Describing your child's age can be challenging, especially when talking to those who have not yet had much experience with children themselves. Every so often I'll see a social media post (written or video) complaining that parents are illogical in how they describe their children's ages. A classic one is wondering why parents switch from days to weeks, to months and then years and sometimes back to months. It's a fair question, but their suggestion of just using years is completely unhelpful after even just a few moments of thinking about it.

Most adults use whole numbers of years to describe their age. This makes perfect sense. As I write this I tell people that I'm 58, when in reality I am 58 and 7 months. Like most other adults I just round down. I wont tell anyone I'm 59 until the actual day of my approaching birthday. The reason that this approach is reasonable is that rounding 58 and 7/12 down to 58 doesn't lose much precision. We're dealing with larger numbers and no one really gets that excited about birthdays after 21. (Except my daughter who looked forward to being 25 so she could start saving on her car insurance.)

When we are describing the ages of children, we are dealing with much smaller numbers and a faster rate of change in their development. A year makes a huge difference when observing children. A year really doesn't make difference with me. My height, weight and general feelings about life don't change much across a year. Also, the rounding down thing is tricky, because under a year old, you'd round them down to zero and no one likes being described as zero years old.

Prayer is interesting stuff. And having said that, I feel like I should immediately issue an understatement alert. Prayer is the art of mankind communicating with God and the moment you include the Lord in any matter, the possibilities become limitless. Prayer, therefore, is a big subject. Entire conferences and sermon series have been dedicated to the subject. Scholarly books have been written on prayer, helping us understand the different types and purposes of prayer. This is absolutely right and proper. A good understanding of prayer is important and needful. Back when I was pastoring, I would have my wife teach on prayer on a regular basis. She is a good prayer and very knowledgeable on the subject.

Admiring, as I am, of the scholarly side of prayer, I am a completely uncivilized peasant on the practical aspects. My approach on prayer is that it’s talking to God (and that we should try to remember to shut up now and then because every so often he is gracious and replies to us). So I talk to God throughout the day, not on a schedule, but as I have things that I want to share with the Lord, my friend who sticks closer than a brother. I've been like this since I first entered the church.

One of my first personal observations about prayer was that the best encouragement to pray was seeing answered prayer. There's just something about seeing a matter that you, or others you know, have prayed for be resolved. "Well, that prayer got answered, so I feel good about asking this prayer!"

I love typography and layout design. I'm not a complete type nerd, but I do know that there is a difference between a typeface and a font, and what that difference is. I was the editor and creator of a state-level church magazine for over a decade, so I also have practical experience to back up my theory. There are many important principles to understand when laying out a document, newsletter or magazine. These principles can be treated as the "rules" of design. They can be followed or broken by the designer, but unless the designer does so with a full understanding of the balance between all of the principles, the end result is likely to look messy and unprofessional. (This is why you pay the big bucks for a good designer, otherwise it looks like you're cheap.)

I don't think it's too controversial to say that the design principle, or "rule", that should be "broken" the least often is the generous application of whitespace. Whitespace is literally the space that you leave around the design elements on your page. Most paper backgrounds used in serious design are white (or really close to white), to ensure optimum contrast with the type, so the name and concept are easy to understand. What is not easy is to get designers to apply the concept. There is a horrific tendency in the design world to cram everything in. Leaving ample space around text and other design elements is seen as wasteful. It's as if the customer has said "I've paid for the whole page, so fill it up!" Yet, too little whitespace will leave a page looking cramped and make it hard to take everything in. Just like cooking with spices, design always benefits from the less is more approach. The space on the page allows the text to be read more easily, the message to be more clearly conveyed to the reader. It allows the eye to be able to concentrate on the flow of your page without being distracted by other overly close elements. Good use of whitespace in your design makes understanding your material easier for your reader.

Our lives are very much like a page upon which we wish to layout a design. There is such a strong urge to fill your life with many cool and awesome things, but then you face the same problem that the designers I spoke of have. The designer after they have handed off their design to the customer, and got paid, has the advantage here, they no longer have to live with the design. If it's cramped and difficult to read because of a lack of whitespace, they are unaffected, only the customer has to deal with it. In our own lives we are generally our own designers, so if we create a life that is messy and has too little whitespace in it, we have to live with it. A life with whitespace in its design will be more comfortable to live in.

Back when I was a young and carefree fellow, I was an enthusiastic member of the canoe and kayak club at Plymouth University. Plymouth, with it's deepwater port and Royal Navy dockyard had a breakwater, but a decent amount of swell for kayak surfing got through and if we wanted even more, we could go outside of the breakwater and find plenty of wave action. All of that was true except for when it wasn't, because the sea is almost completely unpredictable. If the conditions were right, then there was "all you can eat" surfing conditions, otherwise the water would be flat and totally unsuitable for surfing.

Plymouth (the one in England, not the roughly 30 Plymouths in the United States named after it) is in the county of Devon. Right next door is the county of Cornwall, where I am from. Cornwall is easy to find on a map of England as it's the pointy bit down in the bottom left corner. Cornwall extends out into the Atlantic Ocean and to the south is where the English Channel meets the Atlantic Ocean. This gives plentiful opportunities for good surf conditions. Some of the waves rolling in from the ocean are big enough that Cornwall is a world renowned surf location.

With the unpredictability of the surf conditions around the coast, the local radio stations have surf reports, where they announce where the waves are around the coast. For the dedicated surfers in the area, they listen to the report and then drive quickly to where the waves are. Because if there's one thing that all surfers know (even us humble kayak surfers), you need waves to surf on, so they will drive to wherever the waves are. This is a fundamental rule of surfing. No matter how much you may wish otherwise, an absence of waves means that you are not surfing. If you want to surf, you go where the waves are. Don't bother complaining, go where the waves are.

I thought that I'd written about this before, but upon checking my notes, I see that I'd put this in the "to be written" folder. Now seems like a good time to pull it out, dust off the idea and actually write it.

I've written before that as a former pastor, a significant amount of the advice you offer to people is non-spiritual general purpose life principles. Often these come from observing other people with the benefit of the detachment that accompanies being slightly distant from the situation. This one I first noticed in myself and then observed that it was a more general life principle as I saw others do the same thing.

We humans, absolutely including me, have a tendency to start doing things that are good for us, but then stop. Sometimes we stop slowly, sometimes it's suddenly, but it’s almost certainly a case of when we’re going to stop rather than if. It's hard to put an exact reason on why this is. Things that are good, do often require more effort, so perhaps it's that we begrudge the work necessary to do well? This is especially likely with exercise where the payoff for the effort seems to take an interminable amount of time to start showing.