one mo blog

As the world is mourning the loss of some big stars this past week, my wife and I are mourning a couple more personal losses:

This past year Jenny taught a pretty remarkable kid, Vincent. I only hear about the students that my wife really likes, and the ones she really has trouble with, and I heard about this kid, for good reasons, more than once. You can read the details of the car accident that caused his death, and some anecdotes about his life in this article on the sun, but to call him an inspiration may be too mild. The Mount View community is much better for having known him, and it will be a significant loss.

Then over the weekend one of my professors and her 7 year old daughter were also killed in a car accident. Their story is here in the sun. She was an extremely accomplished counselor and professor who leaves behind her husband and 5 other daughters. She was one of those professors that I looked up to both as a counselor and as a parent and hoped that I could one day be where she was.

Both of these deaths have rocked my faith. It’s hard to consider these three people and not think of all they had to look forward to. It’s hard to think about them without thinking of the terrible grief that their communities and more importantly their families are feeling right now. It’s hard as a parent to think that these families are where we want to be, people we look up to as families doing it “right”, and not be upset about some seemingly pointless tragedy tearing that apart. It’s hard to know why God would allow such pointless tragedy.

Right now I’m having a tough time considering how God could turn this mourning into dancing. Maybe one day we’ll look back on Vincent and Dr. Murray and think about how special they were to our communities, and how much they taught us and thank God for the chance to know them.

Right now there is only confusion and mourning.

Please pray for the Woodward family and the Murray family.

Faith, Life

An FYI and a question:

I’ve been hinting for some time that with my transition into professional counseling that this blog will be changing significantly as well. So I have a couple ideas of what is coming, but in short I feel a need to separate my more…professional posts from my personal ones. I have three ideas of how this might happen and I want your ideas:

1. Leave everything on one mo blog. Personal posts become password protected for friends and family, and all posts get sent to facebook for friends there to read.

2. Leave one mo blog for my professional posts, more personal stuff gets moved to facebook…that’s where I tend to be doing more of my social networking now anyway.

3. one mo blog stays a personal blog, and I begin blogging on matt-otto.com as a professional blog.

I do have a direction I’m leaning in for various reasons, but I’d like to hear ideas before deciding (including if any of you have ideas I haven’t thought of).

Thanks!

Random blog

I’m wrapping up my first week at the new job, and I love it.

I just had to share that, I want to be on to post more soon, but this is about all I can do right now.

I did also want to let you know that I’m looking out my office window at a lovely old Frederick neighborhood in the foreground.  I the bacground I’m watching the clouds from the current storm system blowing by and touching the tops of the Catoctin mountains as they go.

I am amazed at the beauty of God’s creation.

Did I mention I love my new job.

Random

On my long morning drive to work I’ve been using the time to catch up on Adam and Scott’s sermons from Metanoia. But alas, they only preach once a week, and I drive 5 days a week, so I’m looking for suggestions for other free sermons to download.

Any ideas?

Faith

Ok, so I stole the headline from the great Peter Schmuck, so sue me.

This past week has been probably the most fun week of watching Orioles baseball I’ve had since the 1997 season, and I spent most of that season working at a Boy Scout camp and checking the box scores in the paper whenever I could. We’ve seen two rookie pitchers win their debut games, and another rookie hit a walk off 3 run homer in the 11th to win a game. Plus, Jenny and I took all the kids to the game on Monday, our first time going to the yard as a whole family, yes even Emma and Mia were there…and the O’s won. Now, the week gets punctuated by Matt Wieters debut tonight. For those who don’t know Matt Wieters is the #1 prospect in all of baseball according to Baseball America, and is projected to be an allstar for many years to come. Don’t believe me, check out this website. My favorite fact: “Matt Wieters Is So Good That Jim Palmer Stopped Talking About Himself.” or maybe “Even Atheists Believe In Matt Wieters.”

Anyway, it’s an exciting day. The O’s are finally headed in the right direction after so many long years of losing. I’m considering going down to the yard for my 4th game already this season!

Now, what should I change the name of my fantasy baseball team, which up to this point has been called “Waiting for Wieters”.

Oh, one more thing: On Monday when we went to the game as I mentioned it was a dugout club game. It’s the first one we’ve gone to. We signed Zach and Cayla up for the club this year and we were not disappointed in our inaugural trip. The O’s really do those games up right with giveaways and games for the kids, cheap tickets for the adults, and a fun atmosphere with other families who love the O’s.

Random Sports

I start my new job next week.  It’s an exciting place to be.  This might be the last full-time job I ever hold.  I’m only 29, so I doubt it, but Jenny and I were talking the other day about how great it would be to find a home and settle down for the next 30~ish years.  We’ll see.

However, I’m also a bit bummed.  For the last 4 years I have had the privilege few other fathers get in today’s world:  I have had the chance to spend the majority of my time at home with my children, and it has been wonderful.  Just now, as I’m writing this my second daughter toddled up to me, gave me a big hug, and then went back to her play.  Sure, over most of these past 4 years I’ve worked as well, and have been a full time student.  However, I always considered my primary job to be taking care of the day-to-day duties of raising my children.  I guess you could call me a stay-at-home dad.

I’ve taken on this tag a bit reluctantly.  It comes with a lot of baggage and in some cases disdain in conservative christian circles.  Men who don’t work full-time to make sure their wife can stay at home with the kids are sometimes seen as lazy, or not performing their duties as a husband, father, man and christian.  What I’ve learned over the past four years is that sometimes “providing” for our families means doing what is best to take care of them, even if it means putting our own ego’s to the side.

You see, for us, Jenny staying home has always been the “preferred” way of living.  I think women are just built to take care of their kids.  Over the past four years this has been highlighted to me in a number of ways, but mostly by a general sense of restlessness I feel by being at home.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done a good job,  Jenny is just a more gifted homemaker than I am, and I think this is a natural thing.  Men, it seems are driven more to produce, to work, to provide, and not being able to do that was more than frustrating at times.  We even had a plan to make that happen.

When we moved back to Baltimore my plan was to work in a sales job that I hoped would provide enough money to take care of my family, and afford me the opportunity to also work part time at Metanoia.  About the time Cayla was born everything was looking good.  My sales numbers were going up, and for a couple months there I actually made more than my wife did as a teacher with a graduate degree.  We hoped that if things kept going well that Jenny would only have to work for one more year as a teacher after Cayla was born.  But then some new government regulations that favored big business in the industry I was working in came into effect and it quickly became apparent that I was not going to make enough money for our plan to work.  Unfortunately, with only a bachelors degree in U.S. History, and my only real full-time work experience in youth ministry it became clear by a quick once over of the classifieds that I wasn’t going to find a new job that would make enough for Jenny to stay home.

So, we created plan “B” and I started grad school.  It was something I had thought about doing for a while, and counseling was always something I was drawn to.  I had even started a grad program in Salisbury, but stopped after on semester for a variety of reasons.  Now the plan was for me to get through Graduate school and find a counseling job that would pay enough that Jenny could stop working.

Plan “B” has paid off, and despite the poor economy God has provided the job for me that we have been praying for over the past two and a half years.  However, life has thrown us a curve ball again, and we have added three kids to our household over that time, the oldest is my 10 year old stepson.  This is wonderful news, but brings with it a necessary move to a bigger home in a better school district.  As you might guess, this probably means Jenny won’t be able to stop working after all.  This just highlights the point I’m trying to make: Sometimes, “providing” for your family doesn’t mean living the ideal life of dad at work and mom at home with the kids.  Sometimes, “providing” means doing what you need to in order to take care of your family in the best way possible.  Just a thought that I think is even more pertinent as we continue in this time of economic uncertainty.

Life Children

She has served us well for the past 4+ years. Grinding and brewing our coffee on an almost daily basis. She has kept me sane through late nights up with babies and grad school papers. Sure, she was not without her faults, the grinder started to get stuck in the coffee maker, making in insanely difficult to clean. However it was ultimately a slow leak that became water pouring out the back of the machine every time we made a pot that was her demise. Still, she was a good soldier, she served us well for more than half of our married life, and she will be missed.

Random coffee, humor

I’ve had a lot to post the last few days, but I was also knocked on my butt by a really bad flu-like bug. I got it last Wednesday evening, and I’m just today starting to feel normal again. It was pretty bad. So anyway, a lot to get caught up on, but I’d be awful if I didn’t start by saying: I LOVE MY WIFE!!!

Jenny and I have been married for eight wonderful years today. I think we’ve crammed more into 8 years than most couples do into three or four. Two masters degrees, three children, three homes (soon to be four) seven jobs…I’m getting tired just thinking about it. But there is no one I would rather do life with.

As if to highlight to me just how wonderful my wife is:  Three of our former youth group students, all girls, are coming to babysit our kids so we can go out tonight. Two of them go to school in Baltimore, but they are all home on summer break right now.  They are making the trip just so they can say ‘hi’ to Jenny, and let us go on a date. I think the fact that they are so enthusiastic about doing this five years after our time with them in Salisbury ended speaks volumes about the strong, Godly relationship Jenny created with them, and how wonderful a woman she is.  I am truly blessed to be able to live with this woman every day.

Jenny, I love you!

Family

When I finished my undergraduate degree I swore I would never go back to school. The plan was to be a youth director for the rest of my life. I never really liked school, I didn’t feel like I was very good at it either. Of course it didn’t help that I really wanted to be a youth director so I put most of my time and energy into campus ministry instead of classes. So it came as quite a surprise to me that when I started my graduate program I really enjoyed it, and did fairly well too. At one point I even investigated transferring into the PhD program, but decided not to after looking at the $$$ to benefit analysis…especially considering we now have four kids at home (as opposed to the one we had when I started the program). Finishing the masters program and getting a job took priority.

All that to say, I’m going to miss school (I never thought I’d ever say that). I learned a lot from the classes, and even more from my classmates. It was a very interesting experience being in pastoral counseling classes with Jewish Rabbi’s, Buddhists, Catholics, Mainline Christian, Evangelical Christians…and a number of other faiths and denominations. I think my understanding of Christianity has especially grown and been challenged. I got to the chance to talk to a handful of Catholic priests from other areas of the world, and became pretty close with a couple of them. It was such a wonderful experience to hear how the spirit is moving in India, Nigeria and other countries.

I have to say though, I’m looking forward to being done.  I put so much energy into academics over the past couple years that I feel I need time to regroup.  I’ve learned so much about Psychology and Theology, but haven’t had the time or energy to figure out how what I have learned fits into my faith.  I realized this week as I was doing my quiet time that for the first time in a couple years I wasn’t looking at what I was reading intellectually (like I’ve been reading everything for the past two years) but was looking at how it applied to me, and how it affects my relationship with God.  I guess what I am saying is that being in the academic world has helped my intellectual knowledge of God grow, but not so much my intimate relationship with him.  I’m looking forward to spending some quality time with God over the next few weeks before I start working as a full time counselor, and attempt to rediscover my intimate relationship with Him, rather than my intellectual relationship with him.

As for academia: I have to take two more classes to get my state counseling liscense, so I’m not totally done with it.  After that who knows, I’m considering taking some online theology classes that might work toward an MDiv, or eventually going back to get the counseling PhD.  For now though, I’m going to enjoy my family, and my God.

Faith Grad School

I received a summons to serve on jury duty next month, about two weeks after I start the new job. I was able to change the date of my duty to be a week before I begin, so hopefully it won’t inconvenience me too much, but still, of all the times to get a summons it had to be now, in one of the busiest seasons of our lives.

Oh well, I feel pretty strong about fulfilling civic obligations.

Life