Clear View Parenting

About sixteen years ago, Phyllis Sather’s husband came to her and suggested the two of them take a few days off “and set some goals” for their family. Phyllis admits she wasn’t enthusiastic. With three young children, a major home rennovation planned, and a four year old just diagnosed with leukemia,

the thought of that sounded appalling to me.  Setting goals meant you had to meet them, didn’t it? I was in “survival” mode, barely making it through each day. The thought of all that failure was just too much for me at that time of my life.

Against her fears, she agreed to the idea. Much to her surprise, the exercise was so beneficial and enjoyable, she suggested they do it again the next year and bring the kids along. Since then the “Annual Planning Weekend” has become an anticipated family event, coming a mid-winter vacation with time for personal reflection, dreaming, and relationship building. How do you make this happen? You can start by reading her newly revised e-book Purposeful Planning.

The timing couldn’t be better for us. We set aside a few hours every New Year to discuss what the Lord’s done for us the past twelve months, and where we should be heading for the next twelve (we wrote about it here). We don’t leave home to do it, so I was curious if the Sathers’ experience would adapt to our own family’s practice.

In short, it does, and Purposeful Planning offers a lot more.

Phyllis acknowledges our tendency to be overwhelmed by things which are urgent rather than preparing and completing the things which are most important. To get a better handle on their family life, she and her husband Dan developed a list of areas where they wanted to focus attention and resources. Phyllis shares several lists of questions they consider about their relationship as a couple, the personal and spiritual growth of both parents and children; the state of their homeschooling, and their financial health.

A couple of interesting insights is their discussion about their house. Rather than asking how to make their home more comfortable for themselves or build up resale value, they consider it as a place for ministry, and ask what changes will make it more useful for hospitality and other outreach.  That recognizes our house shouldn’t be a temple to our prosperity but a gift of God’s provision, and a tool for use in His kingdom.

There doesn’t seem to be significant mention of Dan’s career planning outside the home. I expect he deals with that elsewhere, and reserves this time for family matters. I’ve come to realize myself, though, that outside employment for the most part is the thing we do to provide for the truly important ministry God gives us in our family and other relationships.

Purposeful Planning is a great collection of ideas which will help you really think about where you’re heading as a family, rather than bouncing from one crisis to another and hoping for the best. You’ll also find useful ideas about family vacations, ways to improve your leisure time, and encouragement to have celebrations  which really make a difference in your family life.

Plus if you order it now, you have time to start planning while the New Year is fresh!

Phyllis Sather’s Purposeful Planning is available direct from the author (the best way!), right here.

RELATED POSTS:
Toward A More Godly, Family-Building New Year - how we celebrate with purpose
Counting Our Days - the value of keeping a journal, and some ways to make it easy

Are you feeling torn about Christmas? Loving the sights and smells, but hating the thought of the stress and commercialism? Want to make sure the Lord is glorified in your family, but wondering if you’ll get sidetracked by all the busy-ness?

You are in good company!

That’s why we’ve put together a new book that will:

Save you money on gifts — and help you give presents that will be remembered forever.

Help you make your house look like Williamsburg at Christmas — while spending almost nothing to do it!

Save you time by giving you menus, a shopping list and plans to fix the best Christmas goodies ever with tried and true secret recipes.

Inspire you to host a Caroling Party and take the gospel to your neighbors in a way they will love. And make it easy, too.

Encourage you to introduce new traditions that will focus your family’s hearts on home — and Christ!

Equip you to make this Christmas a Christ-centered one, full of happy memories for your children.

Just Released! Buy it now!

Christ-Centered Christmas

The Ultimate Guide to Celebrating a Christmas Your Family Will Never Forget

by Hal & Melanie Young

Authors of the CSPA 2011 Book of the Year, Raising Real Men

eBook download $15 Just $6 to celebrate the release! That’s 60% off!

Buy Christ-Centered Christmas now!

One of the most important things we did when we were a young couple was to establish our own family traditions. It helped us to realize that we were a family and it created bonds of memories that have strengthened our marriage and blessed our children over the years. Now the parents of eight children, some grown, we’re thankful we can share Christ-centered Christmas with you!

Praise for our holiday books:

“…a wonderful full color compilation of all kinds of important things about having a “family Christmas celebration.” Things like: recipes, gift ideas, traditions, ornaments, caroling, decorating, history and menu planning. Once again (like their Thanksgiving ebook, you can read my review HERE) this is a wonderful resource to prepare your hearts and minds for the TRUE meaning of CHRISTmas.” Dawn Winter of Guiding Light Homeschool

“This is one resource that you will want to keep handy to use year after year. Having all this information in one book will make your ongoing teaching and training of how to celebrate Thanksgiving easier than you ever thought possible.”        Phyllis Sather

“History, Real LIFE, Yummy Food and a great way to celebrate as a family – what more could you ask for?  This is simply beautiful! Your Becoming a Great Cook section is wonderful for me – but even more so for my girls! I can’t wait to print this out and put it in their Home Economics/Cookbook Binder. A family treasure for sure!” – Lynn McInnis of This Day Has Great Potential, about We Gather Together

Download this gorgeous 80 page, full color book now for $15 our introductory price of $6!!
An email will be sent to you with a link for any downloadable items. Thank you for your business!

Tired. Stressed. Harried. Struggling financially. Arrrggghhhh.

Those are the most common words on our friends’ Facebook statuses — and they’re mostly Christians. When life becomes this hard, our marriages can take a back seat to survival. We become just coworkers and housemates when we’re supposed to be so much more than that.

We thought January would be the perfect time to  do something about that. Marriage is the glue that holds our families together and we can’t afford to let it get all stiff and crusty, can we? Enter…

Marriage Boot Camp!

A guy-friendly, fun and inspiring series of weekly LIVE webinars with Hal & Melanie leading up to Valentine’s Day!

For more information or to register now (we’ll give you a refund if you win this door prize!), click here.

Enter to win a free registration to Marriage Boot Camp through PunchTab or by leaving a comment below!

Educating the WholeHearted Child by Clay Clarkson with Sally Clarkson $22

Enter with PunchTab for extra entries or just leave a comment below.

If you have ever felt caught between the demands of homeschooling your children and meeting the needs of your husband, you’re not alone! Read and discover how even a busy homeschool mom can make time to nurture her marriage. It’s not as hard as you think, and more important than you may realize.

The Busy Homeschool Mom’s Guide to Romance: Nurturing Your Marriage Through the Homeschool Years by Heidi St. John from The Busy Homeschool Mom

Enter using PunchTab for extra entries or just by leaving a comment below.

With the Children on Sunday: Through Eye-Gate and Ear-Gate into the City of Child-Soul by Sylvanus Stall

A giant volume, which ranks as one of history’s greatest Family Worship books ever composed. A limited number of copies are available of this book, which has been out of print many decades and is currently not being printed by anyone. Filled with many of the most delightful family readings you’ll find anywhere, from an author with great skill in presenting Bible truths in a form which grips the eye, holds the mind’s attention, and wins the heart of a child for Christ. Many have called this one of the most enjoyable books for family worship they have ever used, especially for children ten and under.

First published in 1893. You can use these “Sunday” readings any day of the week, of course. This is a large, “oversized” volume, 7″ x 10″ – a facsimile edition of the original. 52 chapters, packed with photographs + illustrations.

Be sure to check out Grace and Truth Books. Their selection is wonderful — and more than that, they are careful about what they carry, so you don’t have to worry about you or your children being led astray!

Enter through PunchTab for multiple entries or just leave a comment here.

Football seems to be a sport that our guys are good at and we love the spirit and principle of the league.

A major principle of the league is that family is important. Practices are two long nights a week, but all levels of one team (varsity, junior varsity, youth and mighty mite) practice at one location, so families aren’t separated. Games are on Saturdays and again, all the levels of one team play all the levels of another — so families just make a day of it at the park – bring tents, picnics, toys, etc and spend the day watching football games. Great fun for everyone.

We love the spirit that Coach Earl Pendleton has achieved in the League, too. Parents, coaches and players are expected to act like Christians. Flatten someone in a tackle? After the whistle, give him a hand up. Player injured? Everyone takes a knee and prays for him. Talk back to a ref? You’re ejected from the game. One referee told one of our boys that the refs compete to officiate at our games. He said they love the attitudes – no one ever cusses them out, players just say, “Yes, sir,” and comply. All that and hard-fought football, too? A ref’s dream come true!

An added bonus of football is that our guys are just plain easier to get along with when they are using up all that testosterone and energy on the field!

Read Chapter Six of Raising Real Men to see why boys want to compete on just everything or check out our workshop, Ballistic Homeschooling, to see how that attitude can motivate boys to get their schoolwork done.

 She wasn’t talking about little girls dressed like ballerinas and fairies, but folks of any age play-acting the monster variety. Why, indeed, would anyone want to pretend to be a zombie, a vampire, or a ghost for a few hours?

 We’d had this conversation many times before, and we always return to our original answer: because of the symbolism, we don’t do Halloween. I know, and we’ve explained to our kids, 99 out of 100 people don’t give it a second thought, and that may be more like 9999 out of ten thousand. Still, we try to be people who follow the Lord with some conscious thought about what we’re doing and what we’re communicating.

And the usual Halloween routine communicates a couple of ideas which are polar opposites and both wrong. 

The first idea is that there’s nothing to the idea of demons, witches, and all the monstrosities we associate with the holiday. All superstition and ghost stories, they say. Nothing more than play acting at Halloween, all just good clean fun.

There’s a problem with that. Even if that’s true, it’s all just a game, people don’t just assume the fantastic shapes, the Frankensteins and werewolves of old black-and-white movies. They’re dressing in a lot of too-real ideas like victims of domestic violence and survivors of gruesome accidents and criminals of all sorts. Worse yet are the sick sexual fantasies, the pornographic teases of “naughty school girls” and wayward French housemaids and such. You can’t let the kids look at costume catalogs.

Even if these things are not real, there are people who think they are. Joe Leaphorn, the Navaho police detective featured in Tony Hillerman’s mystery stories, often encounters stories of “skin-walkers,” the shape shifters of Navaho legend. Leaphorn says in one of the early novels, “I don’t believe in skin-walkers, but I believe in people who do.” What he meant was that whether such things exist was immaterial; there are unmistakably real people who do believe in them and because of that belief, do things which have a real impact on those around them.

Missionaries encounter this all the time. Whether the local witch doctor or shaman has real spiritual power or not is somewhat beside the point; if the local people believe he has power, they fear him and defer to his will. The missionary has to overcome the social power this figure wields in order to free the people to follow Christ—the real spiritual power. 

On the other hand, we shouldn’t make light of real tragedy and real sin—don’t sugar coat it—as if it’s all a game. R.C. Sproul Jr. observed that erecting toy tombstones in your yard isn’t a laughing matter; death is real, and for many of us, a very, very bad prospect. It’s not a joke.

The second idea is that ghoulies and ghosties are real, but it’s okay to pretend about them. The Bible sort of squelches that for us.

Consider that when God established His people in a formal way, in the national identity of Israel, He explicitly told them to stay away from that stuff and the people that practice it:

There shall not be found among you … anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord.  (Deuteronomy 18:10-12 ESV)

In fact, He made it a capital offense to follow these teachings (Leviticus 20:27) or consult with those who do (Leviticus 20:6). It’s one of the reasons He wiped out the ancient Canaanites and gave their land to the Jews.

It’s interesting that He doesn’t suggest that these people are truly powerful—He simply says we have to avoid it all. For them (and us), it’s a prostitution, seeking after forbidden  spirituality when you’ve already met the source of true spiritual power, no different than seeking sexual adventures outside of your marriage—except this time you’re cheating on God, and you can’t sneak around on Him.

It kinda takes the fun out of Harry Potter and Ouija boards.

The other option is that spiritual things are real, both good and bad. And if you believe the Bible and believe what Jesus Himself said, you have to take that as given.

Are there bad spirits in every tree and stone beside the road? I don’t see any evidence of it in Scripture or nature. But it’s plain to me that besides the evil that men do, there are spiritual forces, even personal ones, we need to take seriously. Jesus wasn’t playing make believe or joshing along the cultural superstitions when He confronted demons: there are many incidents in the Gospels where Jesus displayed his power over them, casting out unclean spirits which had oppressed individuals a variety of ways. [1]  Jesus never backed away from correcting misunderstandings and human additions to God’s word, even in the face of mob violence and physical threat to Himself, but He never “corrects” the “mythological” view that evil spirits are at work in some people’s lives. Instead, He defeats them, then teaches His people to understand their nature (see Luke 11:14-26, for example) and how to combat them (Mark 9:28-29, Matthew 17:19-21)  He took it seriously, as did the apostles.

If we believe the Bible, and we believe Jesus, then we need to believe that whatever nonsense and mythologies humans may have created in addition to the truth, there is a fundamental reality—there are beings and powers we need to be aware of and avoid, not toy with. Christ has overcome them on earth, and God overrules them throughout the universe, but we need to keep out of their reach just the same.

And for that reason, well, let’s just say we don’t get into the spirit of Halloween.

(More tomorrow, on why boys in particular may be attracted, and what that suggests about our parenting them!)