Tag: Seth

The Great Thing About Brittany

On By Peter WatkinsIn 2007Leave a comment

Dear Will:

I have a niece who is stunningly beautiful—double-take gorgeous—the sort of blond-haired, blue-eyed twenty-something girl who gets noticed by simply entering a room. I’ve known her all her life, and even so, when I see her at family gatherings I can’t help remarking on it. I’ll say to her mom (my sister-in-law Kelly): “Brittany is so pretty!”

Invariably, Kelly responds with something like this: “The great thing about Brittany is that she has such a good heart.”

And it’s true. Throughout her teens, Brittany was active in her youth group at church, always striving to do the right thing. She has always been a dedicated Christian and has even expressed some interest in working in a youth ministry for a career. She is consistently kind and thoughtful, quick with a smile and unwaveringly tolerant of her boorish relatives. In short, she has turned out to be the kind of person any parent would wish for at the time of a child’s birth.

What Kelly is trying to teach me, without being even somewhat heavy-handed about it, is that Brittany’s true beauty lies within. What makes her special is not the blue eyes, but rather the kind heart. I was reminded of that principle earlier this week by, of all people, a talk-radio host. He said that in our frenzy to add to our children’s academic credentials and to feed their extracurricular interests, we should also devote a concerted effort to teaching them integrity, honesty, virtue, and kindness. His point was a good one: In the end, it will matter much more to me what kind of people my children become than what their professional credentials or social status might be.

Do you remember the Old Testament story of the anointing of David? It taught the same principle. The Lord sent the prophet Samuel to visit Jesse, with the specific purpose of anointing a new king in Israel. The plan was for Samuel to offer a burnt offering with Jesse and his sons, with the promise being that the new king would be revealed to Samuel while he was there.

When Samuel met the first of Jesse’s sons, however, the Lord gave the prophet this counsel: “Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; . . . for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

Heeding this admonition, Samuel discerned that none of Jesse’s seven oldest sons had been chosen by the Lord. “And Samuel said unto Jesse, Are here all thy children?  And he said, There remaineth yet the youngest, and, behold, he keepeth the sheep.  And Samuel said unto Jesse, Send and fetch him: for we will not sit down till he come hither” (1 Samuel 16:11). Immediately David was summoned, and when he arrived the Lord told the prophet: “Arise, anoint him: for this is he.”

What makes this story all the more relevant to me this afternoon is that my youngest son, Seth, turns eight tomorrow. In a week he will be baptized, and because of that event many friends and family members will gather in support. If I were to follow my usual tendencies, of course, I would spend a good portion of that time telling everyone about Seth’s extraordinary performance in school and on the athletic field. On retrospect, however, it seems that it would be a better idea for me to tell them instead of Seth’s tender heart.

He really is a great kid. I wish you could meet him. You would like him a lot.

PW

Who’s the Moron?

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20073 Comments

Dear Will:

From where I sit in my upstairs office, I look out of a large window onto our backyard. I get a fairly clear view of the overgrown trees and the patch of now-bare turf Seth uses for home plate when he plays his imaginary baseball games. And on a day such as this one, which started out chilly but has since turned sunny, I can also see Barnum, The Moron Dog, relaxing in the midday sun.

Although he normally lives as if to embrace his Moron Dog moniker, today he looks up at me as if to say: “Who’s the moron?” He knows—because he hangs around here—that I am not likely to move from this chair for several hours as I pound furiously on my laptop, alternately working, emailing, and writing a letter to you. Barnum, meanwhile, will spend the time until the kids return from school moving from one patch of sun to the other, carefully shifting his nap in order to follow the warmth.

If you have stayed up too late working (as I did last night) and have too much to do (as I do today), it’s easy to think that the dog’s life is a good one. Let’s review Barnum’s daily routine:

  • 6:20 a.m. – Take a walk with Bryn. Relieve yourself with enthusiasm.
  • 6:40 a.m. – Hang out briefly near the kitchen hoping for a handout while the humans eat breakfast and make lunches.
  • 6:50 a.m. – Give up on the snack and go back to bed.
  • 6:52 a.m. – Nap until bedtime.

There may be a little more to it than that—including an occasional growling, come-play-fetch-with-me frenzy—but that is the essence of it. As the saying goes, it’s nice work if you can get it.

In truth, I wouldn’t last a day on Barnum’s schedule. There is just too much to do. As an alternative, however, I have come to revel in the divine mandate to set aside one day a week as the Lord’s Sabbath. In Exodus 20 we read:

8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:
10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

I admit that when I was younger, I found the practice of “keeping the Sabbath day holy” both annoying and restrictive. However, when I started college I decided that if it qualified as one of the Ten Commandments it might be worth a try. The short version of this story is that I discovered, even as a UCLA freshman, the sweet, restorative benefits of giving myself permission to take it easy on Sundays. Now these many years later, I look forward to Sundays because I have come to rely on the chance to not do, and I find that as a direct consequence I am actually much more effective at the doing during the other six days of the week.

In our increasingly hectic existence, it has become somewhat uncommon for people to indulge in a day of rest. No doubt the practice seems somewhat decadent, not too different from a dog lolling in the sun on a glorious afternoon. Which, when you think of it, sounds pretty good indeed.

PW

The Fellowship of Less-Than-Basic Cable

On By Peter WatkinsIn 2006Leave a comment

Dear Will:

When we moved to Orange in 1998, we owned a single, 13-inch color TV with rabbit ears. For the first 12 years of our marriage it served us well, both as an entertainment medium and as a symbol of the importance of television in our lives. Unfortunately, tucked in among the hills of Orange we found it virtually impossible to get television reception through old-fashioned , over-the-air technology. And so it was with reluctance that we phoned TimeWarner and, for the first time ever, we signed up for cable, or I should say, the cheapest cable possible: local channels and not much else. It’s the less-than-basic package they refuse to advertise and will sell to you—reluctantly—only if you ask.

Which is to say, the only TV programs we get at our house are mostly unwatchable. (That may also be true if we got the Gazillion Channel Package, but we would never know.) We don’t get HBO or FSN or even Animal Planet for that matter. Its just UPN, ABC, and several others which are incomprehensible even with the subtitles.

So how is it, you might wonder, that my seven-year-old sports nut, Seth, is in the grips of World Cup Fever? Since we don’t get ESPN, most of the games are available to us only in Spanish on Univision. And Seth doesn’t speak a lick of Spanish. In spite of it all, there he is at 6 a.m.—watching Lithuania versus Bora Bora or whatever—and trying to explain to me why the officiating is so bad. At the same time, he has developed a curious vocabulary: falta, tiro de esquina, fuera de lugar, and the one word we all understand, ¡gooooooooooooooool!

What I find so interesting is how this event has begun to introduce Seth to other lands and other cultures. (Do you know where Trinidad & Tobago is? I didn’t. Seth does.) It’s not just that the announcers are speaking in a foreign tongue, but he gets a chance to see the passion of the spectacle which isn’t present at all in the United States. When I was on my mission in Uruguay, I witnessed firsthand the way in which the sport both divided the country (Nacional and Peñarol were the Yankees and Red Sox of their pro soccer league) and united it (in international competition anyway). I even found myself out working one night when Uruguay won the Gold Cup soccer tournament, and all 1.5 million citizens of Montevideo (or so it seemed) streamed into my neighborhood to celebrate. It was as if I had stepped into a completely different universe where I watched, agog, as the citizenry joined in song, deliriously happy, united by a silly game.

Or perhaps not so silly. After all, the World Cup brings people from all over the world into close proximity and forces them, for a couple of hours anyway, to give some thought to another place and people. I witnessed, for example, a moment at the conclusion of one of these matches in which players from opposing teams exchanged jerseys in a traditional display of post-game sportsmanship. One of the players noticed blood on his shirt—the result, no doubt, of rough play—and then good-naturedly insisted on giving his opponent a clean, unstained one instead. It was a marvelous moment of international goodwill, and I was pleased to have Seth see it.

I’m even pleased to have him watching in Spanish inasmuch as we now find ourselves living in an increasingly multi-cultural, bilingual city. Watching a game is helping him to resist the ethnocentric tendencies to which we all fall prey, and if we can begin that process at seven instead of seventeen, I’m all for it. One of the things that the gospel of Jesus Christ is supposed to do is make us “no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens” (Ephesians 2:19). I just never imagined that less-than-basic cable could contribute to that end.

PW

Image generated using AI (M365 Copilot / AI image generator). That’s not Seth, in other words.