Just to add to the ‘way too much’ nature of this blog: I learned to play the drumset in Jr. High on the school’s acrylic drums.  They were clear, tuned poorly, and older than the entire drum section’s ages combined.  We loved them.  We played and played on them.  No animals or trees were harmed in their manufacturing, unless of course you consider that plastic is a petroleum biproduct, in which case animals and plants may have been harmed quite some time ago for their manufacturing.  I’m pretty sure PETA would protest those drums and put paint on them.  We’d probably have hit the PETA members back with the wooden drum sticks we all carried around with us EVERYWHERE.

Have you ever found something so revolutionary that it changed the way you did things? In my life I have found a number of things that made my head spin, my world clearer, or my world bigger. In the late 90’s one such idea came from a book that really got me churning that was called “The Five Love Languages.” It seemed to make relationships between a husband and wife simpler and easier to grasp than the odd complexity I had developed prior to reading it.  It made me want to explore love with my bride-to-be.  The problem with such concepts as the five love languages is that people hear them, learn them, or come into contact with them and them get set off in the wrong direction because they don’t understand them as merely principles.

If you’re not familiar with the five love languages let me give you this simple list of the five:

1. Words of Affirmation
2. Quality Time
3. Receiving Gifts
4. Acts of Service
5. Physical Touch

The gist of the book is that each person has a primary way that they perceive  and express love with their spouse.  Furthermore each spouse is strongly encouraged to explore their partner’s love language and keep that in mind when expressing love for him or her.  I spent quite a bit of time liking the idea of focusing on exploring my bride’s love language and even figured out that this could be used, in a modified way, with my friends to express care for them.  Ta-da!  So did the book’s authors and other books in the series of love languages and their application were born and money was had through conferences, tests, merchandising and copyright infringement lawsuits from unlicensed tattoos [I made that last one up].  This is psychology stuff, so I’m sure that someone also discovered a sixth, seventh and eighth love language and has been trying to write papers proving the adequacy of those numbers of love languages for thesis papers and making a good practice out of helping marriages and relationships discover their tertiary love language.

Here’s the rub: this is overly complex despite the simplicity and it gets used as a poor excuse for husbands and wives to not love one another.  At least not to their fullest.  I want to explain that moving forward from here I’m going to be focused on a few Bible verses that I think make the five love languages childs play, and probably unnecessary.  The first place we should take a look is Ephesians 5:22-27:

Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless.

What I see as I meditate on the above passage is something beyond the five love languages and something that should drive a wife absolutely coo-coo-bananas in love with her husband.  A self-sacrificing husband.  A guy who takes the five love languages in, sees their inadequacy, and says, “I’m going to love you in a million ways, and these five are merely a tiny, tiny tip of the iceberg.”  I recently saw on Twitter a guy who said that he was sorry to his wife (publicly on Twitter?) that his primary love language was acts of service.  Lameness.  If her love language is knitting pot holders it doesn’t matter.  If his language was bringing stray cats home to be fed, bathed, and neutered it doesn’t matter.  Sacrificial love trumps all of the given concepts of love languages because it looks for opportunities to love in every aspect, every place, and it is not strapped to a single, primary concept of perceived or expressed love.

As a secondary point against not stopping with this love language concept is that one of the joys of my marriage with my wife has been exploring each of the facets of expression of love and trying to see how they can be expressed in deeper, more meaningful ways.  Just as humans mature (or at least should mature) we look for ways to express love in a sacrificial, yet exploratory way.  To make a food analogy just because I like vanilla ice cream doesn’t mean I don’t explore toppings, other flavors and other combinations within the world of ice cream (or frozen desserts).  The same analogy applied to music means I don’t stop at the Beatles just because I like rock and roll quartets.  Bring on trios [Cream], duos [Simon & Garfunkel], classical, dance, beat boxing, and opera*.

I’ve discovered that my wife pretty much likes all five love languages [in different quantities at different times] because she knows that they’re expressing love to her.  I would probably not be wrong in saying that 99.999% of guys love physical touch [which often gets interpreted as physical intimacy, and for the sake of argument I'm going there now], but if let us face the facts: not all gals are wired for 24/7 physical touching and there may come a time when they’re bleeding, PMS-ing, medically unavailable, or holding a kitchen knife.  It might be a good time, Mr. physical touch, to explore the finer nuances of quality time, words of affirmation, gifts [read: chocolate], or acupressure to relieve headaches.  Sacrificially speaking get a grip, turn off your hormones for a moment and love your wife some other way so she doesn’t feel the need to lock herself in the bathroom, wear chain armor, or buy a slice-wire-bikini from Victoria’s Secret Weapon.

I want to close by saying I don’t hate the general principles behind the five love languages.  They were a good starting point for me and helped me grasp why I might be miss-communicating with my bride-to-be.  They’re not an excuse to be short sighted, justify weaknesses, or get in a rut.  Make it a point to look for ways to create a richer, more complex relationship with your spouse by abandoning your love language and loving with your exploratory, revolutionary hats on.

*Stay away from country music which is an infectious disease [Just kidding (Not really)]

I am not lying to you when I say I have bought a new filter for my shop-vac.  That’s right, I have a shop-vac with a new filter and I am ready to use it.  I am ready to make that filter wish it was never born.  It will be like so many washed up Hollywood starlettes wishing that it had stopped sniffing in the powder that I am about to rub off of my walls in an attempt to make them look nice.  The walls will be drywalls, but the shop-vac is a wet-dry shop-vac so I could in theory saturate the walls with water and the vacuum would still work!  Of course a house with saturated walls is not a house, its a home for Sponge Bob Squarepants.  Given the past owner’s penchant for hacks, shortcuts and setting up electrical situations that are sure to start a fire, I think I’ll keep the walls dry.

I’m trying to wrap up the wall work so that when my in-laws come next week for Christmas festivities we all enjoy time together and not working to wrap up the wall work.  In some countries this is unheard of, but mostly because they have not knocked the non-existent wall out from between their non-existent two rooms.  With that in mind, be like congress and stimulate someone’s economy like Cash for Clunkers, only because there are folks in need of chickens we’ll call it Cash for Cluckers.  Take some time to look around the World Vision site and buy a goat, some chickens, sheep, or even help fund a well.  I’d much rather have water be able to get into their lives through a well and have the problem of needing a wet-dry vac.

Speaking of which, does Dyson make a sand sucker?  Because I’m thinking in some of the places I’ve seen pictures of they need that.  Wait, they don’t have electricity… ZAP!!

Jessica is presently in the other room schooling the 4 year old. How did the girl turn 4?! Blows my mind. Anyway, she’s being schooled on greater than and less than and I think she’s got the concept down. It tends to really register once you put the lessons in candy form. Fortunately its autumn and the season calls for candy.

Next month I hope we can teach her pie charts with real pecan pie.

I’m pretty sure that some of you will be wondering about now if I have forgotten that there is a wife and two daughters and a sister-in-law that are part of my life.  I love them dearly, but basically since the beginning of the year we’ve been either sick or traveling or both.  I need to force us all into the same room and force us all to make ridiculous faces so that we can have a picture to post so that those who are more distant will see more closely how crazy we are in digital form.

I love my family and to my knowledge we’re all healthy, Abby’s school is going well as is her dance class and Jessica is starting Evie in gymnastics on Monday next week.  I’m not sleeping tonight (I’ve been up since about 3) for no apparent reason, but I figured I’d take a stab at putting information on this blog that folks might also read.

While I haven’t blogged a lot lately I am posting weird bits on Twitter and you can follow some stuff (and repeats of what’s on Twitter) on Facebook.  Just for fun here are some updates from Twitter that I posted last week on a business trip:

Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: listening to some hip hop bit at the airport. White & nerdy indeed [weird al reference].
Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: customs had *4* sitting employees not open. they were chatting whilst we stood by.
Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: Toronto International better deliver on some cheese after this rat maze.
Canada, you get an “eh” for effort.
Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: applebutter BBQ sauce for the gigantic win. [seek this out]
Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: “These are our dog’s and ponies.”
Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: dog & pony show went well. They want to use a few one trick ponies in another movie.
Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: if we catch the rabbit down this trail I’m totally cutting its foot off for luck.
Kevin & Randy’s excellent adventure: note to self disable EVERYTHING but PowerPoint. Kills bings, bongs, & popups.

All of those “Tweets” [and more!] were done while on a trip with a great guy, marketing director, and handy travel companion, Kevin.  I’d tell you more but I’d have to grill you.