Why we don't celebrate Halloween

So, no one really asked me my opinion on this. But that's the great thing about blogs...you can say what you want to. At least in this country. And every year at this time it seems I have to explain to a great number of people why i'm not spending a bunch of money on costumes for my two children and parading them around neighborhoods to beg for candy from people that we otherwise don't know or talk to.  So let me 'splain' in to you.

We simply don't believe in it!...  Did ya get that?!  We don't believe in Halloween and what it represents.  I would no more let my kids participate in Halloween than I would let them march in a gay pride parade.  People say, "Oh well its just harmless fun".  That may be true and I even did it a few times myself when I was a kid.  But I didn't understand back then what I understand now.  Ever noticed that all of the things that make Halloween have to do with the dead and evil?  Now, we are Christians who try to live out what we believe and what the Bible tells us. And if you go looking for God's direction about such things it's pretty easy to come to the conclusion that this isn't really a good thing.  But i'll leave it up to everyone else to decide what is best for their family.  "As for me and my house"....you know the rest.

Also, for those who think its too traumatic on the kiddos to not participate I can only tell you it hasn't been that way for us. Sure at first it was a little tough when they were too young to understand. We have a child with special needs who is always extremely concerned with fairness.  And she now get's why we don't participate and she's cool with that, because she's read the Bible and we've been very upfront with her about our stance on the whole thing.  Her big problem is that the other kids get to stay up later than her and "that's not fair".  LOL   Things could be a lot worse.

Anyway, enough ranting.  I didn't want to write a big apologetics lesson on why Christian's shouldn't celebrate Halloween.  That's been done and frankly it's been done a lot better than I could do it.  If you're interested in it just Google "Christian response to Halloween".  I'm not trying to tell anyone else how they should live.  But please don't look at me like that when I tell you we don't celebrate Halloween. 'Cause I might just tell you why I think you should know better.

Danielle's Ice Cream Dream

We're gonna do our first JDRF walk as a family this coming October!  Danielle is totally stoked about it.  The name she picked for her team of walkers...."Danielle's Ice Cream Dream"

Danielle was diagnosed with Type I diabetes when she was just two years old.  That seems like a long time ago now since she's about to turn eight years old.

It's been a constant challenge but it's developed in her a BIG HEART and she loves to give to others.  I know she would love it if they found a cure, but more than that she just wants to help others. 

Please consider giving to the cause.  You can donate to her, or to me (I'm trying to raise $100 also) or to the Ice Cream Dream.  (Team name: Danielle's Ice Cream Dream)

Thanks for being a part!

Donation Page - Just mention the team name or my name....Arron Vickery

http://www2.jdrf.org/site/PageServer?pagename=walk_homepage

Danielle's Dad

Baylor the Dog and social networking

Image via Wikipedia

If we call our social network Facebook, then what would a dog call theirs?  Let me explain...

Tonight my trusty canine companion and I went for a jog/walk around the block in my neighborhood. It was a beautiful evening with puffy clouds backlit by an almost full moon. The sun had been down less than an hour and already the calm of evening had settled in. As we walked down the streets in my neighborhood, Baylor would zig and zag from front yard to front yard. Each pile of leaves and every mailbox he came to he took the time to sniff and mark.  Almost as if he was a scientist collecting specimins and cataloging them for later recall. Now if I had simply been 'walking the dog' I might have just observed and allowed him to go about his business.  But I was actually trying to get some excercise. And this constant stopping and starting didn't fit into my fitness plan. I mean I understand the concept of interval training, but I think you have to sustain enough activity to get your heart rate up for that to work. This was most annoying and I let Baylor feel my annoyance by jerking him out of his three-legged stance many times.  Two thoughts came to my mind as I was trying to establish a decent pace: 
1.Why is it so important for him to pee in the exact same spot as every other dog in the neighborhood? 2.Where does he store all this extra water?

As I rounded the next corner a thought occurred to me.  What if he's just trying to stay up on all his friends... his aquaintances...his "peeps"? (I guess in his case it would be..."pups"? I know, i know...)  Then it hit me. It was an epiphany of sorts. Running around and peeing on everything and sniffing where other dogs have done the same is the canine version of Facebook!

Of course, there are many other questions that now need to be answered.  How do they "poke" one another?  What is the equivalent of a "friend request"?  Is there such a thing as "like" in their little offline community?  The list could go on and on. But the question that made me lose my ability to keep running as I choked on my own laughter was the last one....If we call ours Facebook, and dogs sniff each other's behinds, what would you call their network???.....Think about it!

Stories my kids love to hear... Pt. 1 "The flamming marshmallow"

Recently my kids have been asking me to tell them stories about when I was a kid.  We started this tradition during the evenings when I'm home that I would tell the girls stories during dinner.  Its been a runaway success. More than I ever thought it would.  They think I'm the greatest story teller ever.  Little do they know that I come from a long line of story tellers!  My Dad, my brother, my uncle on my mom's side, my grand-father on my mom's side, my wife's dad, my wife's grandad and I'm sure generations that I never met. Apparently spinning a yarn is embedded deep within the DNA of both the Vickery's and Inzer's.  So, although I realize that I'm probably just an average story teller in light of my ancestors and contemporary family members, my kids love to hear me tell stories.  Now, the stories that my kids really like to hear me tell are not just any stories.  They always want to hear stories about when "I was a kid."

My upbringing was not quite Norman Rockwellian, rather a little bit more like "the Little Rascals". My older brother and I spent our school years living with our mother who was single and worked full time. There was always plenty of time for hi-jinks and mayhem.  During the summers we traveled to the Arizona desert where my Dad was stationed at William's A.F.B. outside of Phoenix.  In both locations we found friends, neighborhood bullies and plenty of adventure to occupy us.  Many of my stories come from these times. Simpler times. Very good times. Here is the first of what I hope will be many of these stories...

Camping has been a part of my life since I was a baby. In the countless 35mm slides that document my early years I've seen pictures of me with diapers on (and without) sitting around camp fires and the outdoors. Many of these early scenes were in the northwest part of the country where I was born. Later, many of them took place in the wilderness and mountains of Arizona. You see my brother and I would spend our school year in South Carolina with our mother. But once school was out we got to go out west. The old west!  Arizona.  The place that gave birth to the legends of Tombstone and Wyatt Earp. It was a great way to grow up.
 

Camping was just something we did with my dad in the summers. One summer, when I was around 7 years old, we were on one of our yearly trips to the mountains of Arizona.  We had setup camp close to a lake and were enjoying an evening around the campfire. You can't really have a campfire without roasting marshmallows, at least not if you have kids camping with you. So we were roasting marshmallows.  I use the term roasting lightly. Charring or torching might be more appropriate. You have to get close so that your eyebrows feel singed in order to get the end of the stick to the right location just outside that orange glow at the hottest part of the fire. Well, my older brother Shane had just achieved the perfect positioning of his whittled spear tip full of marshmallows. And as we were all admiring his ability to reach the perfect cooking placement he raised that heavenly harpoon and it burst into flames.  He immediately began to wave it around in the air to try to extinguish the ignited treats. I mean what kid wants chocolate, graham crackers and ash?  Well, as he soon found out, the more he waived them around the brighter the flames burned. With this realization he began to panic and started wildly swinging them back and forth. What all of us failed to see in time was the fact that I was standing directly in his path in my cutoff jean shorts. I was already about five feet off the ground by the time I realized that my leg was ablaze with burning goo. I of course let out a scream that no little girl for three counties could rival. Lucky for me my dad had seen all of this happen and had swooped in, picked me up and was carrying me to the nearby lake shore. What seemed like a forever at the time really only took about 3 or 4 seconds before I was thrown into the dark water and the flames were extinguished. As I realized that I was sitting on the bottom of the lake I rose to my feet where the water was about to my knees. I was in shock. But I doubt my eyes were near as wide as my brothers were as I'm sure he thought his short life was about to come to an end at the hands of my father.  Thinking back, I wish I had a picture of the look of sheer terror on his face more than anything.

Recently at a family gathering over the Christmas holidays we told this story again and all laughed hardily. No one laughed more that I did. Especially as dad summed it all up by telling us how somehow every time we went camping we managed to go through an entire first-aid kit.

The Little Rascals: The Complete Collection

A Tale of Two Cities...2010 in review

Image via Wikipedia

Now that we're a couple of weeks into 2011 I'm finally getting around to putting down some thoughts about what we've been through in the last year.
Really, to frame last year properly I have to go back to the end of 2008.  In October of 2008 my family and I were living in Mesquite, Texas. Things were pretty much the same for us as they had been for the last few years.  I was working for the same company that I had been with since 2003. We were able to have Shelly stay home and homeschool. We felt like that we were blessed. But really I had hit a glass ceiling at my job. There really didn't seem to be growth opportunities. We had a good church and the same few good friends that we had known for the last few years.  Life was by no means bad, it just wasn't very exciting or fulfilling.  But the really sad part was that we didn't even realize it.  We were in maintenance mode, stuck in a self preservation rut!  Life had become about keeping the kids healthy and not going into more debt.  Not bad things to be concerned about, but not quite what we were hoping for when we married.
So there we were with our heads down going through the day to day when two events happened that would put things in motion to cause change in our lives.  First, my company "merged" with a competitor.  Now they called it a merger but in actuality it was a takeover. My company decided to basically sell our division to the other company but they were too chicken to tell us employees what was really going on.
The other thing that happened was that my mother was diagnosed with an aggressive form of Lung Cancer.
I won't go into too much detail on either situation but to say that it made 2009 a very difficult year for me especially.  After a round of Chemotherapy and a summer of remission, Mom succumbed  and passed away on December 22nd of 2009.
Work was no where near as bad as loosing a loved one, but I was having by far the most difficult year of my career. All of the leadership from my old company had been replaced by people from the purchasing company. Managers were let go and everyone who knew me, and the reputation I had spent 5 years building up, were now gone or demoted back to new hire status. When you work in implementations, new hire status means you get the really crummy gigs. The ones with the longest travel. I myself had gone from being a senior consultant to being 'low man on the totem pole'.  So, I was back on the road full time traveling every week for 4 or 5 days a week. And to make it worse, I was working for idiots who knew less about their jobs than I did. On top of all of this in October of 2009 while working in my backyard, I dislocated my right shoulder so bad that it required two surgeries and a lot of physical therapy that lasted half way through 2010. The end of 2009 I spent burring my mother and wondering how things could get worse.
The one bright spot had been that I got a call from a recruiter who found my profile on Linked In and called me about a position with a medical center in Mississippi of all places. It was a supposed to be a step up and a lot more money.  This happened in early December.

So, there is the setup for 2010. Along about the second week of January I was driving back from South Carolina where I had been gathering my inherited furniture and stuff. (anyone from Texas will understand this next thought)  I remember looking around as I was passing through Mississippi and thinking, "how could I leave Texas for this place?"  I got back to Texas and went back to work.  I ended up having an interview with the medical center and it went well, or so I thought.  I waited and nothing ever happened.  So in my mind I wrote it off as a dead opportunity.  In the mean time, things continued to stay bad at work.  Some of you perhaps have read one of the first posts in this blog..."No Score and 7 years ago today". It was about this time in early March and in this environment that I finally came to a decision that it was time to leave my place of employment and find another job. Even if the economy was bad, I decided that I just couldn't stand it anymore.  Besides, recruiters were still calling pretty regularly. I followed up on one of these calls and I interviewed for a position at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.  It seemed to be perfect and I let my emotions get wrapped up in that opportunity.  It seemed to be just what I was looking for.  I'd be off the road and at a well respected hospital with room to grow my career.  Well, after going back for several return interviews I got the cold shoulder.  I was upset and couldn't understand why they had strung me along if they weren't interested. It turns out that the recruiter actually screwed up my chances by not following up with them letting them know I wanted the position after telling me to "let him do the negotiating".  Don't ever use Tek Systems in Dallas for an employment recruiter!  So it was back to the drawing board. By this time in May I was beginning to think that perhaps I would never get out of this rut.  The thought occurred to me that perhaps God was trying to teach my something that I just wasn't learning.  I'd certainly heard plenty of well-meaning friends and preachers say something to that effect.  I mean why were things staying so bad for so long.  And why couldn't I get out of the work situation I was in?

In mid-June I got a call from the same recruiter that had called me about the position in Jackson, Mississippi.  Things had changed at that company and they were going a different direction but they still had my resume and were interested in talking to me about helping them implement a new software package.  I gave it some thought and said, "what they heck".  I still didn't want to move to Mississippi but at least it sounded like they appreciated my talents and abilities. So while I was on site with another client I set a noon appointment for a phone interview. That turned out to be one of the best decisions I've ever made. There is another post to this blog about those days so I'll just skip ahead to say that I started with my new job on Aug 16th of 2010.

What a difference!  There were so many things that changed for us when we decided to take a leap of faith and move to Mississippi. 

1. First was my Job situation.  I had forgotten what it was like to actually enjoy going to work.  The people I was working with were glad I was there and seemed more pleasant to be around. And now six months into this job I've already received a promotion to program manager over a great team of folks. Plus, I am now able to be a Dad that is going to be around. No more missing all those simple but important moments that happen around the dinner table and while you're tucking your kid into bed. 
2. Second had to do with my girls.  The neighborhood we lived in back in Mesquite was fine we thought. But when we moved into our new neighborhood we immediately saw a difference.  We knew every family on our street by the end of the first week here. And on top of that there is a little girl my kids age that lives directly across the street from us. I guess the best way to describe how this has changed our lives is in what my oldest daughter who has Asperger's syndrome told us. She said she prayed for some friends and now she has one. If you know anything about asperger's you understand what a miracle this really was. Now, our kids bounce in and out of her house and she does the same to our house. I'll just sum it up by saying it's really a great neighborhood where we actually know and like our neighbors. 
3. Another great thing is how my wife is so much happier than she was before.  A few weeks after moving here we met a great family that homeschools and sees many things the way we do. My wife and the mother in that family have become fast friends.  Their practically inseparable. All because we listed an extra refrigerator we had on craigslist and they responded.  Talk about a God directing your steps...
4. The last way is definitely not the least in this list. It has to do with how we feel God has brought us to a new church for such a time as this.  Our church back in Rockwall, TX is a wonderful church. And we had been there for almost 15 years. We were married while attending there. Our children were dedicated and baptised there. And we have lifelong friends and mentors from there. Some of whom we are still very close with. But sometimes you just have to get out of the nest if you want to really fly.  That's really what I feel God is doing with us here. We've started attending a great new church called Highland Chapel.  It's a church plant that is less than a year old. But we really feel like its home already and love the vision and excitement of what is going on there.  I think this could actually be the main reason we are here.

I left out a lot of details. Some because I just don't recall them right now. Some because it would really make this blog post into a documentary and very lengthy. (if it's not already) But the main thing that I'm taking away from 2010 is this.  God isn't finished with any of us yet.  And he's not punishing any of us for our past failures or how stupid we've been.  So what if you aren't the fastest learner.  God used some pretty stupid people in the Bible.  He even had a donkey speak when it was needed.  He can use us and he's still looking to do just that.  He can turn things around. Don't think he can't.

Two cities.  Dallas and Jackson.  The book is now closed on one and a new chapter is underway on the other.  I wonder if it's really Dallas and Jackson or is it this earthly city and Heaven?