% what to write here. I go back and forth between writing about video games/board games and then about personal stuff. How many readers who read my stuff about video games want to know about our adoption journey? How many readers want to read about my thoughts on worship music?

Yesterday, I turned 40. I spent my day working. Came home after, ate dinner, went out for ice cream, and then I was on the phone for an hour and forty-five minutes with a family member. By the time I was done, I put Wyatt to bed (we went over his devotional, prayed, and he read for an hour) and soon went to bed myself.

Television makes a pretty big deal about your birthday. I mean, not your individual birthday but birthdays as a whole.

“Your birthday should be all about you.”

“Your birthday is your day, relax.”

I mean just the other night my wife and I were watching Season 3 of Virgin River. The first episode is all about main character Melinda “Mel” Monroe’s birthday. Through out the episode, her boyfriend, Jack Sheridan, is unsure what to do. So he schedules her a message, flies lunch (sushi) in via bush pilot, etc. Towards the end of the episode, Jack surprises Mel with tickets for a dinner cruise. She doesn’t want to go. What she has told Jack all along is that all she wants is a cupcake and a bath. So what does Jack give her? A cupcake, a bath, and Jack’s house catching fire? One could say that Mel got what she wanted and some smoke inhalation as a bonus. How sweet.

I am learning that being an adult, a now 40 year old adult, is about unexpected things that come up in life. Be it a phone call or your boyfriends house catching fire (and burning to the ground). Happy Birthday to me.

From Across the Net – “What’s The Point Of Family Devotions?”

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“So what’s the point of family devotions? I wonder if it would be helpful to first consider the purpose it hasn’t served in my family. Family devotions has not been a means through which we have obeyed a specific law or fulfilled an explicit command. There is no commandment in either the Old Testament or the New that tells Christian families they must spend time reading and praying together each day. So we haven’t prioritized it for that reason.”

You can read more here

A Walk, A Birthday, And A Few Board Games

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Woke up this morning and went for a walk with Tabitha. My Apple Watch didn’t record any of our walk as exercise. So if an Apple made watch doesn’t record something… did it ever happen? From the picture below, yes, yes it did.

East Texas in July

I turned 39 this week. Spent my birthday working in the office with frequent breaks to text/talk with family and friends. I loved catching up with those who reached out.

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) dominated many of the conversations I had on my birthday. I’m not complaining. But I can tell that the pandemic and the information roller coaster we’ve all boarded because of it, is weighing heavily on us all.

For my birthday, I received a few new board games. My parents bought me Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective – The Thames Murders & Other Cases; Tab and Wyatt bought me Disney Villainous. I’m looking forward to playing and writing on both of these games.

Disney Villainous

As an observation, I was telling Tabitha this morning that I do not play video games like I used to–like, this surprises me–. Board games have become the thing I ask for and play more frequently. There is something about having screens off and being able to gather around the table with family and friends that is special and builds memories.

As a further thought, I am thinking about starting to write board game reviews. Trying to think of an angle that would best serve the JBG Community. All one of us. 🙂

Hope you all are doing well.

From Across the Net – “When Parents Feel Like We Are Mostly Failing Most of the Time”

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Appreciated this piece from Tim Challies. Especially liked his list of principles, he has been pondering, towards the end of the article.

As parents in this digital world, it’s like we have planted ourselves and our families on a beach. Though the water is rising, we have convinced ourselves that we can somehow hold back the tide. But inevitably it just keeps creeping higher and higher up the beach until our best plans, like feeble little sandcastles, are swept away. There seems to be a kind of inevitability about it, that before long we’ll all always be staring at our devices. In fact, it seems like our devices have wills of their own, and this is exactly what they want. They want to dominate our lives. They want to be our main thing.

You can read more here

Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash