How to Avoid Accumulated Fatigue
Written for pastors but applicable to all men. Does this sound familiar?
Accumulated fatigue signals the gradual build-up of circumstantial stresses, mental challenges, and relational sorrows. It doesn’t ride right up to you and bandit you. It embezzles you instead. Like a slow-leaking tire, you don’t notice the gradual siphoning of air, the subtle lean of the car from its depleted strength.
It’s as if you’ve been doing life and ministry on emergency generators. The electricity went out long ago but the lights still worked, so you paid it no mind. But now, all the lights have burned out. To your surprise, so have you.
Zack Eswine’s solution is strategic pause:
Strategic pause stops us for a while to keep us going. It collects the morning dew of sabbath and trickles its drops into each stressful hour, day, week, and month of our lives. Jesus says, “Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while” (Mark 6:31). Why then, do so many of us somehow believe that rest is foolish, and unrest is wise?
5 Dangers of Being Deprived of an Involved Father
The research, as Eric says, is overwhelming and devastating.
Fathers, father your sons and daughters. Dads—for the sake of your child’s physical, mental, social, emotional, and spiritual development, be an involved father.
For those without a father and those who have suffered through “dad deprivation, the Lord sees you and He cares infinitely more for you than you could possibly imagine. In His holy dwelling, He does not ignore you. “In His holy dwelling, He is a father of fatherless and a champion of widows” (Psalm 68:5). He will not deprive you of His love and grace.
Getting Married? Some Resources and Humor to Get You Started Right
ON a lighter note, here’s something to give you a chuckle and then some resources to follow up on.
Man up!
This is to the point. Not every man needs to hear this, but some do.
Honestly, men, it’s time to step up and stop blaming everyone else for your problems. Stop blaming others for your sexual exploits, drinking, bursts of anger, laziness, gluttony, loose spending, etc. Stop blaming mommy and daddy, wife and kids, bosses and co-workers, or anyone else. Everyone is broken in their own way. Everyone has been abused in their own way. Your past does not define who you are and your wounds do not excuse you. Sinful or shameful behavior is just that and is inexcusable.
How Today’s Kids Have Been Shaped by Technology
If you want to understand your kids and their culture, you really need to read Jean Twenge’s iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood–and What That Means for the Rest of Us. That subtitle is almost Puritan in length.