Happy Hour

It’s the end of another week, and what a great week it’s been. We are happy to share with you that Debi’s “project” she’s been working on is a book based on the life of her Grandmother. This has been a dream of hers for over 20 years. It has been a work in progress for the past decade. Finally, we’ve signed the book deal, and it will be published early next year. We will be sure to let you know when it’s available for purchase.

Now for our “Specials of the Week!”

A Grown Up Marriage

• Change – How well do you embrace change? We’re not talking change outside of your marriage, but the kind that requires you to actually CHANGE? Great post!

Encourage Your Spouse

• Reflections Good or Bad? – An excellent metaphor about the picture our words reflect about our spouse. What reflection do your words create?

Happy Wives Club

• Peer Pressure…The Good Kind – This is a guest post by Lori Byerly of The Generous Wife blog. We love how the marriage blog community supports each other.  See Lori’s blog below for a guest post by Fawn of the Happy Wives Club.

Journey To Surrender

• My Wife’s First Post - In August we had the privilege of sitting down with Scott and Jenni for dinner. We listened as Jenni shared story after story of how Scott romances his bride. All we could say was, “Wow!” And, “You have to share these stories with your readers!” This is her first post (and we hope it isn’t her last) sharing her husband’s gift for romantic ideas.
• A Marriage Full of Grace – Part three of a three part series on Glory and Grace in marriage. Good stuff! If you have a hint of shame in your marriage then please, take time to read this – it may change your life and marriage forever!

Marriage Gems

• The Longer We’re Married, The Better It Gets - a great post. Please read my comment at the end too. You’ll see my recent thoughts on this idea.
• First Kiss To Lasting Bliss Interview – Lori has a book coming out on December 8th – in perfect time for Christmas gift giving. Check out this interview to hear all about it.
• 10 Ways To Get More Adventure Into Your Marriage – feeling bored lately? Then, check out this excellent list for new ideas. They may stretch you a bit, but who doesn’t need to be stretched from time to time.

Marriage Life

• Live For Today – Great advice if you’re tempted with regret.

Marriage Missions International

• Nitpicking – If you read the title and had the thought, “I don’t want to read that!” Then, may we encourage you this is all the more reason why you may need to. An excellent and convicting post!

One Flesh Marriage

• License To Complain – Excellent post by Kate on how we justify this sin in our lives and our marriage.
• Hen-Pecking Party – Brad’s turn. If you read the first post please take the time to hear his response.

The Generous Husband

• Do Something, Do ANYTHING! – Sage advice for those in a troubled place in their marriage.

The Generous Wife

• Twinkle In The Holidays – We love how Lori offers quick and simple ideas to help make your marriage better.
• Happiness Is A Choice – by guest blogger, Fawn with The Happy Wives Club. Do you choose happiness each day?

http://theromanticvineyard.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/happy-hour-26/

Bishop Eddie Long Divorce Buzz: A Few Personal Thoughts…

In light of the recent news concerning Bishop Eddie Long & his wife divorcing/not divorcing, I’ve observed and participated in a few discussions on the matter. I have a few things I’d like to offer my opinion on concerning this publicly displayed private family matter: Read more

Back-To-School Tip #1 - Time to Connect with the School

The back-to-school night gives you the opportunity to tour the school, see your child’s classroom, and meet teachers and classmates. When you attend events like this, it fosters an added level of security and assurance in your child. The first day of school does not tend to be as overwhelming for students who attend this event.

Actually, there will be many opportunities during the school year to attend programs and help in the classroom. While we do not have a required parental work program at Heritage, it is always a great blessing when parents volunteer their time.

http://heritageantioch.com/2011/08/31/back-to-school-tip-1-time-to-connect-with-the-school/

Back to School Night Meeting for 6-12th Grade

If you missed the back-to-school night meeting for the 6-12th grade, please listen to the talk Pastor Oesterwind gave last night. There will be a form to sign acknowledging that you heard this message.

http://heritageantioch.com/2011/08/31/back-to-school-night-meeting-for-6-12th-grade-students-and-parents/

Sixty-Second Solutions: The Tech Basket

Parenting is hard work.  Period.  But it’s even harder in today’s sexualized and technologized environment.  Equipping and protecting our kids–while pushing back on the encroachment of ubiquitous technology and pervasive pornography–is a daily challenge that requires tools and strategies.

As part of our purePARENTING ministry, we talk about “the ABCs” of prudent technology use: accountability, boundaries, and controls.  Communicating boundaries is particularly important for cultivating virtue, self-control, and godliness in an age of instant gratification.

In this edition of Sixty-Second Solutions, marriage and family therapist and pureHOPE Dallas advisory board member Rhett Smith talks about the benefits of implementing a “tech basket” as one boundary for you and your kids.

See Also:

• Sixty-Second Solutions: Vigilance
• Our Vision for purePARENTING
• Talking to Your Teen About Sex

http://purehopeblog.net/2011/12/08/sixty-second-solutions-the-tech-basket/

The Love and Respect Devotional Experience

Working in around books all day, I have been fully aware that the book, Love & Respect: The Love She Most Desires; The Respect He Desperately Needs by Emerson Eggerichs has been a bit of a sleeper title.  By that I mean a book which releases somewhat quietly, but then builds; and while other titles from 2004 have either become mostly forgotten or been discontinued altogether, Love and Respect shows no signs of slowing down; in some areas it is still taking off.

So when our friends at Graf-Martin Communications were doing a blog blitz on a recently-released spinoff, The Love & Respect Experience: A Husband-Friendly Devotional That Wives Truly Love, I knew I was getting a second chance to view the material up close. 

But how to review a devotional book?  Do I speed-read every entry?  That proved not to be an issue.  Finally getting around to opening the book, I discovered the feeling one might get upon opening a book and having hundred dollar bills (or, for our UK readers, fifty pound notes) fall out of every page.  It’s that rich.  I read chapter one.  Then chapter two.  Then chapter three.  Then, seeing an extensive note on it at the back, chapter thirteen.  Which directed me to consider chapter five.  And so on.

However first, I began with the introduction.  This is a book that aims to cut to the heart of the problems often encountered in the couple devotional genre.  He finds the material too feminine in orientation.  She wants to just read the material on her own.  Either spouse feels they’re being “prayed at” or corrected in the middle of the prayer time that follows. 

Next, I skipped over to page 273, an appendix offering a summary of the Love and Respect concept as taught in the original book, in seminars and available (only) at the authors’ website on DVD.  Since the book has been out for more than seven years, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the L&R concept is:

Without love, she reacts without respect
Without respect, he reacts without love

That’s the great axiom of the book, and there are at least two other corollaries which follow from it directly, the most obvious being:

His love motivates her respect
Her respect motivates his love

The decision to include only 52 chapters implies a weekly time together for couples, though the authors are clear that this is just one of many possibilities and also note that nowhere does scripture mandate that couples read and study the Bible together, much to the relief of a few of you reading this.

Finally, I need to reiterate what is essentially spelled out in The Love and Respect Experience subtitle: This is a book which has, by very strong design, been crafted as male-friendly.  The leather-bound cover (at a very reasonable price) adds to the ‘macho’ feel of the book, but the subtitle is also clear that this is not a men’s devotional book either.

I can’t recommend this book enough, especially at a time of year which is a ripe opportunity for couples to purposely launch some kind of Bible study and/or prayer time together.  And the seasonal gift-giving possibilities here can’t be overlooked either. 

A copy of the devotional was provided by Graf-Martin Communications, a Kitchener, Ontario firm which works with publishers and author agencies to provide additional promotion and publicity for books and book-related products.

http://paulwilkinson.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/the-love-and-respect-devotional-experience/

Racism Dressed In Choir Robes

My FB friend, James, linked an article yesterday, and I read about a Kentucky church voting to ban interracial marriage, along with a ban on interracial couples becoming members of the church.  The Baptist church in Pike County separated itself from the majority of Christian churches in the area by deciding that, for itself, interracial couples won’t be permitted to join and participate in the life of their local church.

When I read the article, I kept thinking that the issue was a small one, that the church was smaller than the average church in the USA, under 100 people.  I kept wanting to convince myself that what happens in small local churches doesn’t matter.  I read the words about this black man and his white wife-to-be, and I whispered that this was a hardly noticed incident, that it wasn’t worth thinking about for two minutes.  And then I corrected myself with my real opinions.

I’ve never thought that the decisions and choices in small congregations were insignificant.  In fact, I’m of the opposite opinion.  Small congregations mirror the people in those congregations, and those congregations make up communities.  Communities, not simply cities, combine to form a nation.  I remembered my stronger thoughts about history and about how for centuries this country’s history (and not just Kentucky’s history) was lived by people who had been told who to love and who not to love.  My lips trembled as I talked to myself about how new and somewhat jarring it still is for people to marry “outside their race.”  Four other things came to mind as I read about this church’s decision.

This is bad for Christianity.  Christianity, at its core, is an inclusive religion.  It is a faith of following a person who accepted unacceptable, disinherited people, who pushed just about all the social margins of his day, and, while pushing those margins, said that the kingdom of God had room for everyone.  At the bottom of Jesus’s way of life is a ground of openness that doesn’t tell people that they shouldn’t love particular people but that they should love all people.  You can’t get away from a superficial reading of the gospels and miss this.  Jesus was bad at the restrictive nature of narrow social and theological interpretations.  He was much better at saying, “Look at it this way.”  Or, “I have another way for you to think about this.”  I have trouble seeing how a pastor, a Bible teacher, or congregant who is committed Christianity, when Christianity is following Jesus, can say to another person, “You can’t marry that person because they aren’t…”  It is baldly out of step with the One who gave his life for the outcast and cast out.  Interracial couples, along with a slew of other folks, are the outcasts at least in this case, and they’re cast out on nothing stronger than flimsy, cracked racist opinions dressed in choir robes.

The church loves to tell people who to love.  This is not a new approach.  Part of what made the early church so attractive to people in the first centuries after Jesus jumped was that the church had strong opinions about sex and race and generosity.  My pastor, Peter Hong, talks about how the early church-goers were generous with their money and stingy with their sexuality.  They kept themselves sexually pure until they married, practiced celibacy when they didn’t marry, and they gave their money to the poor and to those who needed.  Those behaviors made the church strange and interesting.  So it’s not that the church has no history with the issue of marriage and love.  But we get into trouble when we draw lines for the people in our pews.  When we force or manipulate or teach that love is defined by something as socially soft as race, we’re practicing racism and doing so in the name and under the banner of God.  There aren’t many things worse for a church.  I’ve talked about that, in pieces, before here and here.

Dating and marriage are tools of reconciliation.  I told a couple I married this summer that their relationship was a grand opportunity for reconciliation.  They came from different backgrounds, in every way.  To start, the husband is African American, the wife Japanese American.  I told them that they didn’t appear to belong together in the eyes of some.  I told them that their relationship was an opportunity to bring together visibly opposing parties.  I tried to tie that into the Christian story because the story is chiefly a narrative about how two parties (estranged and yet full of love) return to one another.  In fact, as I think about it, that theme was in all of my wedding messages this year, with the possible exception of one, because all my marriage ceremonies were interracial.  If marriage is anything it is a community of forgiveness.  A marriage’s success or fruit or longevity is not ground up in the similarity of backgrounds and races of the couple but in the free, liberal, and frequent offering of the hardest thing in the world–forgiveness.

I hope people read and discuss this.  That last thought is the reason I’m writing this post.  I want to generate dialogue about this.  Not because I’m a church-basher.  I love the church, every church.  I’m ordained as a pastor in the Christian Tradition because I love the church.  I gladly wear the banner of Christian and pastor, even when I’m on a plane  or in the park.  I’m not suggesting we bash, but I do think we should criticize and hold to account the people in our Christian family.  Whether we agree with the church in Kentucky or disagree, we should say something, speak up, and float our opinions about these things because it’s in communicating our thoughts that we communicate our faith.  If we say something, if we discuss these things, it enables honest and quality dialogue about race and love, even when that dialogue is complex and nuanced and poetic.  I think we should talk about things like this.  So I’m blogging about it.  I’m running my mouth–or my fingers.

If you’re interested in the story, I saw it here.

http://crossingintersections.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/racism-dressed-in-choir-robes/

Components.2.A.Happy(:Marriage

Simple:
Pray Together and apart always.•.Keep God as the center and true head of the marriage.•.Seek Him for advice big and small, in good times and in bad times.•.Ask Him to continue to teach you how to love your spouse as the two of you grow.•.And no matter how tuff DONT give up or walk away from your marriage!•.Know that most of your problems are universal and possible to work through:)

fLhW.2011©

http://dreacadreaca.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/components-2-a-happymarriage/

Anger Management #278

Verse of the day:

“A fool gives full vent to his (her) anger, but a wise man keeps himself (herself) under control.” Proverbs 29:11

I have been struggling to keep my anger under control this week. When I speak my children act as if they didn’t hear anything. If you are a mom you know how frustrating that can be. I try to stay calm, get down on their level and make eye contact so they know what I expect of them. But there are still many times when my instruction is ignored, which leads me to frustration and anger. I don’t really have a solution to this problem except to pray for patience and earnestly seek wisdom and hold tight until they are old enough to move on to the next frustrating behavior they will hit me with.

I’m pretty sure being a parent doesn’t get any easier. They say having an infant is the hardest part. I respectfully and wholeheartedly disagree! It gets more trying by the day. Today, in order to save my children from losing their mother to the depths of insanity, I am praying for patience beyond comprehension and an appropriate outlet for my anger. Lord, hear these prayers and come to my rescue!!

http://alittlerr.com/2011/04/20/anger-management-278/

Chutes and Ladders #279

Do you know the objective of the game Chutes and Ladders? Let me break it down for you. Get to the space marked “100″ on the game board first. If you land on a space with a kid acting naughty you have to slide down a Chute to a lower number. Conversely, if you land on a space with a child doing good you get to climb a ladder to a higher number.

My kids love this game- mostly because they love every game in which they get to compete with someone and beat them. That’s a boy for you…

I thought a bit about the pictures on the board while I was playing with them. One child got into the cookie jar, another stole a toy, and another broke something that didn’t belong to him. All of these spaces cause the player to slide down a chute to a lower number.

On the other hand there were children playing nicely together, one that made cookies for a friend and another that was reading a book. The spaces allowed the player to climb up to a better space.

Does anyone else see a tiny little lesson in there somewhere? Our actions speak louder than our words. Even though it is a silly game for preschoolers, Chutes and Ladders can actually teach a few Biblical principles if you really look at it.

Matthew 5:16 says, “In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in Heaven.” When your actions are sinful, you don’t point others to the Father and you may even bring them down. But if your actions are good and righteous, you will show others the light of Christ in your life.

It may be a stretch for some, but I think this whole world is infused with biblical principles. We just have to dig for them. After all, God did create it all. He probably put his “stamp” in more places than we can imagine.

http://alittlerr.com/2011/04/19/chutes-and-ladders-279/

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