Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Favorite Things

My daughter Cameron wrote a poem for the Young Authors program in the Lee's Summit school district. She didn't win (boo), but advanced pretty far with her poem, and I figured that it deserved some broader attention. Watch your back, Maya Angelou.

Favorite Things
by Cameron Shandrow

Smoothies with juice
Soft fur on kittens
Beautiful seashells
New furry mittens
Sleeping on days off
With very good dreams
These are a few
Of my favorite things

My very nice teacher
Hannah Montana
Cuddling with dad
Eating a banana
The moon above
And the stars when they sing
These are a few
Of my favorite things

Thursday, February 4, 2010

How Super Mario Taught Me to Love Better

I was so excited to bring home the exciting new purchase I had made for the kids, Super Mario Brothers Wii. They loved the very physical games like Wii Sports and Wii fit, but I wanted to bring them into my video game world...and by "my video game world," I mean an old video game world. It's a world where you only go forward and backwards, a world of Pac Man and Frogger. There are only two flat dimensions, I need no third. It's a world of video games where you cannot get lost. If you keep on moving you will eventually reach the end.

I was really excited about the fact that four of us could play the game all at the same time. At least I was until we started playing. At first it was a lot of fun, knocking into each other while we figured out how to play the game together, but as we began to conquer levels I got more serious about beating the game.

I am an impossibly competitive person. When it all boils down, fun is fun and competition is competition. The idea of leading my family to an ultimate Super Mario victory felt so good, but the reality was that my kids kept killing me. Over and over again they would send me to my doom by pushing me over cliffs, knocking me into balls of fire or bouncing me into spiky shelled turtles. It was more manslaughter or negligent homicide than murder because it was all accidental, but the result was all the same: I started getting really frustrated.

Imagine being so frustrated at repeatedly losing that all you want to do is throw a brick through the tv screen and you will have a taste of how annoyed I was at constantly dying. My thumb started hurting as my grip on the controller tightened more and more. I started plotting how to send the kids to bed early so I could come down to the basement and beat this level by myself without having to work around them.

The next morning, still smarting from my losses, God showed me something in the Bible that all competitive Wii players should take to heart:

Be humble and gentle. Be patient with each other, making allowance for each others faults because of your love.
Ephesians 4:2

In this world we all deal with frustrating circumstances. We have to put up with people who do things that are annoying and irritating, things that make no sense to us. Terri and I have a saying - "People are crazy." Not just some people, ALL PEOPLE. If you are reading this, you have some crazy in you. We are all crazy in different ways, and some of us more so than others, but everyone has little things about them that bug someone else. Our responsibility in a world full of crazy people is to be patient with each other, remember that we are crazy too and to always extend grace to those who are grinding our gears.

Even if they keep bumping you into man eating plants that periodically come up out of plumbing pipes looking for something to eat.