Around the Web:
The Difficult Goodbye

Tim Challies writes about the challenges of traveling. I have a son like his middle daughter. Makes travel tough.

• Daddy, why is it so hard to say goodbye?” She asked the question with tears rolling down her cheeks. She had come for the ride, and for a final chance to kiss me goodbye, as my wife dropped me at the curb outside terminal one.

  Her sister, eight years old, had come along too. An eminently practical child, undisturbed by most emotional drama, she simply said, “Bye, daddy!”, gave me a quick peck on the cheek, and went back to her book. Her older brother had been content to skip the ride in favor of staying home. But she, the eleven-year-old, was distraught. She had been weeping for the entire half hour it took us to travel from home to the airport.

There's some beautiful resolution there. Read more.

Internet Privacy Is a Myth

Over at Christ and Pop Culture, Luke Harrington has some thoughts on how we conduct ourselves online. It's a supremely challenging environment.

• Remember the Heartbleed bug? The one that meant that pretty much all of your online accounts had probably already been compromised and you should change all your passwords, now, now, now? Yeah, I still haven’t changed a single password. And I doubt I’m in the minority there.
  I’m still trying to decide why. Mostly laziness, I guess. Changing my passwords on a dozen websites seemed like more work than it was worth. Failing to do so also felt like a precocious rejection of the Western cultural tendency to confuse your identity with your possessions (or, y’know, something).
  More than anything, though, I think I’ve come to accept that privacy simply no longer exists.

As parents, we've got to be ahead of our kids on thinking this stuff through. It's only getting more difficult. Read more.

Gospel-Driven Productivity

An interview with Matt Perman, who recently authored What's Best Next, a good book on Christian productivity.

• At first it might be hard to see how productivity is about Jesus, because so much productivity thinking looks at things simply from a secular perspective. What do calendars, to-do lists, and cool moleskine journals have to do with Jesus?

  But, of course, they have everything to do with him, for “all things were created by him and for him” (Col. 1:16). All of our productivity practices and all of the cool productivity tools out there ultimately exist for the glory of Jesus Christ. That means they are to be used to bring honor to his name.

Really important stuff. Read more.
 

Raising Self-Governed Children

Sally Clarkson talks about raising children who know how to manage themselves.

• Later, I described the situation to my older children, and asked them what they thought we had done differently that had prevented them from behaving quite so crazily as littles. It was humorous to hear how opinionated they were, as each reminded me how intentionally we taught them to be patient and to wait their turn–because they all remembered it the same way. 

A really good one. Work on this early, your children will thank you. Read more.

Around the Warren:

St George of Appalachia

S. D. Smith writes about his family's own St. George adventure.

• Beardless, but brave. A warrior of light. Earnest and noble. Fiercely determined.
  My five year old son will fight a dragon.
  They had been practicing archery, these knights and princesses, smiling and laughing, taking aim and learning to seek, without flinching, the crimson center.
  They are aiming and smiling and care-free. But it cannot last.
  There is a terrible commotion. A piercing roar. Our gentle serenity shattered, chaos ensues. Screams of terror fill the air.
  A dragon is among us.

Love it. Imagination is about identity. Read more.

You Have Been Born Into A Narrative

A nicely presented (by Paul Boekell, of course) brilliant quote from N. D. Wilson.

Dislike your role in the story?
 

Lemony Snicket's The Dark

Laura Peterson brings some help for those who fear the dark, introducing us to this Lemony Snicket tale.

• “I’m afraid of the dark.”
  If you’ve ever said or thought this, would you please raise your hand?
  Okay, every one of you can put your hand down now, ‘cause I know you all raised ‘em. We all know the dark is scary sometimes. Literal, emotional, spiritual; there’s all kinds of darkness, and they all can be a bit frightening. I was pleased to find a picture book earlier this year that deals excellently with the first kind: Lemony Snicket’s The Dark, with illustrations by Jon Klassen. Several people speculated that it would win a Caldecott Award for illustration, an idea which I especially loved because several of the pages are just plain ol’ black ink. (Appropriate for a book titled The Dark.) The way that Snicket and Klassen portray and personify that darkness is what makes it such a good story.

Read the review, then read the book.

A Saturday Poem for My Son Who Likes Pirates Best

Rebecca Reynolds sure can write. Here's a piratey poem from her pen:

• Once upon a midnight purple,
  oceans churned with maple surple.
  Pancake ships with waffled decks
  held berried treasures from Uzbek-
  A-Something-East on Daddy’s map.

Such fun. Read more.

Something to Do with Your Kids:

Spring continues to dump rain on us, and probably you too. Here are some rainy day activities for your perusal, courtesy RealSimple.com Read more.

And Something Fun to Watch

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