The morning beckons with new light. Even in the darkest dawn. 2025 will go down as a year where the hits kept on coming. Nothing is going right. It started awful and is looking like it is going to end bad, but we have to keep our heads up.
I started this to focus on the positive and our lives have lots of positives. We have a good family, a few close friends, a business, and a good community. This past weekend was a reminder of all the good and bad that life can bring. It isn’t my place to mention the bad, but know it is there amidst all the good this weekend brought.
Everyday was filled with activity and community. It started with a meeting of our churches’ parents group at our pastors house. There we enjoyed food and fellowship with other parents that are trying to navigate the complexities of life. Mostly raising children in the world that was made for them.
These are complex times and it is difficult to raise children in them. All we can ever do is the best we can and hope it is enough. We work on teaching our children to be good people and hope that schools and the media they consume reinforces that, but often we find ourselves working against it or telling them they shouldn’t watch their new favorite show or not to torture their brother with the Huggy Wuggy song. Parenting is a bit like the tunnel in Willy Wonka and we only hope we do come out the other side.
The weekend continued with a pair of birthday parties. The first one was at Chuck E. Cheese which was fun and exciting and full of children being children and having all the fun they could handle. It took me awhile to realize that Chuck E. Cheese is a public place and if one child is invited to a party there it messes up nothing to bring the other kids and just have them run around and play separate from the party.
Next we went to my mother’s house to celebrate her 85th birthday. That was again one of food and fun, and when my niece was thirty minutes late, despite living almost directly behind my mother, me and two of my kids went to see how they got lost.
Sunday began good and then dove off a cliff. It remained a day of community with church service in the morning and then the church’s marriage series in the evening. The marriage series big highlight is date night and on that I was again reminded that combining two good things isn’t always good. Parmesan cheese on fried calamari was weird. I don’t know how to describe it other than it just didn’t mesh well.
That was a weekend that was filled with a lot of good. That is where the focus should be. Not that we ignore the bad things in life. We take them and deal with them without allowing ourselves to get lost in them.
David Huzzard Writes 