Dear Lord; Good afternoon Father.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve decided that 11 is a complicated age Lord\u2026\u00a0 Let me tell You a little about my morning.<\/p>\n
Today started out like most weekday mornings do; with everyone scrambling to compose themselves and prepare for the work and school day ahead.\u00a0 Still shaking off the effects of a restless night, I stepped out of the shower and immediately picked up on yelling coming from the opposite side of the house.\u00a0 Quickly wrapping a towel around myself I headed for the source of the turmoil.<\/p>\n
Jonathan and Aidan were firmly entrenched in a verbal battle with each other.\u00a0 Apparently, Aidan had taken a seat at the table that Jonathan had set up for himself, pushing his things aside in the process.\u00a0 This in turn lit Jonathan\u2019s fuse, and the battle royale had begun.<\/p>\n
Both were intractable, and it had progressed from a basic disagreement to an angered exchange complete with name calling (luckily, nothing too terrible) and yelling.\u00a0 (Looking back to it now, Dr. Seuss\u2019 story \u201cThe Zax\u201d<\/em> comes to mind.)<\/p>\n Still sporting my towel, I quickly intervened on the situation trying to get a handle on who did what and to calm things down.\u00a0 Unfortunately, Jonathan was riled up way past the point of reason and redirected his attitude towards my authority.\u00a0 Needless to say, it went downhill from there.\u00a0 Shannon and I take disrespect very seriously, and Jonathan had gone WAY<\/span> too far to allow it to go unchecked.<\/p>\n \u201cHonor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.\u201d \u2013 Exodus 20:12<\/strong><\/p>\n We then entered the correction phase of the conversation; No computer games for the next couple of days\u2026 At which time, Jonathan went off the deep end.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve never seen anger like this from him Father, and it really caught Shannon and I off guard.\u00a0 He threw what can only be described as a massive \u201chissy fit\u201d<\/em>, told us he was leaving home forever, and without a coat, hat or gloves stormed out the front door onto the snow covered lawn.<\/p>\n I watched quietly out the window for a couple minutes, then went outside and got in the truck to go fetch him.\u00a0 He\u2019d made it down to the end of the street, and when I pulled up on him he stood shivering in the snow and firmly refused to get in the car.\u00a0 More concerned for his health than the attitude at this point, I promptly picked him up, put him in the truck and closed the door.\u00a0 Unfortunately, that still wasn\u2019t the end of it and the ride to school was filled with further venomous outbursts and disrespect.\u00a0 As it hadn\u2019t completely abated when we turned into the school parking lot, I decided to err on the side of caution and keep him with me for the day.<\/p>\n As we pulled out of the school after dropping Aidan off, I quietly focused on Your Guidance Father.\u00a0 I was at a loss\u2026 He\u2019d never shown me this kind of behavior before.<\/p>\n \u201cHold him close to you.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> I heard drift through my head.<\/p>\n With that directive in my heart and an image of You holding him in Your Arms in my mind, I spent the rest of the trip to my office working to release some of the tension that the morning had brought.\u00a0 We arrived at my workplace, where I set him down on the couch in my office to contemplate the events of the morning.<\/p>\n \u201cJonathan\u201d<\/em> I said, \u201cYou tell me you talk to God quite a bit\u2026 Now would be a good time to listen to Him.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n He gave me a half-quizzical look, but sat quietly on the couch for quite a long time all the same.\u00a0 When he finally turned and spoke to me, his voice was much softer and more reserved.\u00a0 We discussed what had happened, and he remorsefully explained how he\u2019d allowed his anger to run away with him and about the difficulty he\u2019d had \u201cgetting the genie back in the bottle\u201d <\/em>once he\u2019d lost control.\u00a0 There are days Father, that I think he\u2019s far too deep for a child of 11\u2026 Today was one of those days.<\/p>\n When I spoke with him later on, I asked him if he\u2019d heard from You while he laid on my couch.<\/p>\n \u201cYes\u2026 And he didn\u2019t sound happy.\u201d<\/em> Jonathan replied.\u00a0 \u201cWe talked about how I was going to make it better, and not let it happen again.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Thank You for the assist with him Father, and for focusing me as well.\u00a0 Sometimes we all need some parenting help from the \u201cHead of the Household\u201d<\/em>.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Amen.<\/p>\n ~Phather Phil<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dear Lord; Good afternoon Father. I\u2019ve decided that 11 is a complicated age Lord\u2026\u00a0 Let me tell You a little about my morning. Today started out like most weekday mornings do; with everyone scrambling to compose themselves and prepare for the work and school day ahead.\u00a0 Still shaking off the effects of a restless night, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[505,181,762,326,289,359,451,286,369,425,450,581,556,899,915,546,747,752,624,173,42,769,966,21,444,731,89,140,159,251,520,557,116,901,904,682,307,389,133,141,506,230,84,670,753,492,648,748,69,263,727,594,174,547,227,732,482,117,817,653,114,106,71,481,138],"class_list":["post-623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-emails-to-god","tag-afternoon","tag-aidan","tag-anger","tag-attitude","tag-behavior","tag-bible","tag-calm","tag-child","tag-complicated","tag-concern","tag-contemplate","tag-control","tag-conversation","tag-correct","tag-dear-lord","tag-difficult","tag-disagreement","tag-exchange","tag-exodus","tag-father","tag-focus","tag-giving","tag-god","tag-guidance","tag-happy","tag-head","tag-health","tag-heart","tag-home","tag-honor","tag-household","tag-intervened","tag-jonathan","tag-law","tag-lie","tag-listen","tag-loss","tag-lost","tag-love","tag-mind","tag-morning","tag-mother","tag-name","tag-night","tag-nothing","tag-off-guard","tag-office","tag-quickly","tag-quiet","tag-release","tag-rest","tag-ride","tag-school","tag-serious","tag-shannon","tag-situation","tag-snow","tag-son","tag-start","tag-terrible","tag-thank-you","tag-turmoil","tag-voice","tag-week","tag-work"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p18mMc-a3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=623"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":626,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions\/626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.phatherphil.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}