What 31 Years of Marriage Has Taught Me

Koffee With Kelli

Good Morning!!

Hope your coffee is hot and your morning is quiet just for a few moments!! This past Wednesday marked our 31^st wedding anniversary!! As I reflected over these years the first thing that came to my mind was gratefulness to God for how he has used David to shape me into who I am today.  Not only has he been a mirror to all my baggage, but he has willingly, lovingly and bravely stepped into places and joined God in helping me confess, reset and focus on how my Heavenly Father is growing me.

I believe that next to my relationship with Jesus, our marriage has been the single biggest factor in who I am today.   Instead of being mad at my husband for helping me see my sin, I have invited him into a very intimate, holy place in my heart to again, give me perspective, motivation and energy to face how God is growing me.

Now I know what you are thinking, ”Maybe you could trust your husband in this place, but no way could I trust mine!” I know this is a scary place for many women today. Not to mention, in many times not even a consideration. But the reality is this: we must refocus our marriages to bear the image of Christ.

31 years later… I love being married!

What does this mean, to bear the image of Christ? It means to help each other die to all that keeps God from doing His great work in us. It means being able to say, “I am sorry, will you please forgive me; and lastly, how can I make it right?  When we begin to reenact the gospel, we do many important things. One, the enemy is thwarted in his efforts to come between us. Two, God is able to continue His important work in us as individuals and even more importantly as a one-flesh team that battles for the Lord in our families and in the world. Three, God is light and hope in our marriages for a broken world to be encouraged by.

Oh dear sisters, are we excited for our daughters and sons to be married?  Are we modeling not perfect, but healthy marriages? Do we talk about what God intends for marriage?  Are we preparing our children to be spouses and parents out of an overflow of their genuine relationships with Christ?

Thank you David… for allowing God to use you to grow me…. I love being married… to you… my lover, my best friend… my knight in shining armor… Happy Anniversary!!

Who’s Coaching the Coaches?

“A coach will impact more young people in a year than the average person does in a lifetime. So who’s coaching the coaches?” ~ Billy Graham

So who’s coaching the coaches? What a great question! According to the research the high school coach is the most influential voice in a young person’s life. You may take issue with putting a coach ahead of a parent in the influence department. But regardless of whether the coach is first and parents are second or vice versa, it accentuates the truth; the high school coach is an incredibly significant voice in a teenager’s life today!

One of my greatest gifts was the opportunity to coach my own children.

Here I’m hugging Tavita after a big high school win.

Whatever comes after the words, “Coach says…” will be heard differently than almost any other words! Which begs the question; who’s coaching the coaches?

The 2 most obvious answers are the coach’s parents and the coach’s coaches. Perhaps you were among the 108 million people that tuned into this year’s Super Bowl. The top story line had nothing to do with the athletes playing the game but rather involved the two head coaches facing off that night. For the first time in history, two brothers, Jim and John Harbaugh were on opposite sidelines coaching in the biggest sporting event in the world. If you ask either of them, they would give you the same answer. Much of their success they owed to their father, Jack Harbaugh, not surprisingly, also a coach. For most coaches, their first coach and trainer is one or both parents.

In the northwest, April 12, 2013 will go down as an important day. The day the coaching world lost two legends of the game; Frosty Westering and Marv Harshman both entered eternity. I won’t go into the details of their achievements… suffice to say the country is riddled with athletic programs modeled after the teaching of these two coaches. Ask virtually any great coach and he or she will tell you of coaches in their past who have shaped and molded their philosophy of coaching.

But this last weekend, we had the opportunity to be part of a speaking team at a Coach’s Time Out (CTO) conference, a ministry of Pro Athlete Outreach (PAO). CTO is attempting to be part of the answer to the question, who’s coaching the coaches? What a privilege for us to be part of a fabulous team. Jake Locker of the Tennessee Titans and Michael Keonen of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, along with their wives Lauren and Devin hosted the weekend and shared coaching tips from a player’s perspective. A room full of coaches, many with their spouse, gathered for a weekend of refreshing, recharging and teaching.

Jake and Lauren Locker

In addition to the Lockers and Keonans, Gary Bell gave great financial advice from a biblical perspective, Joe Nu’u brought spiritual challenge and we spoke into growing strong family relationships in the midst of the craziness of coaching. The best part for us was knowing this room full of people will now affect hundreds if not thousands of lives this coming year.

CTO’s goal according to their director Joe Broussard and PAO director Steve Stenstrom, is to have a Coach’s Time Out within driving distance of every high school coach in America. There were twelve such conferences this year with plans to have seventeen in 2014.

If you have an athlete, rather than buying your coach another plaque for an overfilled wall, why not consider giving him/her something that will be super meaningful and have the potential of impacting more lives in the future (possibly your childs). Most of the cost for the weekend is underwritten by professional athletes and others who place a high value on caring for coaches and their families. If you’d like more information visit their website http://www.coachestimeout.org/.

I know my life has been heavily influenced by the coaches I have played for. But honestly I never stopped long enough to ask… who’s coaching the coaches? Now I know and so do you!

Boys to Men

Koffee With Kelli

Good Morning Friends!!  

I hope your coffee is hot and you have a moment to sit and think!! This morning I would like to talk about what happens when your son comes of age and how your mothering should change toward him!! Yesterday I attended my son’s fifth grad promotion and my daughter’s eighth grade promotion. At one ceremony there were nineteen girls as compared to four boys recognized for academic achievement. At the other event eleven girls and two boys were honored for their grades. It was a visual reminder of how badly we need young boys to rise up and become Godly young men.

As our boys turn 13 we do a rite of passage.  We use the book “Raising a Modern Day Knight “ as a template.   David and I came up with nine character qualities we wanted our sons to have as a foundation when they enter into manhood.  We invited nine adults who work with us at Young Life camp to speak into our son as he goes through the ropes course. They present the character quality, share the corresponding verse we gave them, and add a personal story or reflection that further illustrates what we are talking about. Lastly, they pray with him before he climbs on to the next station.

Mom’s Weekend with son #2!

At the end of the course, David meets him and proclaims he is no longer a boy but a man….a young man still in need of mentoring… but a man. We will not treat him the same nor will he act the same.  Here is where my mothering had to do a 180-degree turn! You see, if my son was now a man, I needed to begin treating him like one.  Things I would never do to my husband, I now had to stop doing with my son!!

Here’s what that looked like:

• No more nagging, begging, prompting to get things done. Allow things not to get done that he needs…a hard change for us moms!!
• Allow natural consequences to do more of the teaching
• Begin to affirm the things he initiates that will make him a Godly husband/father…”Wow I didn’t even have to ask and you….
• Teach, then let him do work ie car, yard, home maintenance/repair with much patience and encouragement
• Point him to his dad with questions, issues and problems that need a father’s guidance without making him feel guilty about this
• Tell him the ways you believe God is using his gifts and talents to prepare him for his life work.
• Encourage him to pray about a mentor to meet with on a regular basis… to share, listen and pray for him.
• Let him begin to talk about girls and what he wants to know from you about how they work…be careful not to rob dad of great talks but rather do good teaching on “this is how that makes us girls feel”
• Lastly, be a safe place for him to begin to own his own faith journey… questions are good and show he’s thinking how God fits into his life. Ask good questions and be ready to give him good resources for the tough thoughts he’s wresting with.

My desire is to support God in my mothering as He grows my son into that strong, confident, courageous and faithful man. Men are definitely under attack today and single women are having a hard time finding men who are brave enough to commit themselves to a lifetime of marriage and parenting.

Please ask God to help all of us mothers support the work He is doing in our boys!!

Have a great day!!

Kelli

How to hold an effective family meeting… and why you’d want to

A football coach wouldn’t think of going through a season without holding regular team meetings. His players are busy, going in a hundred different directions. The coaches meet and have specific issues everyone needs to know. Team meetings allow coaches to cast vision, to give out awards, to give updates, to go over team rules, to explain changes, to take care of any team drama, and the list goes on.

Coaches wouldn’t consider a season

without “family” meetings!

Similarly we believe parents need to meet with their team on a regular basis. In our “team” meetings we pass on a vision for our family to the kids. It allows us to celebrate recent successes.  Remember, what gets celebrated gets repeated! We update the kids on the family calendar (especially as they get older and start having lives of their own). It also gives us an opportunity to address challenges we might be facing as a family or with disciplinary issues. We ask the question, “What kind of a family do we want to have?” It gives our kids a chance to speak into who we are.

But the most important reason for holding regular family meetings has nothing to do with disseminating information or teaching or correcting and everything to do with creating a sense of belonging. We know the great lure of gangs isn’t as much about drugs and money as it is about being a part of something, a family. In the same way, family meetings are one of the great tools we use to convey to our kids, “You are an important part of something special. You belong to this family and this family belongs to you!”

Family meetings help create a sense of

“belonging” in our family!

We’ve posted a Family Meeting worksheet on our Pritchard Ministries website. It explains some of the practical “how to’s” of conducting family meetings. We suggest when your kids are young to have them often and keep them short. We’ve been know on occasion (not often) to have our meeting over an ice cream cone at McDonalds. Sometimes Kelli will end a meeting with a treat. When our kids were young it was easy… we’d yell up the stairs and say, “family meeting in the living room… five minutes.” As our kids got older, they requested a little more notice. So now David texts the kids, “we’d like to have a family meeting Thursday night at 7pm. See you there unless I hear from you.” It takes some effort, but regardless of how many or how few children you have, family meetings can be an effective tool in your parenting journey. We’d love to hear stories from your family meetings!

Happy Father’s Day

Koffee with Kelli

Hello Friends!! I’ll wait while you go grab a cup of coffee. When you’re ready come back and join me!

With Father’s Day upon us, I wanted to make a few remarks about how we celebrate our dad!! First of all, it is wonderful to report that our neighborhood public elementary school still recognizes Father’s Day and has each student make a gift for their dad. I am not being sarcastic, I sincerely appreciate this gesture and the willingness to honor and expend time and energy doing this.

Our church also does a good job thanking and blessing dads in our congregation so that is also a great message from the pulpit.

At our house, we typically begin Father’s Day with breakfast in bed that all the children and I have prepared. David’s favorite is steak and eggs with toast, fresh fruit and coffee. Next we bring him the paper to read and then have him open the school gifts.

Then we go to church together adding to David’s outfit a candy or flower lei reminding us of our Samoan heritage and the important part it has played in our family. We normally take one for the Pastor too as this is very cultural.

Hanging out with dad!

Then we come home and have a big cook out and feed our dad again!! If there is another group gift, we present it to him. But the best present of all is after the meal and gift, we all go around the table and share what we love the most about our dad.

Over the years this has evolved into meaningful blessings spoken into David from his children and me. There is laughter, tears, sweet memories of the last year and affirmation of how incredibly grateful to God that we have him for a dad.

We may take a nap, watch a movie together or go for a walk trying to gift David with not having to make any decisions for the day but doing what feels the most fun, respectful and relaxing to him!!

Many families need to address the issue of not having a dad present. In our community this often happens because of military deployments, but obviously there are other situations as well. David and I have always felt this a wonderful opportunity for the church to be a father to the fatherless.

Sometimes we have to decide whether or not to accept invitations to join with other family members for this day. There have been years when we have done this, especially when the grandfathers were alive.

I also remind the children and myself to be generous with praise to every dad we come in contact with on Father’s Day and to proclaim how grateful we are for them!!

And if you are a dad joining me for coffee today… Happy Father’s day! We love and respect you! Thank you for being a dad!

Confessions of a Bad Parent

With the flood of movies from Iron Man to Man of Steel we decided to reprint a post we blogged a couple of years ago on our old site. I hope you enjoy.

After you read today’s post, you might never be willing to listen to us or read our blog again. I mentioned a few days ago about our midnight excursion to watch the premiere of The Dawn Treader. Some of you read that and questioned the wisdom of taking school age kids to a midnight movie on a school night. Don’t worry, it gets worse! Movies for our family have become a very special thing. First being in ministry it has always been a big deal to even be able to go to movies (and I’m one of those that HAS to eat popcorn at a movie!) and second somehow I’ve raised a family of movie buffs. You don’t want to get into a movie trivia game with Tavita or Jason – either about actors or movie lines. We’ve watched our share of really good movies like Remember the Titans and Hoosiers; but we’ve also watched our share of duds like the first Hulk. My kids know that after we watch a movie we will discuss the message sent or agenda pushed; we rarely watch without a little analyzing. That’s not to say we don’t enjoy being entertained, but I’m not one to pass up an opportunity for a teachable moment!

Often when I’m leading a group I’ll have them introduce themselves by sharing their “favorite”. For instance I might say, tell us your name, where you are from and your favorite ice cream. However my most often used “favorite” is movie. My personal answer has been the same for thirty years – Star Wars. I can sense that I already lost some of you with that revelation! Don’t worry it gets worse. I’m going to date myself, but I was in high school when Time magazine did a cover story about a new sci-fi motion picture that some were saying would be the movie of the year. It was 1977 and that movie of course was Star Wars – I was hooked. So you can forgive me (well maybe you can?) for my excitement when they finally decided to continue the saga by releasing the Phantom Menace (the fourth Star Wars installment and chapter one of the tale but that’s another story altogether). We were living in Centralia at the time and our local theatre would carry the movie on its release date. By the time the movie came out it had been the topic of conversation in our home many times. The decision was made to catch the first showing of the movie together as a family. I had waited sixteen years for this and I would get to share Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia with my kids! There was a problem. The premiere showing would be on a Wednesday at noon. With all of the national hype, it would undoubtedly be sold out. So here’s my confession – we pulled Krista from school to wait in line. That’s right, together with her friend (she was homeschooled) we dropped them off at the theatre with folding chairs at 7am to wait in line. Of course they weren’t even close to being first in line. The rest of us met her there later that morning (some of us had to be responsible and go to work!).

As it turned out the movie was awesome, but the experience was better.  As you know we wrote a book, Going Public, a couple of years ago. We are very supportive of teachers and education (we’ll blog about education another time). But I’ve often kidded; never let school get in the way of your child’s education. My kids still talk about that day. They can’t believe dad let them miss school to see a movie(I know some of you are thinking the same thing); and a sci-fi movie at that. I’m not sure what exactly  they missed that day in school (I do know they made up the work); but I’m sure we made a memory. We don’t do that type of thing very often, in fact almost never, or it would lose its impact. But we are known for seeking out opportunities to make a memory with our kids. As I finish writing this I’m also finishing my morning cup of coffee. And of course I’m drinking it in my favorite cup given to me by my kids – that’s right a Star Wars mug (pictured above)!

You are going to love it at my house!

Koffee With Kelli

Good Morning Friends!!

Pour your coffee and please come sit with me a minute!! Thank you again for mothering faithfully. I know some days are really hard and you feel like resigning (as if that’s an option!). You wonder if anything is sticking to their hearts and minds!!Please know what you are doing does matter…you will be so surprised someday when you overhear them telling others about your parenting. Never grow weary in doing good (and what you are doing is great!!!).

We even want our “in-laws” to be excited about visiting our home!

I know this topic may seem way down the road for some of you; for others it’s go time and you are wondering, “Where have the years gone!!”  This is the season that causes me to reflect on what my children have really learned from living in this family…. what kind of people are walking out my door at 18?

Here are just a few practical thoughts to follow up David’s 2-part blog, What Every Parent Ought to Know About Sending Your Child Off to College…

Oldest sister home visiting the siblings!

Our parenting begins to feel like we are preparing to launch a rocket!!  It has been an enormous adventure and we are a little insecure about what we have done (or not done) to develop these young adults we are sending out into the world,

We try to stop solving problems, making decisions and managing their lives for them during their last year with us. We are available for counsel and will often invite them for coffee or a conversation, but we really try to stop lecturing and instead get them talking about what they want in life.  It’s so fascinating to sit back and just listen to their response to questions like, “How will you know when you have found the one God has for you to marry?” or “How will you choose a church or a mentor?” “What happens if your roommate really gets on your nerves?” or “What happens if you get sick the first week of school?”

Now I do confess to giving them a final exam as each child leaves. I try to make sure they know the things David and I have put down in our Pritchard Faith Vision Statement. That sheet is on our website for you to read. Please know that sheet started years ago and we’ve added to it each time another child has left our home.

Probably the biggest issue for most families is how to transition when people come home for the summer or holidays. Here are some ways to make that smoother:

Have a meeting before they leave and explain that things will never be the same again. Like David said, this is a good and healthy transition.  We suggest discussing the difference between asking permission and common courtesy. (i.e. We tell our kids they really don’t ask permission anymore as much as extending us the respect to say “I am going to a movie with friends. Does anyone need me or do you need something done before I go?”

We also acknowledge we will not agree on everything. We talk about how we will handle our differences of opinion without causing drama in our family. That is part of growing up and figuring out how to live with the choices you make in life.

We talk a lot about sibling relationships. We thank them for coming home and what a sweet gift of time that is to us!! We let them know what we would like them to attend with us if possible and then give them the family schedule as much ahead of time as possible.

We talk about money, chores, food, the car situation, and how they can help us while home; more a “state of the union”, an update of the family, than pressing them to take part in everything.  We also ask for their help in supporting rather than undermining our parenting with regards to house rules (TV, curfew, language etc.).

Our vision is our older children visiting would feel very wanted, welcomed and loved. We want them refreshed and well fed when they visit us. We know this is borrowed time and we really pray the Lord would help us make the most of it (i.e. both sides growing and sensing a deep connection to our roots)

We always want our home to be a safe, fun and energizing place for our children and their friends. God has entrusted them to us for such a short time. We are so grateful when they come home. We pray they will tell their friends, “You are going to love it at my house!!”

What Every Parent Ought to Know About Sending Your Child Off to College (Part 2))

In Part 1 we considered commencement, a beginning… we reminded you that everything changes and that’s a good thing while acknowledging some things never change.. and finally in an effort to raise self-governing adults we suggested you ask lots of questions rather than give quick answers. In Part 2, we want to continue our discussion by recommending one of our favorite traditions we have with our kids.

Gotta love those candy leis!

• Send them off with a blessing and a rite of passage. We will write more about this in the future but consider creating an intentional time to bless your child (publicly if possible) and to speak some words of wisdom and affirmation into their life prior to them heading off to school. We should speak words of blessing throughout their life, but key moments like this are wonderful times to apply what Gary Smalley and John Trent suggest in their book, The Blessing.
  • Meaningful touch
  • Spoken word
  • Express high value
  • Picture a special future
  • An active commitment on your part

A rite of passage would simply be a time to gather men or women around your child to speak words of wisdom and affirmation into your graduate before the leave home. It’s especially effective when you mark the event with something for them to keep, a reminder or memorial.

• Karen Seyfert gave some advice to moms as their kids are leaving home, but this certainly applies to dads as well:
  • How we send them off exposes a lot about our relationship… with Jesus… with our spouse… with our other kids
  • Be joyful – you might not always feel it, but don’t burden your child by moping around and acting depressed. We want them to know they will be missed, but in an appropriate way.
  • Continue to serve others in ministry – life and ministry don’t stop because our child is gone… again don’t make your child carry the burden of your ministry.
  • Advise sparingly – this is a season your child will be learning to fly. Fight the urge to call and offer advice. It is much more welcomed when they are asking for it… and even then, ask questions!
  • Pray faithfully – We said earlier, the stakes are higher… so our prayer life needs to get more intense!
  • Live purposefully – life has changed, it’s not over. Continue to have goals and vision and purpose for your life and the life of your family.
• Finally, be proactive about re-entry. If your child goes away to school, life is going to change drastically for your child… but also for those of you left behind. Talk about what their return might look like ahead of time. Don’t wait until your young adult returns home for Christmas vacation to consider things like curfew, or the use of the car, or checking in. Kelli is going to share some practical insights in her next “Koffee With Kelli”.

What an exciting time of year! What an exciting season for our children!