For the past few years, I’ve been learning a valuable lesson about life, parenting, and spiritual growth.  We all possess a power that seldom gets used (or is misused).  It is the power of connection.  The development of relationships.  The ability to communicate our thoughts and feelings.  I know this may sound simple, but lets go a little deeper.  Spending time with a person is one of the greatest gifts you can give to them.  Time spent with someone says I care about you.  I love you.  You mean something to me.  It is when there is no time spent that people begin to feel worthless.   One thing I have found in the past few years is that disciplining my children is magnified tenfold when I have spent quality time with them.  It is hard to be an effective disciplinarian when all they ever get from you is discipline.  Consequently, I have been working on spending time with my boys – talking, praying, playing, and much more.  It gives us an opportunity to connect on another level that is not as intense.  By doing this, this opens the door for my kids to share more of themselves with me and me with them.  It was really interesting for me a few nights ago when my son sat down with me to talk.  He told me about how he felt about me some years ago when I was spending a great deal of time away from home.  Naturally he didn’t understand what was going on at the time.  So, I took the time to tell him.  He shocked me when he said, “Wow, I didn’t know that.”  At that moment, I realized that we had never shared with him what was going on (this was during the time when I was working in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina).  So, he had developed an impression of me that was based on him not understand the truth.  It was an eye-opening conversation for me.  This is just one example of how I have come to the realization that time spent with people is a valuable experience.  Think about it…  There is so much more to say about this.