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Seeking Excellence
Seeking Excellence provides people with the purpose, direction, and motivation to relentlessly pursue their God-given mission in life.
This community is about becoming fully alive through living a life of excellence.
We will discuss all things excellence including fitness, mental health, relationships, personal finance, Christianity, and social/cultural issues.
Join us here if you're ready to be your best!
This community is about becoming fully alive through living a life of excellence.
We will discuss all things excellence including fitness, mental health, relationships, personal finance, Christianity, and social/cultural issues.
Join us here if you're ready to be your best!
Interested? Want to learn more about the community?
Nathan Crankfield@nathancrankfield
January 16, 2023
Exodus 90 - Week 1 Reflection
Week one of Exodus 90 has been very analogous to one who has very recently converted to living the Christian life. It has simultaneously seemed both easy and immensely difficult at times.
It's easy in that the fruits are very clear. The best thing about Ex90, in my experience, is the time you get back. While you still have the same 24 hours in a day, they just seem to pass by so much slower when you remove so many of the noisy distractions.
When you boil life down to the necessities, you start to realize that many of the "nice-to-haves" aren't so nice to have after all. Yes, I missed watching playoff football this weekend (quite badly, actually), but I did enjoy the time I got to spend with my wife, the extra time spent reading and in prayer, and the additional silence the absence of TV has provided.
However, Exodus 90 is also difficult. The most challenging part is convincing yourself that the additional suffering of cold showers and the removal of small pleasures like having cream in your coffee actually do mean something. It's hard not to cheat, when cheating is so easy, and when sticking to your commitment seems so pointless.
So it is with the Christian life. Surely, we have all experienced the abundance goodness of God in some moments of our lives. It's likely what has encouraged us to take some steps toward God, no matter how small, in hopes of experiencing more of His abundant life.
But it's hard at times to see how skipping some seemingly insignificant tasks will lead to your lukewarmness and mediocrity. Do I really need to pray before my meals? Do I have to go to mass EVERY Sunday? I can always just go to confession next week. And so on.
Exodus 90 is great because it provides you with a path toward personal renewal and greatness. Christ and the Church also provide us with a path toward greatness, but it is undoubtedly broad and at times unspecific. Yes, the Church has timeless truth and wisdom that apply to our current lives, but we have to prayerfully discern and plan for how we can apply that to our every day living.
I am so grateful to be doing Ex90 at the beginning of the new year because I think it's such an excellent time to evaluate such things. The world needs us to be better. The world needs us at our best. And the devil will use every distraction possible to prevent that from happening.
So today, I encourage you to evaluate what distractions in your life are keeping you from doing the little things that add up to your personal greatness in Christ. God wants to do great things from you, but he requires that you cooperate and participate in your own transformation. It will certainly be both extremely difficult and more rewarding than you could ever imagine.
Be your best.
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"My daughter was really offended by your talk last night." 😅
"My daughter was really offended by your talk last night."
Someone dropped this bomb on me unexpectedly after daily mass this past summer. Although I can sometimes be a bit dicey and bold in my presentations, I was pretty shocked to hear it.
I had given a talk to middle schoolers the night prior on how our faith can help us in managing sadness, anxiety, and stress.
After mass the next day, I was walking in the convention center and was stopped by a woman who asked if I spoke to the middle schoolers the night prior. I responded in the affirmative.
"My daughter was really offended by your talk."
In a flash, I try to recall what I said that might have been the trigger for offense. Nothing came to mind. So I inquired, "Interesting. What was it that bothered her?"
"She said that you told the kids that if you experience anxiety, you can essentially pray it all away. And she has been clinically diagnosed with severe anxiety so it upset her."
"AH okay, I see the misunderstanding here" I ...
00:56:59
I am a Charlie Kirk, not a George Floyd
Over the last few days, I've taken a lot of time to reflect on the importance of this moment for our nation and for the Church.
Here are further reflections on these recent events and what I think we ought to do from here.
00:36:22
The Lion and the Lamb - What We Can Learn from the Life and Death of Charlie Kirk
Yesterday, we lost a legend in the Christian movement in our country and world.
Charlie was a great force for good.
We remain here on earth to continue fighting the same mission - advancing truth, beauty, and goodness against the evil forces who work against us.
I encourage you to battle the temptation to hate or become cowardly in the face of hate. More than ever, we need love and courage to guide our words and actions.
00:34:02
Multiple hard truths can be believed at the same time
An important thing to remember is this - multiple things can be true at the same time. You can easily believe all of the following statements, which I believe shouldn't be controversial at all :
1) Taxes are taken by threat of imprisonment or heavy fines, aka by force, and meant to be used for improving society as a whole.
2) If you're able but unwilling to work, you should not have any aspect of your life subsidized by taxes.
3) If a person loses their income, it is good for them to receive help while they look for more work.
4) It is also good for the poor, children, the sick, the physically and mentally disabled, and the elderly to receive help if they are unable to work or feed themselves.
5) It is best for both #3 and #4 to come from personal charity rather than taxation. And this is what was done for most of the history of Western Civilization.
6) Taxes are not charity. They do not produce the virtue of generosity. And they sterilize the relationship between the giver and ...
Should Christians support food stamps/SNAP?
About 42 million Americans lost access to SNAP (commonly known as food stamps) and EBT over the weekend, sparking a frenzy of online debate about the necessity and fairness of the system.
Government shutdowns are always somewhat of a goofy thing. Many in the government continue to work and get paid, like Congress and the Military (for the most part).
For the average American, we don't see much impact on our day to day lives. Nothing at all in my life has changed since the government shutdown aside from the news stories I consume.
That changed over the weekend as tens of millions of Americans lost access to their grocery money.
Some have pointed out that kids, the disabled, the sick, and the poor - the very people Jesus cared most about - will go hungry as a result of this.
Others have pointed to stories and testimonies of young, able bodied people who are taking advantage of the system and simply refuse to work out of a sense of entitlement.
It's one of those topics where we typically see ...
Happy Halloween from the Seeking Excellence Team!
What Is the Real Value of Stay-at-Home Moms?
Addressing the extremes of what society claims this vocation is worth
According to Investopedia, the real income of a stay-at-home parent exceeds $200,000. But is that based on reality?
For context, my wife stays home full-time with our children. We are very pro-stay-at-home moms around here—that should already be well known.
However, I am very opposed to skewing the numbers to make a financial point. The Investopedia article does precisely that. I have two significant issues with it.
First, it’s simply dishonest (which I’ll explain in a moment) and therefore unhelpful for those trying to decide whether to have a parent stay home full-time.
The second issue is that the article is materialistic in nature, focusing primarily on a financial argument for a decision that is fundamentally human, formative, vocational, and, for many, spiritual. It prioritizes money over the two most valuable aspects of having a stay-at-home parent, both of which are priceless.
Let’s address the dishonesty first. As you can see in the screenshot below, the article accurately assigns national average costs to the general work done by a stay-at-home parent.
This part is true: that's what you'd pay individuals to do those tasks. The problem, though, is that only the top 1% of society actually hires people to do that work. My wife doesn’t save us money by doing our laundry, cooking our meals, cleaning the house, or driving the kids around.
Why? Because if we both worked, we wouldn’t pay anyone to do those things. In most dual-income households, people end up doing all that work ON TOP OF their full-time jobs. Full-time working and parenting is an absolute grind, there’s no doubt about it.
My wife does save us money on childcare, but it doesn’t come anywhere near $130k per year for two children, unless I were hiring private trilingual tutors at the highest end of the cost spectrum.
Some two-income households have family members watch their children or other arrangements that cost $1,000 a month or less, so the $130k price tag to cover 14 hours of childcare per day is just absurd.
Now, I understand why people do this. It’s an extreme reaction to society’s growing distaste for traditional family values. When the world rejects the value of motherhood, we try to amplify it using the one measure the world respects most: money.
But money isn’t the best way to measure the value of the stay-at-home parent lifestyle and their contribution to the family. My wife would be the first to tell you that the most valuable part is the extra time she gets to spend with our kids.
By the time our children are 5, Emily will have had almost an extra 10,000 hours with them that she'd otherwise have missed out on. That has a massive impact on their character formation, familial bond, and education.
What’s in it for me, the provider? Besides the satisfaction of those extra 10,000 hours for my wife and kids, it’s the massive increase in leisure time I get because someone is managing the home full-time.
No, this doesn't mean I never help out around the house. But I don’t have to split cooking meals, doing laundry, and many other chores because she handles the majority of them while I’m working.
Then, when I come home, I'm able to enjoy the meal she's prepared and take over the kids for a couple of hours before we tag-team bedtime. I get to play with the kids every evening instead of washing dishes or cleaning the house. It’s a win-win: she gets her much-needed break from the children, and I get my precious time with
them.
That said, becoming a one-income household is definitely a financial decision. The problem with Investopedia’s math is that it distorts the financial bar of entry.
Most approach the financial
aspect of one parent leaving their job
through a simple equation:
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