Perspective, Thanks and Link Love

Thanks so much to everyone who weighed in and gave me some great advice over "The Big Dilemma". I tell ya I'm sorta glad only one of my kids is in sports. I don't think I could go through some of this stuff with three of them. And when you see your kid really hurting that old Mama Bear instinct just rises in me. You know; protect your young. But you all are right. This is a perfect opportunity for her to learn that life is not fair and how to walk through it with grace and leaning on Jesus.

We've never quite experienced this kind of coaching in her "career" as a basketball player. Her former coaches have always been very supportive and treated players fairly. Her last that she had for 2 1/2 years, was very competitive yet was able to balance playing the girls fairly, at least communicating to them exactly what he wanted. And she also had him as a coach in club for two years where it was very much a family atmosphere and parents and the coach talked freely. So this is a huge learning curve for me also, this negotiating the choppy waters of competitive high school sports and new parent-coach relationships, or lack thereof. I think what's been the most frustrating for her is going from a top player in junior high to having her position changed and then not being played as much last year as they decided what on earth they wanted to do with her (they said she was no longer tall enough to play post), then deciding they were going to change her around, the learning curve of learning the new skills and then all of a sudden being thrown into something she hadn't worked on in a year and then sat out because her performance wasn't there. Anyhow, it's a day past it and she went to practice and still worked hard. Good for her, I don't know if I could have been so mature at her age of 16.

Anyhoo, all that to say, thank you all for helping out this mom to have a little perspective on the situation and for granting to me your sage advice and your prayers.


And moving right along, there have been some awesome posts out there in the last few weeks. I wish I would have wrote them all down but I'd like to pass on a few that I remember.

~ Barbara H. at Stray Thoughts posted a wonderful Christmas version of I Corinthians 13 here

~ Kari at Oodles of Blessings has had a wonderful series running where she takes different characters from the Christmas story and gives us their perspective of that wonderful event. It started a little while ago but if you go now you can catch up. It's well worth it. It starts here and then you can see the rest of the posts in here sidebar to get to todays.

~ Linda at 2nd Cup of Coffee posted this hilarious perspective on a popular Christmas gift exchange.

~ Christine at Fruit in Season had a great post on the atmosphere in your home here and she has Mr. Linky set up with others writing on the same subject.

~ Carol at She Lives had a great post on what you can learn from each character involved in the Christmas story here.

There have been tons more this week. I really need to write some of these down. Enjoy the ones I remembered.