When Jesus visits your home, He'll ask for you, dads.
There comes a time in each person’s life when he says to himself for the first time, “Hey, I don’t think I want to stay right here. I want to move over there. I will now do it!”
It’s a big moment. Foster (our youngest) experienced this feeling this week.
Yes, he’s crawling.
I recommend making a Wordle for your family. It’s easy. Just type out a bunch of words that apply to your family – names, activities, hobbies, what’s important to you. Then go to wordle.net, click on create your own and paste in the words. Click ‘Go’ and it image is made for you.
Change the settings if you want and save it. It looks cool and it’s personal. My wife made one about me for Father’s day.
Here’s the JamFam Wordle (i.e. ours):
Some tips:
– I put the words we used at the bottom of this post.
– Put in more important words more than once.
– Hyphenate words you want to stick together.
– Don’t be afraid to make it what you want to be, even if you feel you haven’t arrived yet. For example, we put in ‘glorifying-God’ even though we could do that much better than we currently do.
– Don’t put in secret family data, because the wordle will be available for all to see.
I think every mom or dad blogger should do this. And can I ask, if you do, could you comment it here with a link? I’d like to see them.
Here are the words we used:
Scott Debbie Carl Daniel Barrett Adelyn Anna Erik Foster Foster
Scott Debbie Carl Daniel Barrett Adelyn Anna Erik Foster Foster
Scott Debbie Carl Daniel Barrett Adelyn Anna Erik Foster Foster
picnics Superior Jamison Jamison Jamison Jamison Jamison Jamison Jamison Jamison picnics Fighter-Verse-Songs Fighter-Verse-Songs God God God God God worship singing biking Bethlehem ResponsibleFather ResponsiblePuppet jamsco legos bionicles Vadnais Baptist church 7Kids 7Kids memorizing homeschool adoption Minnesota glorifying-God peace joy love Bible Bible truth Psalm-1 Psalm-1 Planted-by-streams-of-water Armor-of-God geocaching
Dads! Do you work at an office? Let it be known that if people are throwing away paper that is (A) unstapled, (B) un-inked on side, and (C) not confidential, that they should give it to you. Then take it home and let your kids write, do crafts and fold origami with it.
More than once I have come into my office to find a stack of paper a half foot tall waiting for me to take it home, because a printer went goofy and printed out 300 pages of paper with a little squiggle of print at the top of each page. I love those days.
Kids are more creative if they have more paper.
Okay, I have to be careful how to say this – and no, I haven’t seen this at our current church. Bethlehem is great on this issue.
Also, I think this is a bit controversial. I’d like to hear from someone on the other side.
It is widely acknowledged that it is a tricky business trying to determine if your child is a child of God. I know it is a common occurrence for a parent to wonder if the statement of faith or a prayer uttered spoken by their daughter when she was eight (or six or ten) meant that she had truly experienced second birth or if she was merely saying words. This is a given.
So churches shouldn’t add to the complexity of the situation or make things more potentially confusing. And here’s one way that people in children’s ministries (often with good hearts and godly motivations) add to the confusion: by too aggressively encouraging children to make Gospel decisions at church.
I was once, for example, at a presentation to a group of first graders and at the end the pastor said “How many of you would like give your life to Christ? Please raise your hand and one of the leaders will meet with you.” Hands went up everywhere. But that’s what primary-aged kids do. They go along with things, whether they know what it’s about or not.
So now what are the parents supposed to think when their son or daughter, on the way home says “I prayed with a leader tonight. Am I going to heaven?” They may have no idea what the situation was or what the prayer was or what lead up to it.
Might not the mom or dad reasonably be troubled by this? The child’s heart is primarily the parents’ responsibility after all – not the church’s.
Now don’t get me wrong. If a parent, knowing their child’s heart, and the questions they’ve been asking and the behavior they’ve been showing, asks their son or daughter, “Would you like to pray to Jesus right now?”, it may be a very real salvation that occurs – or the beginning of a true process. But if a young child has been approached by a church volunteer to pray ‘the prayer’, and the child agrees and then does it – this signifies just about zero in the heart of the child. To the contrary, it may serve to confuse the child and his parents down the road. We never want to cause false assurance.
What do you think? Am I off base on this?
Other clarifications:
– Age matters, obviously. Teenagers are (or should be) approaching adulthood. They have much more maturity. Altar calls at youth retreats are not what I’m talking about here.
– I am not against teaching kids about their need. The Gospel must be presented to children of all ages (including saved adults – over and over again). They must be taught early and often that they are sinners in need of a Savior and Jesus is that Savior.
– Announcing to a class after the gospel is presented that all of the leaders are available to talk about these things at any time is different from approaching the children individually and asking them if they want to say the prayer.
– So the reader might be wondering – what would I do if a child came up to me* in the middle of a session with interest about how to be saved and wishing to pray. Well, first I would show my genuine interest (if you aren’t genuinely interested in a child’s wanting to understand the gospel, you are probably in the wrong ministry) and ask lots of questions. I would then say “Let’s talk about this with your Mom or Dad – can we do this after Sunday school is done?” and then follow through and talk with the child’s parents with the child present. I’d happily speak to them about the child’s interest. I’d tell the parents of my availability to be a part of the process if the parents wish it. And if the parents aren’t able to carry through with the process of shepherding the child’s heart I would make sure they get the right resources. This could be very helpful in the spiritual life of the parents as well. It would be an honor to be a part of this.
Update: My wife recalls being present with a first grade class where the leader “told the kids that if they wanted to ask Jesus into their hearts, they would get a little booklet which she held up for all to see, and I think ALL the kids raised their hands!”
Not good.
* I have been working with Wednesday night children’s ministries (K-1) for 10 years.
I’m glad you’re here.
While the content that you see here is along the lines of which I plan to keep writing, the look and feel of this blog is still in a state of flux. I will always appreciate your feedback on these matters.
By Voddie Baucham Jr.
The book title says quite a bit. It assumes (A) that Dads should have an opinion on the kind of man their daughter marries, (B) that Dads should expect their daughters to listen to their opinion, and (C) since the book is not titled, What He/She Must Be To Marry My Child, there is an assumption that men and women are different. As a result, the title by itself biases me to like the book, because none of these assumptions are shared by many in our culture. It’s helpful to our country that books with titles like this merely exist.
But let’s open it up, shall we?
In the intro, the author states that he has two goals: “First, to lay out a . . . biblical picture of what moms and dads should be looking for on behalf of their daughter” and second “To provide a road map for men who have a desire to lead their families biblically but simply do not know how.”
Good goals, to be sure, and Voddie succeeds in accomplishing them. But before he gets to the set of traits in men who would marry his daughters he lays a significant foundation of the importance of marriage and a ‘Multigenerational Vision’, which means preparing for the long term as you make decisions about the future of your family. He then lays down a biblical approach for what a God-fearing father should do in the leadership of his family. It’s a pretty daunting list.
And then he gets to the traits of a son-in-law. They are not trivial. When he states that a man who is seeking to date his daughter must be a ‘Follower of Christ’ he doesn’t mean a guy who once said that prayer and now attends church. He means quite a bit more than that and takes a chapter to explain it.
He grounds what he says in scripture and sometimes makes one or two page departures from the main subject to make sure it is clear that his points are biblical.
We recommend this book to anyone who has a daughter as well as any man who eventually wants to marry.
I wrote this review for the review writing program here: http://www.crossway.org/blog
Dads! Do you have a dirty clothes shoot that goes down the basement laundry room? Does it sometimes get clogged? Try this handy tip. Take your wife’s curling iron and, holding on the power cord part, repeatedly drop it down into the shoot until the clog comes loose.
(I’m always looking for tips – email them to me and I’ll post them)
One Carl Story:
My Wife writes – “While getting the boys to bed, Carl was trying to explain to me some mumbo-jumbo about black holes and gravity and time; you multiply and/or divide something by something several times to determine how far back in time something will go. He said that when futuristic spacecrafts get close to a black hole, time slows down . . . “there is actually a three-dimensional box of time, so it’s a time-warp.” When I gave him an eyes-glazed-over-look, he said, “I don’t really get it, either.” Whew.
(Also pictured: Foster – our youngest)
At Cascade Lodge, where we stayed on vacation last week, there is an outdoor chapel amongst the pines. This is the devotional I gave to my family there Sunday morning.
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So Israel has done evil and the Lord has given them into the hands of the Canaanites. For 20 hard years.
And the Prophetess Deborah goes to the military leader Barak and says “God told you to attack them – why haven’t you?” and Barak says “I’ll go if you do”
And they attack this militarily strong army (fit with 900 iron chariots) and God uses circumstances and ordains that Israel conquers.
And when it is all done Deborah and Barak sing a song – a long song, but it begins with this:
That the leaders took the lead in Israel, that the people offered themselves willingly, bless the Lord!
I imagine these leaders, Barak especially, thinking – it didn’t have to go this way. I could have sat around and did nothing and we’d still be oppressed. But God chose that I would choose to go against this strong military force and we won.
Sometimes it takes a Woman to inspire the Man to do the right thing.
As a father who is married to a Deborah (who has often inspired me to do the right thing), their song resonates with me. It is my prayer that in five years, and ten years and one hundred years it will be said of our family:
That the parents took the lead in our family, that the children offered themselves willingly, bless the Lord!
My Son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline or be weary of His reproof, for the Lord reproves him who He loves, as a father the son in whom he delights.
Let us remember that not only is this comparing God’s discipline to a dad’s, but the comparison works the other way around: If you discipline your child in a loving way, you are fathering like God.
This can be encouraging.
Responsible Father 