We chose to pay our children for some of the work they did in our home. With our family business and 7-1/2 acres of land, we had plenty of extra work to do. Paying children to do some of it gave us the opportunity to teach them about money. First, we wanted them to understand that God had blessed them and that they were to be good stewards of His […]
Read More →Author: Pam
For the Joy That Is Set Before Us
Praise God! A new little man-child has joined the family! Little James Sterling is the first child of our second-born son and his wife, and he actually isn’t so little. He weighed in at 9-1/2 pounds! His birth was painful. It was hard work. Jesus’ words from the gospel of John kept going through my head as I watched our precious daughter-in-law (and our son) labor to bring their firstborn […]
Read More →More on Paying Children
Parents have different opinions about paying children for work in the home. Some are comfortable paying for at least some of the work their children do, while others are not. Some believe that any work done in the home is simply part of being a member of the family. Others believe it is appropriate and even beneficial to pay for some work done in the home. Both approaches have their […]
Read More →God’s Faithfulness Through the Generations
Last week I traveled back more than a hundred years as I sat in our dining room. I saw grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and lots of other people that I’m somehow related to. My mother’s cousin, Tom, had spent more than a year planning a family reunion, and I was helping organize a notebook full of family photos and history for the event. There’s Alice, who worked so hard on her […]
Read More →Putting Off and Putting On
It’s easy to focus on the “don’ts” in our parenting. We invest a lot of time in disciplining our children for their misbehavior, for their bad attitudes, their sinful words, their disobedient and unloving actions. But teaching our children to get along with each other involves more than breaking up fights and taking away coveted toys. We know that they need to “take off” the impatience and pride that so often […]
Read More →Training Our Children to Help with Household Chores
In the days when our children were little, I used to jokingly wish we could afford to hire a maid once in a while to help with routine household chores. Well, that maid never made her appearance. Instead, we decided to hire our own boys. Why not pay them to do work that we would be willing to pay someone else to do? Suddenly our live-in mess-makers became live-in maids […]
Read More →Some of My Favorite People
I just spent almost four days with some of my very favorite people! All my daughters and daughters-in-law (along with their children) ran off to the beach for our annual girls’ weekend away (while the guys did their man thing in the woods). We had sunshine, beach walks, singing, way to much food, and lots of time to talk (when we weren’t trying to keep up with five grandchildren!) Rebekah […]
Read More →Helping Our Children Remember God’s Hand in Their Lives
Last night we watched reminders lighting up the sky all around us. Fireworks, sparklers, booms, and cracklings all helped us remember the battles that men fought to earn our country’s freedom. Independence Day commemorates the beginnings of our nation, and if we want to do our job well, we will take advantage of the holiday to teach our children about God’s hand in our country’s history. Memorials are powerful teaching tools. […]
Read More →God Rebuilding
I love this quote from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity: “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about […]
Read More →Grumbling
“Do all things without murmurings and disputings” (Philippians 2:14). Children grumble. So did the Israelites. Children (and parents) who grumble are grumbling against the Lord. Sometimes, like the Israelites as they faced the Red Sea with the Egyptians at their backs, our children grumble because they are afraid. We can challenge them with our questions and instruction: “What are you afraid of?” “Is God strong enough to take care of […]
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