My Powers are Middling

A velegoraptor

My son received a few new lego sets for Christmas and his birthday (including the impressive dinosaur to the right), so the sight of him scouring a tray full of bricks for a 4x1 black base has become a familiar site.  He's pretty good at finding things himself but every now and then there's a cry of:

"Dad I need your powers!"

because my little boy has discovered that I have a pretty impressive ability to find lego bricks.  And there certainly are a great variety of bricks on that tray; lego has got more complicated since the last time I was looking at it.  Of course you could stick to working only with the old style of bricks, but then you would be limiting what you can build. There's a famous quote that sums this up quite well:

"When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail."  [Abraham Maslow]

What this is saying is that if you don't have many ways of dealing with problems, you have to use those ways even when they don't fit the problems very well  (It is a pretty famous quote, though I only just found out it originally came from a Management Psychologist; my normal source of pithy observations like this is the book of Proverbs in the Bible, but I'll say more about that in another post).  So if the only bricks you know about are the 4x2 and 2x2 Duplo style ones you're not going to make anything very sophisticated.  This applies to lots of other areas too, for example:

1. If your only solution to conflict is to take over and start ordering people around you can solve some problems, but you won't be much help with others.
2. If your only way to unwind is to have a drink, you will end up drinking (and probably drunk) at some inappropriate times.

There's a couple of areas of my life where I already have a few bricks, but I'd like to have a few more.  The two main ones are family culture and getting close to God.  By family culture I mean "the way we do things in our family".  There's some things about "the way we do things" that I'm really proud of: welcoming people, loving each other, playing together, keeping in touch with extended family.  But there's a lot that could be better.  On getting close to God I can say that there are times when I hear and feel God, but I can tell from reading the Bible and from looking at some of the people I know (like my Mum and Dad) that there's so much more.

So what bricks are in your lego box?  And what problems are you trying to use them to solve?