The payback. Think of experiencing something great and wanting to share it. You want others to experience something similar. This drives you to help other couples that haven’t experienced what you have.
Being a parent is one of the most important jobs in the world. I think we can all agree on that. One thing that may differ, is what is the most important aspect of our parental “job description.” If I polled you right now, I’d probably get a different answer from almost everybody. So how can we be effective and successful as parents if we don’t know our most important role?
We’ve been homeschooling one or all of our kids for over eight years. Our boys first and only school experience was via homeschooling. That is until last Fall when we made a big shift and sent our boys to “regular” school.
It was at one of their school’s periodic Saturday School Seminars that an educator shared with us the right, or best, way to parent our boys, and what we were doing was not it.
“Daddy, who are we praying for today? And can we start praying together at the table again?” Those are the words our 7-year-old said the other day. We were five or six days into 21 Days of Prayer with our church, and we’d missed a couple days because our 11-year-old had surgery.
What he said was just a small window into the truth my pastor spoke to me the first time we went through 21 Days of Prayer with our kids. He said, “Your kids will never recover from this.” I’ve witnessed this firsthand. Prayer has changed our family and prayer with our kids has wrecked their lives…for good.
New technology has created a new norm for today’s modern family. We have things at our fingertips that we’ve never had before. But we also have challenges that we’ve never had before. Is technology beneficial in bringing your family together? Or is it actually pushing your family apart?
It’s finally Spring weather here in Indiana! If you are familiar with the weather in the midwest, especially Indiana, you can understand my excitement. We are not too surprised when winter weather is the norm even after March 21st when it’s supposed to be spring. So, when we get several days of spring-like weather we are excited.
For our family, it’s time to pull out the bikes and take some family bike rides. It’s our thing during the spring and summer. We ride around our neighborhood, pack up bikes and go to the park or even downtown Indy. I remember riding bikes during the spring and summer as kids, but it wasn’t the family bike ride like we do today. It was different then.
I heard a quote several years ago that has stuck with me ever since. The quote is the best – maybe the only – way to predict the future.
So far for me, it has been a great forecaster of my future. And that fact has me super excited about what lies ahead for me and my family in the coming years. There are many versions of the quote, so I’ll quote the one I’m most familiar with…
This past Tuesday our homeschooling group had our end of school year presentations. It was great seeing the kids display all they’ve learned this year, but at the same time it was bittersweet.
This closing ceremony marked the end of my wife serving as the director of our homeschooling community. After much prayer and thinking, we decided it’s best for her to step down from this role and get more intentional with our kids’ homeschooling as well as help out with my platform, our web show, and speaking opportunities.
Last month my wife Stephana and I took a trip to Chicago for a conference we were invited to attend as part of the blogger and social media team. The conference was put on by one of our favorite organizations, Awana, which is a nonprofit ministry that serves kids all over the world.
Our kids have been in the Awana Clubs for the past six years and my wife and I have been serving in their Awana Clubs for the past three years. We love it so much and it’s had such an impact on our kids and family that we’ve literally scheduled our calendars around our Wednesday night Awana Club meetings.
While away at a retreat this week I had a conversation with a friend who will be giving his oldest daughter away in marriage this weekend. While we are several years away from that as our daughter is in her mid-teens, I was curious to know what it’ll be like. I wanted to know what he thought and how he felt.
I can only imagine what it will feel like to see my baby girl walk down the aisle and enter into a lifelong commitment of marriage. As I asked him questions I was pleasantly surprised at how calm he was about it all. As I said—oldest daughter, first daughter to get married, and less than a week away! But he was calm, cool, and collected.
All of us who are married hope to have a marriage that lasts. Not only do we want it to last, but we want it to be fulfilling, and successful in every way. But after we say “I do,” we begin to wonder how we can actually accomplish this. It’s no secret that a successful marriage takes work, just like success at anything in life.
We come into marriage with high hopes and Hollywood-inspired visions of what marriage is going to be like. Then we hit hard patches and we discover things about our spouses (and ourselves) that aren’t as appealing. This leads to a first-hand understanding of why people say “marriage is hard work,” and why the divorce rate is so high.