"Obstacles are things a person sees when he takes his eyes off his goal." - E. Joseph Cossman

Transferrable truth from Canada?

It's 6:20 Sunday morning and I'm sitting in a place called "Sugar and Spice" about a mile from Steve & Michelle's house. I've been up since 3:00 and decided I "needed" a very good BACON & egg croissant and a cup of hot black coffee. In my ear buds I've got "The 50 Greatest Opera Arias," my latest iTunes purchase.
Life is good.

We'll leave S & M's house about 8:20 for church. The Sunday School hour is first and then the worship service where Steve will preach in the pastor's absence. Looking forward to that. The kid's good.

There were three purposes for this trip to Phoenix. (Weather wasn't one of them. It will be 108 again today.)
First, time with family. The best.
Second, it was Grandparent's Day at Emily's preschool Friday and that is a "must do" for Grammy and something she's been present for each year since Jason and Emily started at Goddard. It's now just 3-year old Emily there (Jason is K this year) and that only added importance to the event.
Thirdly, and what brought me down this trip, was Caedon's culmination event.

A year ago Josh read a book about being a man and decided Caedon, who will be 13 next week, needed a rite of passage experience as he moved from boyhood into manhood. Over the last 12 months Josh and Caedon have worked together through a series of activities as steps in that passage. And they were very significant activities!

To develop his mental dimension Caedon read six books, all pretty heavy for an early teen. Authors included C.S. Lewis, Stephen Covey, the Harris twins, and a biography of Teddy Roosevelt.
To develop the spiritual dimension Caedon and Josh read through all the NT epistles and discussed their content.
On the physical front they did a number of hikes, including a "rim-to-rim" trek of the Grand Canyon.
As a way to learn a wide variety of skills Caedon and Josh worked together to design and weld up the coolest metal chair I've ever seen that is an homage to one of the Star Wars vehicles. (Don't ask me which one; I'm happily clueless on that whole genre.)

Caedon has nailed everything in each of these areas and done more in a year than most adult men do in a decade. Through the year and all of these activities Josh asked five of us - grandfathers, uncle, pastor and youth pastor - to regularly pray for Caedon, sending us updates on what Caedon was working on.

Unbeknown to Caedon the group of us met at a campground late in the day yesterday after Josh and Caedon had completed a series of hikes. Each of us had written a short assessment of what we saw as Caedon's particular strengths and character traits, and how we would describe what we thought it meant to be a "man." We took turns reading them to Caedon as we sat around the fire tried to avoid the millions of huge ants that overran the campsite.
(At 107 degrees there was no point to a fire.)
Caedon was given a copy of each guy's comments to put away for future reference.

OK, I gotta confess, I'm pretty proud of Caedon and what he's accomplished in the last 12 months, and of his father who practiced some very intentional parenthood. We live in an era when most teen boys spend hours honing their video game skills, not reading "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" or learning how to weld. And most fathers are focused on their career and enjoying their toys, not spending hundreds (!) of hours guiding their sons through a very wide variety of activities to help them grow into manhood.
Maybe the coolest thing is that both father and son had a lot of fun doing these things together. It wasn't always smooth; there were times Caedon needed a nudge to complete an activity. But he did the ALL and did them all well.

Yeah, this ol' grandad is a proud father and grandfather.