When Your Child Struggles

With one lap to go, my child fell behind his teammates running around the soccer field. From the look on his face, I knew something was wrong. Not something as simple as a stitch in the side or a sore ankle, but a wound that burned far deeper.
As soon as practice was over, he followed me to our truck. “I don’t think I want to play soccer anymore,” he confided, head hanging.
“You don’t?” I asked. “Was it hard today?”

Perseverance, when you want to quit

On a recent Saturday, I caught a TED Radio Hour talk on NPR with Diana Nyad, the first person to swim 111 miles non-stop from Cuba to Florida. For the next quarter-hour, I was spell-bound as Nyad shared her journey of perseverance, overcoming multiple failures, physical challenges, and pain so severe that jellyfish stings caused her body to go into convulsions.