Now that Trump won the Electoral College, here's a quick thought . . .

I walked into the detention center to teach my fatherhood class one Sunday afternoon. The entrance to the jail was right next to the isolation cells, or the "hole" as inmates describe it. Those are the rooms reserved for inmates who are out of control, coming down off a high, and/or in danger to themselves and others. They allow no light: they are concrete rooms with steel doors.

As I walked in, I heard yelling and cursing and pounding coming from one of the cells. Its occupant seemed to be quite unhappy with his situation and was letting the world know it. He was cursing and swearing and threatening everyone on the other side of the door, and was obviously kicking it with all his might. Now, this door was probably four inches of case-hardened steel and wasn't going anywhere. The jailer was standing at the door, trying to talk the guy down.

"Mark, are you done?" the jailer asked patiently.

"H*** no!" shouted the voice on the other side of the door. "Anyone you send in here is gonna get knifed!" How he was going to do that I didn't know, unless this jail had a policy of allowing knives to inmates in the hole. The fact that he didn't have a knife didn't seem to faze him at all, though.

The voice continued, "You send any female guard in here I'll beat her head in! You hear me?"

The jailer answered, "Mark, NOW are you done?"

"F*** no!" shouted the voice. "I know who you are! You sell drugs in here, you blah blah blah blah blah." The guy continued ranting and raving and kicking and fussing and screaming. All the while, the guards on the outside of the cell were waiting patiently.

As I watched this unfold, I realized something. Soon, the guy would run out of energy and he would stop. He would stop beating on the door, he would stop yelling; as his emotion-powered actions used up all his energy, he would cease.

Then he would realize that all his words, actions, beating on the door, threatening everyone, had gotten him exactly nowhere. He was still in the same situation as he was before, and all his antics and threats and ballyhooing and whining and crying and cursing hadn't yielded the results he wanted. He was stuck in an isolation cell and wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

All of that fuss for nothing.

I've been watching the post-election reaction from the losing side. I've seen the riots, the Twitter hashtags, the celebrities trying to sway electors, the cries of racism and sexism and whatever other -ism and -phobia that will garner attention. I've seen the safe spaces on campus, the play-doh and cartoon coloring books offered at universities, the protests outside of state capitals during the electoral college votes. I've seen the emotion and the rhetoric and the insults and the threats and the tantrum being thrown.

And it reminded me so much of that inmate.

All of that post-election stuff amounted to nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The problem with emotional reactions is that emotions quickly drain your energy. They don't last long- kind of like an adrenalin rush that dies as quickly as it starts up. When the energy of the losing side had been used up by their emotions, they, like that inmate, realized that all their actions, all their threats, all their activism, all their tantrums, all their riots amounted to absolutely nothing.

Just like that inmate in the cell.

The reason I even bother to write about this is because I don't want this to be repeated. Ever.

I never want to see a post-election reaction like this ever again. I don't want to see riots, family members separating, friends not speaking to each other, property destroyed, people being called racists and xenophobes and whatever other insult is trendy and cool. For those of you that reacted that way, I have two things to tell you.

1) History shows us that in either four or eight years, there will be a Democrat president. America has only sent the same party to the White House for three terms once since term limits were imposed. That was when Ronald Reagan, a two-term republican, left and his VP, George Bush Sr, was elected. Americans loved Reagan and wanted a Reagan third term. They didn't get it, and Bush only lasted one term. Other than that, Americans have never elected back-to-back presidents from the same party. So, chill out. Republicans had to deal with eight years of Obama and they survived. You'll have to deal with one or two terms of Trump, and you'll survive.

2) When you react this way to a loss, you are giving license to the other side to do that when you win. Your actions upon hearing that Hillary Clinton lost- riots in the streets, destruction of property, calling names, trying to influence electors- do you want those repeated when your person wins? If the right reacts that way in 2020 or 2024, you will have have no grounds to condemn it. If you don't want riots and employees being fired and insults and everything like that coming your way when you win, don't send it out to the other side when you lose.

At any rate, it's all like that inmate in the cell.

My biggest failure as a father

One of my biggest passions is fatherhood. I love being a father. I spend at least three days a week in jails and rehab centers teaching fatherhood courses. People ask me my advice on parenting and fatherhood all the time, and it is a big part of what I do.

Lots of times, this blog will cover parenting/fatherhood topics. I guess they tell you to write what you know, so that's what I do. I spend a great deal of time talking about things I've learned, trying to shape and guide with advice and all that. It would be easy to think, after reading all this, that I'm a perfect dad.

I'm not.

Fatherhood is more error than victory, and there are plenty of mistakes I've made as a dad. However, there is one that stands out more than others.

I'm just going to be gut-level honest with everyone. I would say that in my forty-two years as a human being, this was my worst failure, one that to this day I have trouble forgiving myself for.

In 2004, my wife and I were blessed with our son Jacob. He had a heart defect that was 100% fatal without surgery (it was called Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, or HLHS). He was born September 5, and he was going to have major surgery within a few days of his birth.

His temperature kept spiking every time they were going to operate, so his surgery was delayed several times. I was a youth minister at the time, and our son was at Vanderbilt hospital forty minutes away from where we lived. He was born on a Saturday. We stayed with him in the NICU on and off, because we had two little girls as well to care for and tried to keep things as normal for them as possible.

It kills me to write this. Looking back, I wish I would have done things differently.

The next week, when he was eight days old, on Monday, I had been out of the office pretty much the entire time. I went to work. All day. I didn't go to the hospital that day.

My son was in the NICU fighting for his life and I went to the office because I thought that's where I should be.

I didn't think he was going to die. I thought that he would do well with his surgery and we would have him for a good long while. I couldn't see it any other way. So, that day, I went to work thinking that what I was doing that day was so very important.

Jacob died two days later.

He only lived ten days, and I missed one of them. 10% of his life.

See, I thought we would have him for longer. I thought he would live many years. I thought that he would grow up and go to school and play sports and graduate school and get married and have kids and the whole nine yards. When he needed his family- when he needed his dad the most- I wasn't there.

When he needed me the MOST- I wasn't there.

Maybe it was my view of work being so important. Maybe it was a sensitivity to the criticism that so many people have of ministers "not having a real job" and "only working thirty minutes on a Sunday."(yes, we hear that all the time) and feeling like I had to counteract that stereotype. Maybe it was an over-inflated sense of how important I was. Whatever the cause, whatever the reason, it was the wrong one.

Somebody once said that we prefer clocks to hourglasses because a clock just spins around and around, giving the illusion that time is infinite. If we could actually see grains of sand disappearing, showing that our time is limited, we would live much differently. I think that is very true. I know that had I known Jacob was going to die that Wednesday, I would have been in his room the entire day on Monday instead of sitting at a desk in an office forty minutes away.

I know that God has forgiven me, but I just can't seem to forgive myself. What I wouldn't give to have that day back. I would live it much, much differently.

But I can't get that day back. Like a grain of sand in an hourglass, it's gone forever. The only thing I can do is from this point forward, learn the lesson and be intentional about spending these days as well as I possibly can, doing what is important and right, regardless of what everyone else would say.

For all of you parents who haven't gotten it right, you're not alone.

For all of you parents who have made mistakes, maybe MAJOR mistakes, and are struggling to forgive yourselves for them, you're not alone.

For all of you parents who wish you could go back and relive a day or week or month or year of your life and do things differently, you're not alone.

I'm right there with all of you.

Sometimes the weight of that failure is enough to make me want to quit. Many times as I go to teach fatherhood or write about parenthood, I feel like a hypocrite. "Who are you to write about being a father?" I ask myself as the episode of Monday, September 13, 2004 comes flooding back. I know many of you feel the same way. The guilt of past failures has the ability to paralyze any future action that we need to take.

All I can do is point you to the words of Lamentations 3:23-24, "Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for His mercies never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness."

Because of His love, we are not consumed by our failures. Because of His love, our failures are not final. Because of His love we can pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and put one foot in front of the other in spite of our past failures. There is hope and peace ahead, thanks to the goodness of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I'm here as a living testimony to that goodness and forgiveness, as I have experienced it personally.

It's difficult to write this blog. I don't really know why I'm writing it right now. Maybe it's because there are folks out there who need it. Maybe it's a lame attempt to assuage guilt within me. Maybe it's the Holy Spirit of God telling me to be authentic and share struggles with the folks who read this. Whatever the reason is, I hope you can find some encouragement today. No one is perfect. No one has it all together. No one has all the answers.

But everyone can have hope and a future. We aren't bound by our past mistakes, thanks to the limitless grace and love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

I ask you to do what I am trying my hardest to do- learn how to forgive yourself. Sometimes I think the hardest person to forgive is ourselves. And if any of you figure out how to do it, I'd appreciate you sharing it with me.

God bless all of you.

What a secular college professor taught me about cursing

I was in my sophomore year at Centre College. I had been a Christian for about two years, and needless to say, most of my beliefs and values were still being formed. One thing that was a constant struggle was my mouth.

I was surrounded by guys on the soccer team that couldn't even say they loved their mothers without dropping three or four f-bombs. It probably took the guys twice or three times as long to say something because every other word was a swear word. Our communication probably would have been a lot more efficient if we would have just said what we were trying to say, but like Admiral Kirk said to Spock in Star Trek IV, "That's just the way they talk here. No one pays any attention to you unless you swear every other word."

I was sitting in class one day and a student, while answering a professor's question, dropped a curse word in the middle of his statement. I can't remember which it was, but it was a swear word. The professor stopped him cold. Then he proceeded to tell the student something that I would never forget.

He said, "You should never use profanity. It is the language of the unintelligent." The class was silent. What in the world was he talking about?

The professor continued, "While I do know some intelligent people who swear, I have never known an unintelligent person who doesn't. Profanity is the least common denominator of human communication. It expresses no great ideas, no great thoughts; it puts forth no great hypotheses or visions or dreams. It is the baseline of human utterances driven more by emotion than by thought."

We were pretty shocked. No one had ever heard this about our favorite words. The professor had just referred to us all as unintelligent (at least, using the language of the unintelligent) and had said some things that, while we didn't like them, were difficult to argue with.

He finished, "If your point requires profanity in order to make it, it isn't worth making. If your statement needs profanity for people to listen, it is a weak statement. You students are better than that. Make your points and your statements intelligently; using profanity to make them is a signal that it is an inherently dumb or weak argument."

We all walked out of class a little different that day.

The professor had made no moral arguments against profanity. To my knowledge he was an atheist, as a good many of my professors were. He was not arguing from a position of right or wrong; he was arguing from a standpoint of intelligent versus unintelligent. He wasn't making moral judgments- he was simply calling us to a higher standard of communication and expression.

He made that point several more times that semester- profanity was the language of the unintelligent; while he had known intelligent people who swore, he never knew an unintelligent person who didn't.

I wonder what that professor would say today as profanity has become even more mainstream than it was twenty years ago when I took his class. He would probably say the same thing- he would continue to call us to a higher level of dialogue, using words and sentences that put forth great ideas rather than base-level utterances needing four-letter-words for them to be heard.

This is why I choose not to swear. I agree with my professor. Profanity puts forth no great ideas, no great thoughts, proposes no great solutions to human problems, and operates from the baseline of human emotion rather than from thoughtful, considered, rational dialogue. If I feel that profanity is needed to get a point across, my point isn't worth making. My points should stand on their own without needing a four-letter-word to get it across. This calls me to a higher level of thought, consideration, and self-control, and those things have been very good for me as a person.

Today, I propose that we ascend to a higher level of communication and thought, leaving profanity and cursing behind for richer and more fruitful fields of human endeavor.

Don't Laugh At It

A few days ago I was in Wal-Mart. I had just popped in for some quick groceries and wanted to get out as quickly as possible. I was in a hurry, not in the mood to deal with things- just wanted to get there, get what I needed, and get home as quickly as possible.

Which made my time in the checkout line even that much worse.

In front of me were two young parents with what looked to be about a five-year-old child. She was full of energy, to say the least. Basically she was running around, jumping in the shopping cart, being very loud, and was out of control. When you are stuck in a checkout line, being around a kid like that gets really old really fast.

However, I very quickly realized why she acted that way, because something happened that drove me absolutely nuts.

Her dad, probably realizing that his daughter was annoying the people around her with her constant running around and noise, told her to be still. She looked up at him and shouted, "NO!" Then she smiled and continued doing what she was doing. I began thinking what would have happened if I would have done that to my parents. I certainly wouldn't be here writing this, I can guarantee you THAT.

However, the mom laughed. She looked at her husband and said, "She is so SASSY!" Meanwhile, the kid continued to act like a brat. I made a mental note that if I ever became friends with this couple, I would NEVER invite them over as long as they had that kid with them.

This illustrates a major problem in parenting.

The child was disrespectful to her father. Defiance and disrespect are terrible attributes for any person to have, let alone a child. When the child said, "NO!" defiantly, she should have been corrected right then and there. She should have been told in no uncertain terms that she was in the wrong and should have been punished accordingly.

However, the parents laughed at it and wrote it off as "sassiness."

Parents, don't explain away your children's disrespect as "being cute" or "being sassy."

The truth of the matter is that the world won't find your child's disrespect nearly as cute or funny as you do. Neither will I. Neither will anyone unfortunate enough to come into contact with your child or anyone unfortunate enough to be stuck in a Wal-Mart checkout line behind them.  Employers won't find it funny when your child, being "sassy and cute," disrespects the customers. Teachers won't find it nearly as amusing when your child is a constant disruption in class because someone at home encouraged them to be "sassy and cute."

We have an entire generation growing up without respect for their elders, and I believe mainly it happens because parents laugh and explain away disrespect in this manner. The amount of parents who laugh at their children's disrespect is astonishing to me. Do they know they are encouraging the child to repeat it? Do they know they are setting their child up for failure in life? Do they know that they are raising a brat?

Probably not. In this generation of parents' quest to be their child's best friend, any thought along those lines are out the door. Any thought of future consequences to said "cute" behavior is gone.

Don't laugh at it. Discipline it.

Parents, you are the first people your child learns to respect. If you laugh off disrespect and defiance, if you call it "sassy," if you explain it away as "cute," you will be creating a monster. Resist the urge to laugh it off.

Remember- it is easier to train a child than to fix an adult. It is easier to train a five-year-old to be respectful than it is to discipline a disrespectful teenager. Far too many parents, by laughing at the disrespect of a five-year-old, create a monster that they have trouble dealing with in the teenage years, and then experience the heartbreak of an adult child who has none of the characteristics needed for a successful life.

Don't laugh at it. It isn't sassy. It isn't cute.

It's disrespect.

Work Ethic Begins in the Home: A Tribute to My Father

I was talking a few weeks ago with a friend of mine who is a Human Resources guy for a major business. He was telling me that it is his job to hire new employees for the company, and he was having an extremely difficult time finding people to fill their positions.

He told me that somewhere between 50% and 60% of the applicants were immediately rejected because they couldn't pass a drug test. Of the ones that remained, half of them wouldn't have the qualifications necessary for the job, and of those hired, several of them would quit after they got their first paycheck. Of those who didn't quit, several would be let go because of missing work, being late, or just flat out laziness.

"The jobs are there," he told me. "We just can't find people willing to work."

Ever since I was little, work ethic was drummed into me. Both of my parents are hardworking people. My mom was a stay-at-home mom who worked her rear off trying to manage our home, and my dad has probably never missed a day of work in his life. Work ethic is something that cannot be taught in school or at work- it is taught in the home.

Many times in life, there are defining moments when we learn lessons that stay with us for life. One such event happened the summer of my sophomore year in college.

I was playing semipro soccer for the Bluegrass Bandits (the local semipro team) as well as working first shift in a lumberyard that summer. One particular weekend, we had a grueling road trip. We left Friday for Louisiana, played New Orleans on Saturday, drove to Little Rock, AK, played their team on Sunday, and arrived back in Lexington around 1:30 am Monday morning.

I had to be at work at 7 am. When 6:00 rolled around, I was exhausted. I couldn't get out of bed. I decided to take the day off.

I had parked my truck behind my dad's car, and when he was leaving for work that morning, my truck was still there. So he came into my room and asked me what I was doing. I told him that I was exhausted from the road trip and two soccer games and that I was taking the day off.

Bad move.

For the next ten minutes, the only way I can describe it was a hurricane hit my room. Bill Cosby describes people having a "conniption." I think I saw one that day. My dad BLASTED me. He told me in no uncertain terms that missing work was not an option, that laziness was not a characteristic of successful people, that it didn't matter how tired I was, you suck it up and go to work because missing work was unacceptable. He told me that the people at work were counting on me and that I was letting them down by not going in. He told me to think of the work that I was selfishly putting on them because I was too big a pansy to do what I was supposed to do. That was the basic gist of it.

So I dragged myself out of bed and got to work a few minutes late. It was a rough day, but I survived.

I also learned a life lesson.

You don't miss work. You follow through on what is expected of you. You do your best even when you aren't feeling your best.

All those lessons I learned from my father. And those lessons have paid off in life ever since.

The hardest thing I've ever done in life was planting the church that I now currently pastor. When we launched off into this endeavor, I had a family of five to provide for. I got up at 3 am every morning seven days a week to deliver newspapers- rain, snow, sleet, Thanksgiving morning, Christmas morning, you name it. I substitute taught at East High School. I coached soccer. I pastored a church. This was in 2008 when the Great Recession had hit and no one could find work. I had four jobs. I did that for a year and a half until the church had grown to where I could pastor full-time.

The lesson from my father echoed in my mind. You do your best even when you aren't feeling your best. You go to work because that's what you do. You don't miss work. You do what is expected of you.

All those lessons kept me going during the most physically and emotionally demanding season of my life. Looking back on that endeavor, seeing the blessings my church has brought me and my family and the people of this world, I am so glad I did it. I am so glad my dad and mom instilled in me the concept of work.

What other people might have seen as impossible, I saw as possible because with hard work you can accomplish anything.

I am so glad my dad cared enough about me to speak hard truths when I was tired.

He could have coddled me. He could have been "understanding." He could have let it go. After all, what was one day of missing work?

But he didn't.

I still remember that day like it was yesterday. I remember my father's passion when talking about work ethic and how important it was. I remember his remarks about laziness being beneath me. I remember his high expectations of his son when it came to the discipline of work.

As I was listening to my friend talk about his frustration with hiring people, I went back to that summer morning of 1994. Sadly, I realized that these people my friend was talking about had probably never had that discussion with their fathers. They had probably never been taught the importance of work. They probably didn't have fathers who held such absolute contempt for laziness.

Those people were always going to struggle in life. People without a work ethic always do.

Today I am thankful for my hardworking dad who demonstrated the importance of work every day of his life. I am thankful that he cared enough to pass that on to me.

Parents, work ethic begins in the home. Bless your children by teaching them the value of work.