A Time to Sharpen

Brandon tells us at the beginning of each podcast that the ensuing conversation will help us to become better teachers, better counselors, better parents…better people. I always like hearing him say it. Because first of all it reminds me of who our intended audience is, and that’s important when you’re doing a podcast. And second because it reminds me that I am all three. All adults, whether it’s...

Music is the universal language. It crosses the boundaries of culture, gender, age, and race. It speaks to us before we have the words to understand language; and it continues speaking to us even if we lose this ability in old age.  At Whetstone Boys Ranch, we use music to make meaningful connections to our boys. Among other things, we use it to help them cope with emotions, to teach life lessons,...

At least once during a boy’s stay at Whetstone, he will return home for an entire week to test out what he has learned about living with his family. As you can imagine, the boys and parents look forward to this time which comes after months of separation. On the other hand, it is a source of much anxiety…for both parties. Will things be any better than they were?  The answer is always yes, and no....

“I feel the need…the need for speed.” This iconic Tom Cruise line in Top Gun accurately describes the drive that many teenagers feel while they work to create space between their parents and themselves. They want   freedom and independence, and they can’t get it fast enough. Parents, on the other hand, bear the responsibility of slowing things down by asking important questions about safety, direc...

Twice a year, Whetstone Boys Ranch hosts a father-son retreat here in Mountain View, Missouri. Dads travel from all over the country to spend a weekend with their son. They join other dads who work here, along with our counseling team, for a series of guided activities and adventures designed to get everyone talking - talking about expectations, perspectives, frustrations, hopes, and fears. There...

Summer is coming. The kids are going to be underfoot for the next three months, and there is nowhere to hide. If you home school, you might be thinking, “get on my level,” but for most families the next few weeks can be a very stressful transition. Everyone is excited about vacation and free time, but these things are a double-edged sword. At some point, the lack of structure usually starts to get...

God is never not communicating with us. If we can’t hear him, it’s not His fault. We need to pay closer attention to the signs and signals he unceasingly sends us, taking time to reflect in contemplation and conversation.  On this episode of A Time to Sharpen, we will discuss how God speaks to us through our kids, students, or anyone in our care. It behooves us to learn how to listen to what they...

Elvis. Chuck Berry. The Beatles.   Young people flocked to hear them sing. Boys and girls bought their records by the millions, lined their rooms with posters, and toted lunch boxes with their image to school. Young men dressed like them, moved like them, and wore their hair like them. Young women swooned at their feet.    Corporate America took note. The money-making machine went into high gear a...

We’ve all been the new kid on the block. We all know what it feels like to have “all eyes on you.” You’re in a fish bowl, and there is no way out. The faces of people around you are exaggerated by the strange curved glass that distorts your view of them and traps you inside their gaze.  At Whetstone Boys Ranch, we have a boy, or two, or three going through this experience every month, and it’s our...

Change usually happens slowly. Our minds and our bodies are not capable of handling too much all at once. It’s actually kind of unhealthy. Yes, there are baptisms of fire, and God can pull off a ‘road to Damascus moment’ any time he desires, but these seem to be the exception. At Whetstone, graduations are a time to publicly celebrate the change that has occurred within a young man over many month...

A mental note is a lost note. A short pencil is better than a long memory. If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time. That last quote is from Zig Ziglar. The first two my dad told me growing up…like…every day. They were drilled into my soul. “You have to write things down,” he’d say, “or it’s never gonna happen.” This is backed up by countless studies. I don’t know if successful people tend...

Timing is everything. This is true in so many areas of life. It’s true with hitting a curveball. It’s true about making a joke and about offering words of wisdom. It’s true about investing in crypto…boy, is it true about investing in crypto! It’s also true when considering the right time to send a son or daughter to a therapeutic boarding school. Wait too long, and you’ll lose the window that you...

The story of Gideon has some serious ups and downs. He trusts God and then he doesn’t. And then he does. And then God decides that Gideon doesn’t trust Him enough. So God reduces the size of Gideon’s army from 32,000 to 300, “lest Israel” according to the Biblical account, “claim glory for itself…saying, ‘My own hand has saved me.’” It seems that God orchestrates our circumstances at times, so tha...

We are born to run. The human body is built for it – it’s a biomechanical miracle, allowing all of our muscles, bones, and joints to move in synchronization. Little children can do it all day long without being trained how or told why . As we get older, we become more interested in speed and utility. We see it as a means to end. We compare ourselves to others. Our bodies break down. Eventually, fo...

Jehovah Jirah!  “The Lord Provides.” People of the book like to say this, sometimes without thinking. It’s a nice thought to adorn a coffee mug or a t-shirt. Maybe we have a bumper sticker that proclaims it. Nothing wrong with any of this, but there is a danger that its ubiquity strips it of its power. It can become cliché, and as such, something we can take or leave. But when Abraham was sud...

There’s no place like home. Seriously, there is no place like it for tension, and fighting, and feeling like you’ll never measure up. Home is not always the healing balm that God intended it to be. At times it is a battlefield, pitting husband against wife, parent against child, brother against sister. There are tangled barbed wire lines we’re not supposed to cross, and buried landmines that we kn...

It’s that time of year again. Time to buy new shoes for the kids, and a Trapper Keeper, and a fresh pack of unsharpened pencils…or mechanical pencils if that’s how you roll. It’s also time to fill in the spreadsheet with data about who needs to be where and when along with what. And time to figure out a way to pay for it all. It's stressful for everyone. And for families that are already strugglin...

The Bible says that “whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much.” Maybe that’s why we don’t take surly teenagers home from the hospital as new parents. Most of us get a few years to learn the ropes through sleep deprivation, and diaper changes, and playdates. We have few years to grow into the role of being responsible for another human being. God usually gives us someth...

So we’ve established there is a time to quit. We have laid the groundwork of humility and wisdom that needs to prevail in those stressful moments of conflict with our teenagers. We know that maintaining the relationship is more important than winning every battle. But what’s next? What is our exit strategy? How do we drop the rope without abdicating our responsibilities as parents, teachers, and c...

Whetstone is a 6-12 program, meaning that most boys who graduate do so within that timeframe. We also have many boys who are here for far less time, who don’t graduate. Regardless, we try to keep in touch with all of them – whether through social media, phone calls, letters, texts, their parents, word of mouth, etc. Every boy who has spent a single day here is a part of our large and unorthodox fa...

Three times a year at Whetstone Boys Ranch, in the Spring, Summer, and Fall, we take our boys on a week-long adventure in the Ozarks. It’s a lot of work to plan, order supplies, rearrange schedules, pack, and then travel hundreds of miles in a van with all of our equipment. But once we’re there, and we’ve set up camp, we remember that it’s always worth the effort. Lifelong memories are made. Relat...

You’ve seen it on a bumper sticker. You’ve probably seen a meme or a gif. Maybe it’s popped up on a slide during a sermon on Sunday morning: “More Cowbell!” Just 2 words, but their impact is, dare I say, profound. One for the ages! Just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last 20 years, it’s from a classic Saturday Night Live skit, starring the great Will Ferrell. I can’t even begin to...

America has a complicated relationship with cowboys. We could argue about the reasons why and what these reasons tell us about ourselves, but one thing is for sure: everyone seems to like Danny Glover’s portrayal of Joshua Deets in the television miniseries, Lonesome Dove . Rarely has a fictional character demonstrated such “splendid behavior,” to quote the book by Larry McMurtry and the film. On...

Words, according to Albus Dumbledore, are “our most inexhaustible source of magic - capable of inflicting injury and remedying it.” Nowhere is this more true than in therapy. One might even argue that it is impossible to heal past wounds without assigning them meaning through language. It’s not exactly magic, but learning how to communicate is like crossing an invisible bridge you never knew exist...

There is no script for how to help a struggling teenager. To paraphrase the 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns, “the best laid plans of mice and men often go wrong.” Or as the late 20th century American philosopher, Mike Tyson, once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Whetstone Boys Ranch can’t tell you what to do when your son or daughter is spiraling out of cont...