The title goes here
I can’t recall the last time I went over a week without posting an entry. Sometimes it gets away from you. I guess I have a decent excuse this time, in that it was last Monday evening that I got the call that my last surviving grandparent had died. As a result, the clan was summoned for a long weekend of funeral related activities, that for the Territorial Nuclear Family meant a Thursday - Sunday road-trip to the ancestral homeland in Metro Detroit.
I’m not going to go into a long, drawn-out, blow-by-blow recap, if only because it’ll bore y’all (’cause other folks’ families are never quite as entertaining as you might thing, even when they are dysfunctional…) & annoy me (’cause it was bad enough that I had to live through parts of it once…). Suffice it to say that there were good parts (it’s always good to meet up with bigsis!), and bad parts (extended family members & social situations that were frankly uncomfortable, physical and mental/emotional malaise, and a funeral service/eulogy that was stunningly stereotypically lightweight in its lack of theology — with the two “hymns” having been In the Garden & The Old Rugged Cross — and thus not terribly comforting as a result…). Layer all that on to the fact that I just don’t like to travel all that much, and you can easily see that it wasn’t the greatest of times for me.
But, it had to be done, and I was more than happy to have been there for my beloved mother. While my grandmother was, to put it lightly, the most difficult of the four grands, it still didn’t make it any easier for my mom to deal with the inevitable endgame. Over the past 14 years my parents have had to bury all four of their parents, including three in the past five, IIRC. Fold into that all of the traveling that they’ve had to do for medical appointments, home care, emergency-room trips, nursing home transitions, nursing home visits, etc… — well, this past decade-and-a-half has aged my parents well beyond the mere passage of time. I pray that the Lord now blesses them with a rejuvenation & removal of stress, that they might enjoy life on their own terms, without demands placed on them by other folks, really for the first time in their 51 years of marriage.
Anyhoo, that was the past week for me. This week, it’s catching up at work & getting ready for another trip to MI this weekend, albeit a planned one for the little woman’s family reunion and for her 20th high school reunion (can’t say I understand why she wants to go, but she does & I’ll do whatever I can to support her — ’cause if she’s odd enough to love me, then she obviously needs all the support she can get! 
).
-ghp
Bigsis will be happy
Well, bigsis will be happy — it looks like none of her Starbucks will be among the 600+ that are getting hit by the “belt-tightening” that’s recently been announced by the Starbucks corporate mothership.
Also, neither of the two that have just opened up around here got hit, which is good, ’cause bigsis gets a bit cranky when she doesn’t get her Starbucks during her visits! (love ya sweetie!)
You can check out the full closure list here…
-ghp
Ambition and vocation
Something that I’ve been grappling with of late (for the last 9 months or so, actually) is the relationship between ambition and vocation, particularly as it relates to one’s individual career advancement and family obligations.
We are constantly bombarded with the idea & mantra that ambition is good, and that there really is no such thing as selfish, blind ambition (except, perhaps, in hindsight to ascribe blame/guilt). Job-hopping up the career ladder is no vice, even if it means uprooting home and hearth.
But does this conventional wisdom mesh with a Lutheran of the Doctrine of Vocation? I think not…
In my case, raw ambition would dictate a full-court press job search, so that I could show “proper progression” and get into a director-level job to have enough time to parlay that into a director-or-higher-level job somewhere bigger & better. And if I have to uproot the family, so be it.
Here’s the rub - to do that, I think I would have to seriously drop the ball on propery executing my vocations as father, husband, & head of household. My family likes where we are. The kids are getting old enough to have “roots”. And the only reason (at this moment) to think about leaving would be my ambition (vanity? selfishness?). And I just don’t think that it’s enough, at least not enough to warrant the type of full-bore search that I would’ve undertaken without a second thought even 5 years ago. It isn’t just about me anymore - not even to rationalize it such that “I need to be happy in order to make my family happy.” That’s true, but not necessarily in quite the way that raw, unfettered ambition would demand. Sobering thought.
So, what say you? I’d really like to hear your thoughts on the subject of ambition vs.vocation - help me out here with your collective wisdom!
-ghp
I lack discipline
I lack discipline.
It manifests in many ways, not the least of which is the recent paucity of postings. It’s also why I so look forward to time off from work, only to end up doing absolutely nothing of actual, you know, substance during that time. I’ll sleep. I’ll be horrifically slack. I’ll even be able to somewhat rationalize it in my mind while it’s going on, even as I know that I’m in the middle of an ultimately unjustifiable torpor.
I have books I want to read. Projects I want to complete, both on the computer and in “meatspace“. I have oodles of things that I want to write about. I have a course I’m teaching in the Fall that I need to prepare for (yeah, they’re letting me mold young minds…).
I don’t lack motivation. I know it all needs to get done. Well, I know what needs to get done, and I know what I want to get done, and I know the general timelines for both.
I just lack discipline.
More specifically, and importantly, I lack the discipline necessary to save myself the angst and last-minute stress that can be avoided by getting things done early (I never was the type to get projects & papers done weeks ahead of time and/or in little chunks of time & effort by starting them right when they were first assigned…). All too often I’ve done my some of my best work at the last minute/the night before — often enough to reinforce the bad habit, even though I intellectually know it’s not the best practice.
Heck, I don’t even have enough discipline to have good sleeping and eating habits. So I’m always tired & overweight.
Why unburden myself here? Eh, why not? If it’s a bad idea and/or the wrong thing, I can just blame it on the fact that I lack discipline…
-ghp
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