Comfort zone

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There Are No Ifs

September 12, 2010 | 3 comments

This summer, Squirts, DeDe and I had the opportunity to join our church junior high group at a swim night during their summer mission trip. We found ourselves at a small Southwest Texas community pool situated next to a mobile home park featuring a sign that read, “All trailer park children under 12 must be supervised.”

Needless to say, we wanted to fit in so we tried to keep all of our children supervised as well.

As we entered the pool area, Squirts eyes lit up at what must have been the tallest diving board he’d ever seen. I estimate the board to have been nine or ten feet high. If you ask Squirts, “It was 13 or 14 feet. All the way to the sky!”

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Daily Duties

August 15, 2010 | 10 comments

There are very few things about which I can say with absolute certainty, “This is what God intended when…” or “This is what God was thinking when…” In fact, a lot of what I write on SoulSquirts is an exploration of what I think or believe I know about God or we can learn about God through our daily lives—especially through my experience with a certain four year old.

But if there is one thing of which I have always been convinced, it is this: God intended for human beings to conduct certain parts of our daily routine—our daily duties, if you get my drift—in complete and total privacy.

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Swim Fear

January 17, 2010 | No comments

At the beginning of last summer, our son could not swim. It’s not that he wouldn’t get in the water or didn’t have a blind enthusiasm for getting wet. But if he wasn’t holding on to his mom or me, or us to him, he would drop to the bottom of the pool faster than a bowling ball coated in Crisco (That’s a theoretical observation. We never actually tested it with our son.)

As a kid (at least according to Mom History), I was a fish. I went straight from womb to swimming pool. My tan was so deep, it would be considered child abuse today (hey, it was the 70s).

The fact that Squirts (don’t worry, that’s not the name on his birth certificate) was three-and-a-half-years old, the end of summer was near and he still hadn’t learned to swim naturally made me feel like a neglectful father. It’s not his fault either. We’d barely given him the opportunity to try. We don’t have a swimming pool of our own, and our summer schedule hadn’t allowed us to visit our community pool even one time.
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Bear