Parenting
What influences our children’s lives the most? As Christian parents we would all like the answer to be that we are the main influence in our children’s lives. We know that is how it should be. [...]
Be true to yourself. Follow your heart. Believe your truth. Love yourself. Don’t let someone else stand in the way of your dreams. Speak your truth. Take care of yourself first so that you can best care for others. Cut from your life negative people who cause emotional stress. Live the best life you can, […]
Most of us recall the recent defection of former “Young, Restless, and Reformed” (YRR) author and ex-senior pastor Joshua Harris. A homeschool movement leader’s kid who went on to become a leading figure of the evangelical sexual purity and “courtship” movement with his 1997 monster best-seller I Kissed Dating Goodbye, followed by Boy Meets Girl: […]
One of the reasons for the wisdom literature in the Old Testament, we are told in Proverbs 1:4, is “to give prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the youth.” The discretion that wisdom bequeaths to those who take up abode with her is not simply a bare knowledge of right and wrong (though […]
If someone had asked me what my highest ambition was as a twenty-year-old, I would have said, “To be a wife and mother.” I had it all planned out—I was going to be a flawless, well-heeled, stay-at-home mom of six who ran errands in my immaculate SUV, prepared glorious dinners, and enjoyed fancy date nights […]
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2015 224 pages (hardcover), $27.95 Americans living at the beginning of the twenty-first century enjoy unprecedented human freedom, or so we are told. We have myriad sources of entertainment and information available to us at the touch of a button, along with the means to pay for and the leisure time to […]
Even before he was born, my son interfered with my participation at church. The exhaustion of pregnancy sent me to bed at the same time as evening services began, and when I signed up to provide soup for the Lenten suppers, I had to send the food via my husband so that I could lie […]
The image of the “nuclear” family has always been an ambiguous one for me. Of course, it’s meant to convey a picture of a centered family, anchored by a mom and a dad, with children orbiting around them as satellites, together comprising one of the basic units of society—an “atomic unit,” if you will. (Part […]
We all have days we will never forget. On top of my list is the day when my nineteen-year-old son revealed a new perception of reality. He had always been a top student’a little odd and forgetful at times, but also extremely bright and endued with a sharp sense of humor. Over the course of […]
All Christian parents desire the spiritual well-being of their children. We want our children to be Christians, to get saved, to know God; however we express it, we want our children to be part of the company of the redeemed. We yearn for the blessing of God's covenant grace to be on our children. This […]
I was raised in a Jewish home without a lot of theology. Okay, to be honest, without any theology really. My father never read or discussed the Bible at home, and he was downright hostile to those who were foolish enough to knock on our door spreading their religious views. There was simply no excuse […]
What did I do wrong? What did my spouse do wrong? How could it happen, when we have so many memories of shared Christian experience together? Did I catechize them enough? Love them enough? Was I too strict’or not strict enough? Too inconsistent in the way I lived what I professed? Could I have seen […]
Imagine for a moment that a school in your neighborhood organizes a field trip for one hundred of its students to a nearby zoo and that during this trip a number of large animals escape and end up trampling sixty children. Not only would this become a national news story, but more importantly, it would […]
If your children are in your home for 18 years, you have over 5,600 occasions (figuring a 6-day week) for family worship. If you learn a new psalm or hymn each month, they will be exposed to 216 in those 18 years. If you read a chapter a day, you will complete the Bible 4.5 […]
No matter how Jack provoked me, I never ever struck him. When I first began babysitting him, his mother and I discussed corporal punishment, and we both agreed it wasn't an appropriate disciplinary measure for a babysitter to use. Of course, this was before the memorable even-ing I caught him calmly roasting a gummy worm […]
