“Even a beautiful God-scripted love story can never satisfy the way Jesus does. Even the most heroic and Christlike man on earth can never fulfill the longings of our heart like the true Prince and lover of our soul (Jesus Christ). And until we are able to truly make Him our first love, until we are willing to give up our dream of an earthly love story for His sake, […]
Read More →A Bible Study on Humility
“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.” (Philippians 2:3, ESV) God promises some great blessings to those who are humble: A humble person receives God’s favor (Prov. 3:34) A humble person finds wisdom (Prov. 11:2) A humble person finds riches, honor, and life (Prov. 22:4) A humble person will be exalted by God (1 Pet. 5:6) A humble person has the […]
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 →Words
Today Bethany is back with some encouraging words about words! One thing I am learning to appreciate more and more about the people and rooms around me is their general appetite for books. Since the beginning of time, or at least my time, my parents have modeled honest book obsession. This love would have burst out even if they hadn’t intentionally tried to pass it on. It is a […]
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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