I didn’t talk or write about those moments back then because they were very raw, very close and intimate. Writing about them at the time felt like betraying some kind of trust, soiling some kind of memory. But talking with my old friend reminded me that every day, people around me face that same kind of close and private pain. I hadn’t thought about my own experience as being helpful to anyone, but then I realized that one of the most difficult things about facing the death of a loved one is not really knowing what to expect of those moments just before death. So I’m sharing some of my personal observations with the hope that it can help ease some of the apprehension.

We knew for a month that Nancy didn’t have long; but the waiting was perhaps the most difficult part. The world doesn’t just stop revolving for that month. Bills need to be paid, the house needs to be cleaned and everyone else keeps up their breakneck pace while you sit and wait for the thing you don’t want to happen to happen.

Finding out a loved one has died unexpectedly is shocking and upsetting and often accompanied by a sense of regret: “I never had a chance to say goodbye.” However, knowing that someone is going to die weeks in advance is difficult in different ways, especially with an illness like cancer that slowly wrings the life out of someone until they’re just a shell of who they once were.

There were so many unknowns my wife and I wrestled with during that final month. How often should we visit? At what point do I take off work? How do we talk about death with her? How do we talk about death with her husband? Do we talk about it at all or do we just try to distract her from her pain with pleasant conversation? Is it selfish to leave her alone at night to get some much needed rest? Do we we treat her as if she’s dying or do we pretend she’s not in pain so she can finish her life with dignity?

I won’t pretend I had all the right answers. To be honest, the only answer I had for those difficult questions was love.

The day before Nancy died, I sat in her bedroom for several hours, playing guitar and singing to her. I’m not sure why, but I was a bit ashamed to do this in front of everyone. I visited her room when everyone was busy with other things, and I sang her songs about peace and about heaven. I held her hands a few times and prayed with her. She was unconscious most of the time, and her breathing was so labored that it brought tears to my eyes.

I don’t know if she heard me as I played, and sometimes I wondered if I was just playing for my own sake. But I figured that even if there were a chance she knew what was happening, it was a kind and decent thing to do, and something I would want in those final moments.

Nancy believed, as do I, that her last breath on earth would be her first breath in heaven. Her faith in Christ gave her great comfort in the weeks before her death and us great comfort in the years after. However, even if you think there’s nothing after this life, that heaven isn’t real and that there is no God, to comfort someone when they’re afraid and dying, to hold their hand as they take those last few steps through the valley of the shadow of death and to let them know that they are not alone—

That is love in its purest form.

Listen online:

In 1135, King Henry I of England died with no clear heir to the throne. His only legitimate son William had died 15 years earlier in a shipwreck. He did, however, have a daughter named Matilda and he desired for her to inherit the throne. However, a woman as heir was unusual in those days, and Henry’s nephew Stephen of Blois was a well-respected count with a large army and eye for the throne. Matilda was out of the country when her father died, so Stephen capitalized on her absence by quickly seizing power across England, shoring up church support and racing to London for a coronation at Westminster Abbey.

This began a brutal war for succession and plunged England into what is now referred to as The Anarchy, an 18-year civil war in which there was a total breakdown in law and order. In the absence of any real king, injustice and tyranny were rampant—so much so that an early historian called it “nineteen long winters in which Christ and his saints were asleep.” While the would-be-rulers were busy fighting for the throne, their subordinates subjected the people to horrific oppression.

Many wicked men gained powers of position by their connections, and they forced commoners to build castles for them, rewarding them with nothing but extortion. People were imprisoned and tortured for money—tortured in ways that would make your blood run cold to hear them. After going into gruesome detail about the tortures carried out on people, one of the old Anglo-Saxon annals concludes:

“I have neither the ability nor the power to tell all the horrors nor all the torments they inflicted upon wretched people in this country… There had never been till then greater misery in the country, nor had heathens ever done worse than they did.”

It was an awful, miserable time of tyranny and oppression; but I will borrow a quote from Spurgeon:

“Oh! my brethren, I speak in sober earnestness when I declare that all the sufferings that have ever been exercised upon man have never been equal to the tyranny which man has brought upon himself—the tyranny of sin… Sin is the world’s great Despot. It is the serpent in whose subtle folds earth’s inhabitants are crushed. It is such a tyranny that none but those whom God delivers have been able to escape from it.” —Sin Slain, Spurgeon

My childhood Christmases were filled with real trees: sticky sap, shedding needles and all. In rural upstate New York, though, we’d usually have to trek through sprawling, snow-filled pine tree farms to find the tree we wanted to bring home. After the decision was made, there was still the ordeal of chopping it down, hauling it a half-mile through the fields in sub-zero weather and scheming about the best way to attach it to the car.

Recreating this tradition again for the first time in a long time brought to mind a flood of memories and reminded me of my very first taste of entrepreneurship. Bill Blake, a man in our church had approached me with the idea—drive up into the Adirondacks with a truck, buy as many as we could fit in the truck at bulk pricing, haul them back down to civilization and sell them for a profit. I was 16 at the time, and the whole idea seemed impossibly large, especially since I had my hands full trying to beat Super Mario World. He provided the truck, the contact with the tree farm and the prodding. I had to do all the rest: pick out and pay for the trees, set them up at home and sell them throughout the holiday season.

I brought home nearly 40 trees in all: a mix of Scotch Pine and Blue Spruce. I can’t recall the exact prices, but think I charged $10 or $15 more for Blue Spruce because they had better “needle retention”. I built some tree supports, decorated them with Christmas lights, then set up the trees in our large front yard. Fortunately, we lived on Route 9 just north of Saratoga Springs, NY, so traffic was always heavy—a big asset when you’re selling Christmas trees on your front lawn. As they say in business: location, location, location.

Most of the experience is a blur in my mind; I can only recall bits and pieces. Keeping vigil at the front window, running outside when a car would pull up, making best the “I’m a young entrepreneur” sales pitch a young thespian could muster. I vaguely remember tiring of the responsibility at times (more often than not, I’m sure), and mom or dad dutifully bundling up to collect money for me. I remember wondering what to do with the extra trees that were left over. I don’t even think I made very much off the whole thing—maybe $100 or $200 for the season.

I learned a lot that Christmas season about taking risk, taking initiative, and working hard while others were playing. I learned about loving what you do. I learned about rejection and failure.

The most important lesson was not lost on me, though: one of the greatest gifts you can give or receive is a nudge toward the unfamiliar. I’m profoundly thankful for the people in my life who challenged me to grow. Most people see a Christmas tree and think about the presents under it; I see the tree and think about the year I was given the gift of courage.

1. Are you preaching the Word of God rightly?
2. Are you administering the ordinances (baptism and communion) rightly?
3. Are you exercising church discipline rightly?

These were (and are) foundational questions for evaluating the health of a church.

But how does a church become unhealthy? How does liberalism creep into the church? It almost always comes through people concerned with evangelism.

Consider three influential church leaders: Friedrich Schleiermacher, Rick Warren and Billy Graham. Schleiermacher earned the title “Father of Modern Liberal Theology” for his attempt to reconcile Enlightenment thinking with orthodox Christianity. Rick Warren is famous for his book The Purpose Driven Life and for advocating a seeker-sensitive approach to church. Billy Graham is widely known for his massive evangelistic crusades. All three have strayed some in their doctrine (some more than others), but their general reasoning for doing so has been to make it easier (in their mind) for people to come to Christ. The warning here is that sickness often enters a church by attaching itself to genuine concern.

On my way home, a small pathway that created a tunnel through the trees caught my eye, so I knelt down and snapped a shot. After looking down at my camera for a moment, I glanced up and saw a small fawn walk across the far end of the trail. I tried to take a picture, but the fawn had already walked out of the frame.

I nearly kicked myself for missing the shot; but as I knelt there, the foal walked back into view. I decided to stay put and see if he would walk back into the frame. To my delight, he just walked closer and closer, until he stood about twenty feet from me.

He sniffed wildly, trying to figure me out while I knelt there motionless. Finally, his better judgement overcame his curiosity and he bolted back down the pathway and off into the woods.

As a parent, I want to pause, savor every age and every moment; but as my son reminded me last night when I told him to stop growing so fast: “Dad, that’s the way God made me—to get bigger.” He’s right. That’s the course of things: “Nativity, once in the main of light, crawls to maturity.”

While I cannot (nor would I) stop his crawl to maturity, a friend of mine suggested something to me the other day that can help mark the passage of time in a meaningful way:

Email your children.

Set up an email account for your kids and email them every day. Tell them about what they’re like. Tell them about funny things they’ve said or what they want to be when they grow up. Tell them what you think they’ll be like or what they’ll do when they grow up. Tell them about things you’re going through that they may not understand right now. Talk about the future and the past and everything you’ll probably forget when they’re older.

Then, when they’re old enough, give them the password and let them read the letters you’ve been writing them through the years.

I can’t think of a better gift for my kids than a chronicle of my love for them. (Not to mention a biography of their childhood!)

Another goal of this time away is a rekindled focus on my family.  I’ve seen many pastors who have lost their family in the name of ministry.  This is especially sad considering a godly family is one of the qualifications for being a pastor.  If you’re friends with me on Facebook, you know that I love my wife and kids; I can’t stop talking about them. But I’ve been sinfully neglecting some of my responsibilities to love and to serve at home while I’ve been busy loving and serving at church.  These stress fractures are small and probably invisible to anyone outside my family, but I believe in being deliberate and proactive. I don’t want to just wait until things are falling apart before taking action to correct them.

We have a lot of things planned. I’m still working every day for Simply Recipes; but we’ve been spending some time with family, visiting some friends and the last two weeks of our sabbatical we will be in Ocean City, NJ for a proper family vacation.

I’m looking forward to this time away quite a lot—even the few days I’ve been gone so far have been restorative. I love my church family, but we all need to steal away to the desert place sometimes for a respite. Even Jesus escaped the crowds of people—many of whom were in desperate, genuine need—for a time of quietness and prayer.

Overall, it was a highly successful experiment. I can’t say enough good about this approach. I’ve seen substantial change in my life, and not just for the first few weeks of January as with many years past.

One of the things I noticed was that I was far more successful at the challenges which required giving up something than I was the challenges which required adding something. For instance, giving up television was relatively easy, but trying do something new each month was surprisingly difficult. It really is the difference between catching myself about to do something I’m supposed to be giving up (and stopping) and remembering at the end of a day that I’ve forgotten to do something (and … ?).

With this in mind, I’m going to modify my challenges slightly this year. Instead of a single challenge each month, I’m going to attempt a binary challenge—giving up a habit or behavior I consider harmful in excess and replacing it with a relevant behavior that I consider beneficial. For example, this January I’m giving up Facebook and Twitter like I did last year; but I’m also going to send one handwritten note to someone I care about every day this month. Put off, put on. Sounds familiar…

Interestingly enough, my wife asked to join me in the challenges this year. I think that’s a testament to both the effectiveness of this approach as well as their overall impact on my family. Many of the challenges (like giving up television) involved my family whether or not they were willing, so my wife and I decided to share many of the same challenges and to set some that relate to our children.

A brief overview of 2011:

January: 30 days with no Twitter or Facebook — An excellent challenge, one that I’m repeating again this year. Instead of posting stream-of-consciousness style to social networks, I abstained and instead kept a running list of what I wanted to post throughout the month. At the end of the month, I vetted the potential data and posted a much more substantial (and I’d even argue much more meaningful) digest of information.

February: Take one picture a day for 30 days — The easiest of the challenges, especially since my daughter was born in February. I’m probably not going to repeat this one as a challenge because a photo a day is practically a habit of mine now anyway.

March: 30 days with no computer after 9 p.m. — Surprisingly difficult and fraught with complexities, especially since the term computer has gotten so blurry. What about my iPhone or my iPad? Which tasks were okay? Answer the phone, but don’t check email? Watch a movie, but don’t check Facebook? I’ll need better definition if I’m going to attempt this again.

April: Try one new thing a day for 30 days — More difficult than you might think, but also incredibly rewarding. Will definitely be repeating this one.

May: 30 days to get my finances in order — Dismal failure. I chalk this up to not having a specific goal in mind. Look for this one again in 2012, with a much more specific task.

June: 30 days with no caffeine — Another really great challenge. This one inspired me to make more of my 2012 challenges about my body and my health.

July: Draw something everyday for 30 days — Surprisingly, I failed this one miserably. There are several reasons I failed this challenge, but ultimately I didn’t really care about drawing as much as I thought I would at the beginning of the year. I may revisit this one some month…

August: 30 days with no TV — I thought it would be one of the most difficult, but it was surprisingly easy. I also found myself accomplish so much more with all of the extra time I had. I also discovered that this one had a profound impact on my family, both in the shared challenge it was to give up television as well as the increased interaction we had as a family. Will definitely be repeating this one.

September: Write down one thing I’m thankful for each day for 30 days — This is where I began to drop off. Things started to get extremely busy at work and church and my challenges began to suffer because of that.

October: Read the New Testament in 30 days — Another victim of neglect, I only made it through the gospels.

November: Write a novel/book in 30 days — My wife will probably post “I told you so” in the comments, but I never wrote a single word. Good intentions and all…

December: Learn one new word a day for 30 days — This was one of the challenges I was most looking forward to, but it too withered in the end-of-the year neglect. I’d really like to include this in 2012 as one of the put-on parts of my binary challenges.

I’m still working on the list of new challenges for 2012, but I’ll be sure to post it to my journal when it’s complete.

Have you set any 30 day challenges for 2012? I’d love to hear about them, if only to get some good ideas for my own life.

My wife and I began our life together without television. After her long days of class, we loved to relax, talk, play cards. Yet somewhere along the line, we got a television, subscribed to cable and got into the habit of eating dinner in front of the television. Looking back on it now, it was like worshipping at some kind of altar: this do in remembrance of me.

Like any engrained habit, it was difficult to give up at first. Not only did we have “our shows”, but we had our rituals (none worth recounting).

Two things, though, frightened me most of all about my television consumption habits. First, I found my son forming the same kind of rituals. He’d wake up in the morning and immediately ask to watch a movie. Any time he was feeling upset, he’d ask for a movie. Worse yet, I found myself getting angry when my own viewing was interrupted. I’d fly off the handle at my wife or snap at my son if they dared intrude on my alone time with an engrossing show.

I am embarrassed to admit that kind of a reaction, given its relative insignificance; but it became the impetus for me to cut the cord and focus on the more important things in life. Our family has gone back to having dinner around the table, talking over our day and just generally sharing focused time together. Evenings are spent interacting, giving and taking, moving around together, being productive together, doing something together beside mindless consumption.

In fact, I found the whole exercise so fruitful that we decided to drop our cable altogether—saving about $70 monthly. That’s enough per year to pay for a weeklong camping trip.

Why not try it yourself?

Note: I realize this summary is coming a month after it’s respective August challenge. I have no defense for failing the September challenge, except to say that every night I prayed with my son we talked at length about the things we are thankful for. However, I felt the lesson I learned with my television fast was important enough to share, even a month after the fact.

Ah, technology.

See, I met Tim a few years back now online. Nearly all of our communication has been through email or IM. I scoured the annals of my inbox and discovered that one of the first conversations we had was about technology: website and logo design. We were both working to master this blogging platform called Movable Type and needed all the help we could get. So it’s rather fitting that my conversation with Tim today would focus on two of our shared interests: technology and faith.

It’s been five years since that first email thread and Tim has been working hard. Though he’s stepped back a bit from web design, he is now ministering as an ordained pastor at Grace Fellowship in Toronto. He is the author of several books. And that wasn’t enough to keep him busy, he continues his impressive habit of writing something daily at Challies.com. (He’s written every day since October 31, 2003!) His consistency and his voice have inspired and encouraged many, many people.

This is a bit of his story:

Rogie is the sole proprietor of Komodo Media in Helena, Montana where he designs and develops beautiful web interfaces. He’s also recently been dabbling in illustration work, to much success, and working hard to open Fine Goods Market, a “hypertext boutique featuring fine goods” crafted by the man himself.

This is a bit of his story:

I’ve been working on some interviews that I’ll be sharing over the next few weeks, perhaps months.

When I first thought of doing these interviews, I really just had a single goal in mind: praising the worth of people I admire. I’ve met many talented people and every one is a storehouse of knowledge, experience and history. I felt far more compelled to write about their adventures and advances than the rather pretentious work of chronicling my own.

However, I realized very quickly—even while preparing questions for my first interview—that I needed some kind of point of view. I was interviewing myself, asking the most important question: “Why do you want to interview these folks?”

The answer is plain, but it says a lot about how I view life. I’m interviewing these folks because I want to hear their stories. I believe the story of what brought you to your successes are an integral part of those successes. Of course I want to know about what you accomplished and how often you had to practice and all the technical ins and outs of your craft. But I also want to find out about the detours and potholes and the other incidentals that are usually not-so-incidental. See, I believe in a holistic life. I find that the decisions and choices people make in one part of their life impacts all the rest of it.

So these interviews will be me, talking with people I admire who have done well, giving them the attention they deserve, learning about their craft and ultimately casting a light on the path that brought them to where they are today.

I hope you find their crafts and stories as compelling as I have.

I need to remember these moments.

Admittedly, a part of me wants to chronicle my own personal parental journey for the sake of grabbing hold to something that slips every man’s grasp: that elusive moment in time when we stop for a moment, lift our heads and declare the beauty before us to be good. The river of time pulls us so quickly away from those moments, though, try as we might to pause longer and savor them; and we’re swept onwards with a handful of earth that seems to dissolve away all too quickly in its flow.

Still, I cannot help but rage against the dying of the light. Savoring these moments—celebrating their arrival and departure—helps carry us through moments of darkness and difficulty yet to come and, perhaps more importantly, helps us articulate what matters most of all as we navigate the river ahead.

I love to pause with my son. When we’re lying outside in the grass and he wants to get up for the thousandth time and run in circles, I ask him to stop for a moment and listen. “Tell me what you hear.” The sound of the neighbor’s mower isn’t important, but the moment of remembrance we just created is. In that fleeting moment, he learned the importance of paying attention to the things that are easy to forget.

So this recollection is my effort to recline in the grass, close my eyes and tell you what I hear.

I’ve noticed that as he develops, Ethan has picked up certain conversational patterns.

When he hears something he’s never heard before, he’ll ask “Daddy, what is that…” and attempt to recreate the sound. When I was putting him to bed the other day, my phone signal created a bit interference on his noise generator. He sat up straightaway and blurted out, “Daddy, what is that…” buzz, buzz, click. When we were praying before bed last night, his stomach gurgled, prompting a “Daddy, what is that…” gurgle, gurgle. The printed word doesn’t do his impressions justice.

I’ve also been amazed (and frightened) at how much he hears and processes from other conversations that get worked into his own. The other day, he came into the living room where I was working on my computer and started out with, “Daddy, look at me.” When I looked up from the screen and he knew he had my full attention, he said very matter-of-factly, “Daddy, you have to come outside and push me on the swing. It’s your job.” Jessica told me later that she told him outside that she was too short to get him in the children’s swing and that it was a “daddy job”.

Prayer time with him has always been precious, but now that he’s older, it’s become a much sweeter time of participation. I usually begin and thank God for our family, and he usually starts right in with a list of things he’s thankful for: his family, his friends, the places we went or the memorable moments of the day. What’s especially interesting is to hear the things that make the biggest impact on him, especially things he brings up long after they’ve passed. A few months back, my sister’s 2-year-old daughter fell down the basement stairs at my parent’s house while we were visiting. Thankfully, she was alright, but those frantic moments must have had an impact on Ethan, because even now he’ll pray for “Harmony who fell down the stairs.”

One of the meaningful moments so far, though, was when he and I were working in the crawlspace beneath our house. It’s smelly, dark and cramped with only about 3 feet of headroom. You would have thought I’d taken him to the zoo. “Ooooh, what is that?” he’d ask about everything down there. He was fascinated with all the water pipes. “Red means hot and blue means cold,” he would remind me (and continued to remind me for months). But my heart was touched when said plainly, “I’m glad to be down here with daddy.”

There are countless funny quirks, mysteries of his amazing little brain that I can’t quite understand but delight in nonetheless. According to him, everything tastes like applesauce. He visits an imaginary land behind the couch called “Munch-a-munch”. If you ask him any morning what he dreamed about, he’ll tell you, “starfish”.

I could go on and on, but time is like inflation—it always seems to move faster than I can. We just passed another Father’s Day, and do you know what my children gave me? Another day full of beautiful memories.