It’s been so sad to not post like I hoped to.  I am still working on the Love Dare with my kids, and I wish I would have done regular updates however it’s been so crazy around here.  I am also doing a study at church on parenting teens (oldest is a pre-teen).  But this study is really for all parents.  Terrific!!!!

One of the thoughts that has struck me while doing both of these things is that, as Christian Parents, we are not to be ‘A’shamed or ‘D’issapointed with our childrens behavior. 

Now here me out if this sounds wrong to you.  God is not disappointed with us.  He disciplines us to get us where he wants us to be but He is never shocked, dissapointed, ashamed, etc!  So if we take on His traits as a Christian, shouldn’t we be the same way?

I always thought that a certain amount of shame, like a Moms look, you know ”The Look”, was ok.; we joke about it don’t we?  Really it’s not part of building a child up with unconditional love (agape love).  That doesn’t mean that we won’t discipline a child or let them experience natural consequences, but that there is no shame in screwing up.  And if we all think about it, haven’t we screwed up a time or two ourselves?  So why would we be surprised they do?  Disappointed and shame is just a way of saying I am shocked that you did that cause I never have or would.

Have a “Shockless” Day!

Imagine with me for moment the day when your husband asks you what YOU want for the day.  He asks you what you want for dinner (and you get it!).  He asks you what you want him to accomplish for you for the day (and he does it!).  He asks you what you think looks good on him (and he wears it!).  Wow!  What a fun day, right?  Now I understand that this is probably a little awkward thinking about your husband doing everything you want for a full day, but it’s a nice thought, huh?

 Well, now it’s time to play by the “Golden Rule”.  Do unto others as you’d have done unto you.  Obviously a day where your husband does what YOU want him to do sounds like a great day.  So why not reverse that and make your husband’s day?  You are going to really have to have a servant’s heart in doing this.  But, looking at scripture, it’s actually what you are asked to do anyway.

 Here’s a few examples:

 -Before you go and get your hair chopped off at your shoulders, ask your husband how he likes your hair.  Does he like your hair better long, pulled up in a ponytail, or cut short?  You may think, “Well, he doesn’t really care.”  I bet if you asked him, he’d have an opinion! 

 ”The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband….” 

1 Corinthians 7:4 NIV

 -Overwhelmed with all of the housework that you have to get done?  Ask your husband what is the biggest deal to him.  He may not even notice some of the things that you are so overwhelmed with.  Do the one or two areas that he really wants done, and just get to the others when you have time.

 -Or, try this one: Ask him what he wants for dinner!  I know it sounds simple.  Or maybe not, maybe you’re thinking, “Okay I already have to cater to what my kids will eat.  Now you want me to add one more person’s opinion in there?”  Yes!  I do!  That “one other person” needs to be the priority.  The kids won’t starve if you chose one night (start small) to make just what your husband wants.

 -If you’re like me, I LOVE sweatpants or shorts and a nice t-shirt.  Does my husband like that?  Not so much.  He much more prefers it if I actually get dressed in “real” clothes, do my hair, put on a little makeup and look “pretty” for him.  Your husband may be the exact opposite.  Ask him what he likes for you to wear.  You may be surprised by his answer!

 The key to all of this is ASKING.  Ask him what he wants.  Never assume that you just know what he would like.  You may really be surprised that after 2, 5, or even 15 years of marriage, you never really knew (or took the time to care) what he wanted about certain “little” things.  I guarantee though, those “little” things can really add up to big things when you take the time to make him feel like he matters.

 In all of these things, I’m not saying that you need to ask your husband for permission or to okay your every move.  In many cases you need to make decisions for yourself without bugging him to make them for you.  But I am suggesting that you stop every once in a while and find out what HE wants.  Again, if you sit and dream about a day where he asks you everything that you want done, then take the first step and do that for him!!  (Not so that you can get that in return, but instead so that you can have the joy of making his day!)

 Start small and you’ll be surprised at how easily this will become a habit to you.  His happiness will be worth the few extra moments of doing it his way.

 “So, in everything, do to others what you would have them do unto you.”

Matthew 7:12 NIV

So you’re just married and concluded that your husband is not good in bed. That is not necessarily surprising. It’s a new thing. That’s why God gave couples a lifetime to figure each other out in that way. The Bible commanded newlywed husbands to stay at home with their wives for a year to figure it out. Wasn’t God’s wisdom wonderful, they could not even be forced to go to war. They had to stay home and “know” their wife and then learn to dwell with them according to knowledge. That knowlege included intimacy. Two things God wanted for newlyweds - a stable sex life and he wanted the husband to have a home already prepared for his wife so that she had a sense of security coming into the relationship. Society was the one that chucked God’s wisdom. But it can still apply. Might not be as perfect as God had planned but newly wed couples can still say we are going to spend one year building intimacy.

Now what you can’t do is complain or let him sense your disapproval. Yo’ve got to nuture and develop. You have to make him feel like a pro, even if it is not all what you had in mind because the more you build him up the better it will get. Read my post How To Become A Great Lover. Also I would highly recommend the book The Act of Marriage by Tim LaHaye that you read together. That book will bless your married life. Then has it occured to you that he might feel the same way about you. Maybe you are not all he thought it would be. Sometimes asking him what he thinks would make things better can help the situation even out. Good, open communications in important to developing a stellar sex life. It’s like a bottle of fine wine, it’s only good if you open it up. Then you can drink it and enjoy it. Intimacy is like that you have to open up.

Here are a few things that can help build a lifetime of great intimacy:
1. Communications
2.Knowing that foreplay is an all day thing. Wake up thinking of ways to make your spouse happy, meet their needs, do kind things for them, take care of them. Then when nature calls you’re in a receptive mood.
3. Coommunicate your love often verbally and through acts as simple and gentle as holding hands. Touch keeps relationships together.
4. Keep God and prayer front and center. Ask him to show you the wisdom in his word on sexuality. The Bible is more loaded than most people realize.
5. Never cheat. Stay knit together and limit to eliminate non couple relationships. Don’t go out with singles of the opposite sex without your spouse.
6. Don’t violate each others confort zone in bed. If you both can’t agree this is something that you wish to do, then leave it out.
7. Keep porn out.
8. Spend physical time together often and do not lock your spouse out of the bedroom as punishment for something else they did.
9. If you get angry with your spouse, get it over before the end of the day. Never go to bed angry, this can ruin your sex life and plant seeds for long term discord in your marriage.
10. Keep your weight in tact. The way your spouse first met you is what turned them on to you in the first place so over the years of the relationship try to keep that in mind and stay reasonably close to that. Reasonably means you will gain some weight after childbirth, but it does not have to be excessive. Keep in shape, exercise, keep junk food and excessive sweets out of your house. Purpose to look good and you will. That apply to the husband and the wife.

Why not? Why would God not bless a second marriage. Is he not the God of forgiveness and second chances? His will never was divorce, nor ever will be. But he made provisions in his word for change under dire circumstances. If you want to know what he thinks about second marriages read the story of the woman at the well. She had five husbands and the man she was living with at the time was not her husband. He never condemend her over her relationships. He just told her he had a better way for her to live. The way God has for us to live is through peace. He can bring that to a second relationship. A lot of first marriages fall apart because of lack of the hard work it takes to keep an outstanding marriage. But any persons that have an outstanding marriage will tell you that it takes work, committment, dedication, devotion and a lot of selflessness. So you’re fortunate enough to have a number situation bring it to God. Ask him not only to bless it but to help you to deal with the day to day flow and ebbs that marriage is made of. You might marry for love, but love is not enough to keep a marriage. However love and committment is enough to keep a marriage. Learn from your first relationship so that those type of problems won’t enter your second relationship. Then build a blessed union with love number 2.

There was a time in my past that I began tongue in cheek to make ridiculous predictions for my coworkers just before the end of the year. You know, the kind that would predict that Jim would accidently breed a new type of rice that when eaten would extend life for several years, Jim becomes a millionaire over night and retires never to be seen around here again.

The predictions were always over the top and not likely to ever happen.

I always started the predictions by stating that I would receive my insights by looking in the rear view mirror of a car. Since my success rate was somewhere south of never happening, I would change the type of rear view mirror I would concentrate on. One year it was the rear view mirror of a 57 Chevy, the next it might be that of a Lincoln Town Car parked on the side of a funeral home, you get the picture.
The fact that my predictions NEVER came true didn’t seem to matter to my coworkers. They loved to get them in their email and would act a little miffed if for some reason I did not have a prediction for them.

It was a good time in my life and I have good memories of the people I worked with.

As I was thinking about those predictions, I began to think about why I chose the rear view mirror as the fictional place of my inspiration. Why not a crystal ball, or a deck of cards, or even the mayonnaise jar under the porch of Funk and Wagnalls? Why the rear view mirror?

It appears to me that a rear view mirror is just about the last place you would want to look to find the future, but isn’t that what most of us do every day?

Aren’t we often so tied up in the past that we can’t find the future much less see it? We get all involved in reliving our mistakes, in hopes we won’t repeat them and go through the pain again.

As parents, especially fathers, we make mistakes and we never move any further in our relationships with our spouse, our children, or our friends. We analyze the situation that lead up to the mistake, our actions, the people involved, our own intent, and on and on.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe we need to learn from our mistakes. Once infracted, we should endeavor to never let it happen again.

Our problem exists in our view. If we ever get in a car and begin to drive down the road but we never look anywhere but in the rear view mirror, we are destine to make even bigger mistakes than we have ever made in the past. If we concentrate on the vision in the rear view mirror, we will never arrive at the future.

Without a future we have no hope. Without hope, we have no reason to live. God has given us a windshield to give us hope.

Parents, we have God given memories of our past, so we can help our children navigate through the streets of the present and to help us understand the impact of the pot holes that would swallow us up and prevent us from reaching the future , He has promised us.

We must use the rear view mirror to glance at; not to be the major means of navigation. For that we are given the whole windshield before us. Sure there will be the occasional bug that will smash into it, and we will be required to clean it once in a while, but through it we can see our future.

The windshield gives us a clear view of the world before us. We can see potential bends, hills and speed bumps. We can see the beauty of the country side. We can see others who are on the same journey as us.

As fathers, we must look through the windshield. We have a family to care for and protect. We must clearly chart the direction we are going so none of our family is lost along the way. We must take our eyes off the rear view mirror before we plow over someone or something that we can never replace.

The choice is ours, we can look through the windshield and be expectant of a bright and sure future, or we can continue to try different rear view mirrors and make predictions that can NEVER come true.

En servicio como padre
Dave

I got home from my trip a couple of weeks ago. Ever since, him and I have only talked a few times on the phone. It has been significantly less, considering we would talk almost every day before my trip.

I think we both learned quite a few lessons while being away from each other. I can’t really say what he learned, but I can tell you what I noticed has change. The phone calls, for one, are initiated by him most of the time. So the fact that we are talking less means that it has been his decision to do so.

Here’s a bit of what I learned during my time away from home, away from him:

1) He can live without me! He would usually tell me when he was feeling down or discouraged, and I would always be giving him positive words and affirmation. I considered it could be a bit dangerous if it reached an extreme (say, if  he only came to me),  but I couldn’t just deny my friendship to him. I realized that by always being there for him I was not allowing myself to put the situation in God’s hands, nor was I encouraging him to put himself in God’s hands.

2) Long distance is a great test for true love. I met some really cool, good-looking guys during my trip. He had a nice break from me and probably spent time with other girls. Nice, pretty girls. We’re not in a relationship and have made it clear that we are not reserved for each other; I have no right to anything if he one day asks a girl out. I want time to show if we’re meant for each other; I don’t want to force anything.

3)Long distance can be dangerous because we tend to idealize the other person since we’re not in physical proximity to them. There were nights I’d put myself to sleep just thinking about him, his smile and eyes. I’d create silly scenarios in my head of how it would be when we saw each other again. Do you see where I’m getting to? It’s very unrealistic, and I had to fight it.

Bitterness is, unfortunately, a part of everyone’s life.  Perhaps your bitterness stems from the loss of a parent, or a horrible and unexpected divorce.  Perhaps, worse yet, yours stems from the loss of a child. An unexpected layoff with no hope for employment in sight.  A lingering and debilitating illness.  An incurable disease.  Bitterness comes in many forms.

Bitterness is like a dark and very cold room.  Once inside, with the door closed, it’s impossible to see the way out.  You could search for it, and eventually find it, but there are other things that lurk in the dark, cold room that scare you.  If you were able to provide light, there you will see others who suffer from bitterness.  Each one has been chained to the wall.  Chained because they too couldn’t find the way out.  Eventually, the same will happen to you.  Your own bitterness from loss and deception and hurts will chain you as surely as the others you would see in that dark, cold room.  The chains are heavy, and being metal, they crown you with the cold of the room.  Stealing you warmth faster as more and more chains bind you.

Once there, with the others, you will find yourself crying out in despair.  You will grumble, complain, wail.  All against eh unfairness that is life.  Soon, like the others, you will think the whole world is out to get you.  Bitterness breeds and spreads like a virus.

But there is an option.  You could choose.  You could choose to put away your hurts before you get chained.  You could go to a party.  There is a place there for you.  In fact, your name is beside a plate, a place reserved just for you.  If you are a child of God, no one can take your place, no one can take away your sonship, your birthright.

The father said this to the oldest son.  “Son,  you are always with me, and all that I have is yours.”

And that is exactly what your heavenly Father says to you.  How does God deal with your bitter heart?  By reminding you of the things you have and how much more important they are than the things you don’t have.

The most important thing you have is your relationship with God.  No one can take that away from you.  No one can even touch it.  No one can take your place at the table at the party.  You name is there, the place is reserved, just for you.  How can this be?  Because you are His child, and His love is perfect.