A professor once told me:
“You eat breakfast for yourself; lunch for your friends; and dinner for your family.”
I like the commercial advertisement for Stouffer’s Dinners about taking time to have dinner as a family. It’s good for the entire family: young and old, big and small.
Here’s an interesting post from Phil Vischer of VeggieTales fame and the new Jelly Telly.
Children’s attention spans are said to becoming shorter and shorter and relationship skills are lessening. Some say the reason is from social networking websites.
Where do you include young teens in your church ministries — youth?
What happens when a 13-year-old becomes a father? Most preschool ministries and early childhood centers require a person to be over 18 to sign children out. Read on…
This week’s children’s worship lesson was a fabulous reminder to all of us. We must focus on Jesus and listen to Him.
The story is told in Matthew 14 when Jesus walks on the water toward the disciples’ boat. Peter sees Jesus and calls out to Him for an invitation to join Jesus. Peter begins walking on the water towards Jesus but is overwhelmed by the wind and the waves and loses his focus on Jesus; therefore, he begins to sink into the water.
Uh oh! Now he’s getting wet. What to do? Jesus puts out his hand for Peter to hold and Jesus pulls him safely into the boat. The storm then stops.
We need to remember to focus on Jesus and listen to Him. When we forget to focus or get too busy and overwhelmed with other things and don’t listen to Him, we can know that Jesus’ hand is sticking out for us to hold; we must remember to reach our hand out and grab His hand.
This is the day God has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. No matter what happens, God is in it and will pull us through.
As an early childhood teacher, I have very few rules in the classroom and those rules are mostly for safety. I just finished reading in the Old Testament book of Exodus about their rules. Most of the time we think about the Ten Commandments. Ten is a manageable number, easy to remember. But there was actually more to their rules than just ten. Some rules had “fine print” to read as well.
Read Exodus 21 for further explanation.
There were rules for slavery. If it was one way when the slavery work began, then it was to finish the same way, unless something else happened during the slavery work.
There were rules for fighting and different consequences, depending upon who was involved in the fight.
There were rules for theft and different consequences, depending on what was stolen and who was the thief.
My, my, my … Thank goodness we don’t have quite so many detailed rules in the 21st Century or our short-attention minds might not be able to handle it.
Life is hard but we must keep going and pressing on. Yes, that is easier said than done.
Look at Moses and Aaron in Exodus. God told them to free the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. God said he would show them each step to do it but Pharaoh would be stubborn, and yes, Pharaoah was stubborn and would not let the people go. Time after time, try after try, Moses and Aaron had to keep trying to get Pharaoh to let God’s people go free. What if they had just given up after the third or fourth try and said it’s not worth it?
God wouldn’t let them give up. He kept pushing with more commands and they kept trying until finally they succeeded and got out of Egypt.
Yes, life is hard but keep going; keep pressing on. God is there.
I recently finished reading the Book of Job, and I read an interesting point at the end of the book, end of chapter 42.
God blessed Job’s later life even more than his earlier life. In addition to his 7 sons, he also had 3 daughters of whom there was not a woman in that country as beautiful. Their father treated them as equals with their brothers, providing the same inheritance.
I found that to be an interesting point to note since Job is known to have been written around the time of Abraham in Genesis when females were not so much looked upon as male equals, as the males were the ones to carry on the family name.