Ten Ways to Live the Life-Charged Life

New glass in our font door

One of my more regular writing gigs is the ongoing work I do for All Pro Dad (allprodad.com). In brief, All Pro Dad provides resources and encouragement for men who are motivated to do their dad job with imagination, creativity, commitment, faithfulness, love and anything else that works.

All Pro Dad comes under the Family First umbrella, and features a cutting edge website that showcases a wide variety of resources. One popular feature is the “10-Ways” series that gives “bullet point” ideas designed to help men in their role as dads, single dads, married partners, family team members and a whole host of other challenges. As of this week, 92 of those lists are mine.

So, in recognition of the All Pro Dad project and for a change of pace in this blog, here are “Ten Ways to Live the Life-Charged Life.” I’m writing these “stream of consciousness,” which means that the items are not pro-rated, the list is nowhere near complete, and we could probably go with 20-30 items if we had time. Enjoy:

1. Launch each new day from the context of prayer. Simply put, as little as five minutes of early morning prayer sets a trajectory for the coming day that is loaded with positive.
2. Choose a positive outlook. For example, the fact that it’s raining again this morning will not change. But your choice to see it as a blessing versus an inconvenience is entirely up for grabs.
3. Determine to put the interests of others ahead of your own. In traffic… at the office… what you fix for dinner… how you chose to view a particular challenge… how you handle a disagreement….
4. Make sure the people you love know that you love them – today. Call; say it with flowers; write a note; smooch… use your imagination.
5. Make sure that, because you interacted with the world today, the world is qualitatively a better place. Every day, this is our opportunity.
6. Do something outside of the predictable stream of activity for the expressed purpose of making someone else happy. Fix a cup of coffee for a co-worker; complement your spouse; plant a rose-bush; offer a back-rub…
7. Make the effort to keep your awareness of personal faith front and center all day long. There are many ways to approach this; the point is to make the effort.
8. Memorize a short passage of scripture. I cannot overstate the power of planting good seeds of truth and inspiration in our hearts and minds.
9. Replace one hour of media (television, talk radio) with one hour of reading. Duh…
10. Replace another 30-minutes of media with a long walk. If I started the process of enumerating the benefits of regular exercise this would be a looooooong post!

Bottom line, friends and family and general readers, EACH NEW DAY stands as an unprecedented, previously untried and often unimagined opportunity to live and to grow and to love and to learn…

So why not today?

- DEREK

Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way they will lay up treasure for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life. – 1 Peter 6:18-19