Have you noticed that over the last decade family homes have become larger? It seems that over a period of many years, generally speaking, families have been retreating from the community and tending to spend more time at home. So the home, needing to be a place where you can spend a lot of time, has become bigger. However, when homes grow bigger, separation and seclusion within a family can happen. Family members can all be home and never be together. They’re all in different rooms.
The home that I raised my kids in had many rooms, and sometimes I literally had to become a mini search party of one in order to find out where everyone was. I would be between tasks and hear the glorious but telltale sound of complete household silence; always glorious because there’s no noise, but telltale because the level of silence is a meter that gauges individual seclusion. Complete household silence usually indicates complete individual seclusion.
That’s when I would go on my one-man search party. As I found each child, I’d sit for a short time and engage him or her in a little “wazzup” talk. It takes only a few minutes, but it reconnects everyone to the family collective. The best part is that it doesn’t take long. You just need to take advantage of the minutes you have between tasks to personally connect with each of your children.
Another thing I did and still do to counteract individual seclusion and get in some quality family moments is to get some or all of us to seclude ourselves in the same room. If my wife and I are reading in the evening, sometimes we’ll grab our books and sit in the living room. Then we let the other family members know what we’re doing and they’ll sometimes grab their books and join us. I really love doing this because we end up laughing and talking and taking breaks together.
It takes only minutes to battle seclusion, but it’s worth it.
Much of the time reading email forwards is just a waste of time. I find that my inbox fills up with them until I have to take an hour or two to scan through them. The reason that I eventually put in the time is, because every once in awhile, I find a few that are hilarious and/or inspiring and worth sharing with others. Here’s one such email forward that I’d like to share with you:
The Neighbor’s Dog
An older, tired-looking dog wandered into my yard; I could tell from his collar and well-fed belly that he had a home and was well taken care of.
He calmly came over to me, I gave him a few pats on his head; he then followed me into my house, slowly walked down the hall, curled up in the corner and fell asleep.
An hour later, he went to the door, and I let him out.
The next day he was back, greeted me in my yard, walked inside and resumed his spot in the hall and again slept for about an hour. This continued off and on for several weeks.
Curious, I pinned a note to his collar: ’I would like to find out who the owner of this wonderful sweet dog is and ask if you are aware that almost every afternoon your dog comes to my house for a nap.’
The next day he arrived for his nap, with a different note pinned to his collar: ‘He lives in a home with 6 children, 2 under the age of 3 – he’s trying to catch up on his sleep. Can I come with him tomorrow?’
Unfortunately, as with most email forwards, this came to me with no links or author credits so I don’t know where it came from or even if it actually happened. However, it’s hilarious, and most of us can see it happening and can identify with it.
Some families give their kids ‘timeouts’ when they’re misbehaving. Many times the misbehaving comes at times when the child is tired, hungry, frustrated, etc. and the time-out really just serves to settle them down so that they can be talked to and dealt with rationally.
This email forward reminded me that parents get tired and frustrated from time to time and also need a timeout. It’s when we push ourselves past our own strength and run ahead parenting, even when we’re tired and/or frustrated, that we end up misbehaving towards or in front of our children. Every parent needs an exit strategy. Kind of like a fire escape plan so that you can get a little rest when you feel the need before you reach the end of your rope and parent badly. Here are some ideas:
- If you’re a full time, at home parent, and your spouse has an outside job, arrange for your spouse to take the kids for a hour when they get home to let you escape to what ever relaxes you (a bath, exercise, a prayer walk, etc.).
- If your kids have nap times, coordinate the naps to happen all at once. Even kids who are older can have a ‘quiet time’ in their room while their younger siblings are napping. Take some of this time and do something that relaxes you. Resist the temptation to spend all of this time doing chores. You being rested for your kids is more important.
- If your kids take well to the stroller or riding in the car, get out and take a walk or a drive. Don’t have an agenda, just walk and/or drive to relax and maybe see some nice scenery.
- Make time each evening, after all the kids are bedded down, to do something that relaxes you, reading, praying, chatting with friends online etc. Identify which activities recharge you and spend even a small amount of time recharging.
- Plan a bigger timeout at least once a week. Get a babysitter and get out and about doing something you enjoy.
What do you do to make sure that your batteries are recharged so that you can parent calmly and in control? Leave your comments, they could be helpful to another parent. We may not be able to follow our dog to the neighbor’s house, but with a little bit of planning we can keep ourselves rested and ready to go.
(If you know where the email forward originated, please let me know so that I can give proper credit.)
Hey Fellow Dad,
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that there are times when your marriage isn’t always as great as you’d like it to be.
In my family, we have 3 very active children, a fourth one on the way, a family-run business, and we homeschool. Finding time to spend alone with my wife is a bit challenging.
Yet I know for an absolute fact that the times when I take her out on dates and give her my complete, undivided attention and focus means more to her… and to our marriage… than almost anything else I could do.
I know this because she has told me so… more than once.
All the flowers, chocolate, jewelry, movies, or anything else I “buy” for her don’t even come close to the love she feels from me when I simply give her my time and focused attention. It makes her feel valued and cherished by me.
One of the best dates we’ve ever had was exactly like this. Since Valentine’s Day is coming up, I asked her to briefly share about it. (The book she mentions is called My Wife Journal, and I highly recommend it no matter what stage of marriage you are at.)
“This is what I can tell you from my heart. I will always remember our date on a cold winter night.
Rather than getting dessert at the restaurant and rushing off to see a movie, our going to the quiet, empty eating area of a local supermarket was one of the best dates I’ve ever had with you.
It was so much better than any flowers or anything you personally could have bought me. With your work at such a hectic pace in your life, it was like you took the time to stop and focus on me.
More than anything, what I really long for is your time and focused attention. I wasn’t sure what you were slipping out of your pocket with a pen in your hand. I thought you were going to share another one of your entrepreneurial ideas or business strategies.
It was the coolest thing for you to actually start asking me personal questions. It was as though my heart began to melt and by the end of our date night I was laughing and holding your hand.
One of my favorite books that you own is the my wife journal. Thank you for keeping it in a private place and guarding what I shared with you. Thank you for making our time together conversational and when I asked you the same questions, thank you for sharing your thoughts with me.
Thank you for dazzling me with something more beautiful than diamonds and much more significant than flowers!”
Fellow Dad, I can’t tell you enough how much my wife appreciated this date. I hope this encourages you in your marriage.
You can learn more about the “My Wife Journal” here.
Blessings on your marriage,
Joey Watkins Founder, FamilyDads
PS – Don’t forget, Valentine’s Day is February 14th!
FamilyDads is a dad-founded and dad-focused organization committed to helping dads prioritize and lead their families. Learn more at http://www.FamilyDads.com
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valued I’m not a fan of the Simpsons but I had to chuckle when I heard an ad for the show. Homer said, “Why do things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?”
Very few of us would ever seriously ask that same question but how about if we tweaked it slightly, “Why do things that take place in stupid families keep on happening in mine?”
Isn’t that kind of what we’re asking when we get frustrated and throw out questions like, “Why must everything be a fight?” “Can’t anyone clean up after themselves?” “Would it hurt anyone to help out a bit for a change?” “For once, could you please just get along?”
One day many years ago, a friend and fellow worker very politely pointed out that I had a bad habit of interrupting him pretty much whenever he spoke. I admitted I had the problem, apologized and told him that I was going to do something about it. In the days that followed, he politely reminded me time and time again. I responded the same way each time.
A week or two later my friend reached the end of his patience and said, “Every time I talk about this, you say that you’re going to do something about it. Stop putting it off! Make a decision to change and do something about it now.”
I stopped and prayed on the spot for God’s help and I made a decision. Once the decision was made, I began paying attention and I put some effort into learning the skills I needed like really listening and following up with a question.
Albert Einstein once defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
I stopped interrupting however the biggest benefit of my friend’s rebuke was that I later learned how to apply the change principle in my family. Let me give you a brief example.
Once our family was suffering from chronic tornado kitchen syndrome. At first I whined, I complained and I asked the ‘Homer Simpson’ style questions.
My wonderful wife pointed out that perhaps we needed to do something different if we wanted change. (Where had I heard that before?) After some prayer and thought, I taped a note to the kitchen counter and had a family meeting and the fun began. If a single thing was out of place after someone left the kitchen they were on kitchen duty until the next time someone was caught. For awhile everyone was catching everyone else and kitchen duty revolved frequently. Within a few weeks everyone was getting the hang of ‘the game’ and those caught were spending longer periods of time on kitchen duty which made it even more important not to mess up.
What needs to change in your family? Is it the way you communicate with each other, are the kids not helping out, is the sibling rivalry fierce, are you constantly cleaning up after everyone? Here’s what you do, pick one thing that you want to change, pray about it and ask for wisdom. Now go looking for wisdom, search this site or other Christian parenting sites, Google the problem, read a parenting book, anything you need to do to find an idea or solution.
Proverbs 9 says that wisdom has prepared a huge banquet and she’s yelling, “Come and get it.” Finding the wisdom is very seldom difficult once you’ve decided on change. Now have a family meeting and get started.
What I found out was that small efforts at change can yield big results. A simple fun game in the kitchen led to everyone learning skills that began to spread to the rest of the house. My simple decision to stop interrupting people led me to better communication skills and therefore to better and stronger relationships.
The things that happen to stupid people happen to Homer Simpson and us not because we’re stupid but because we keep doing the same things over and over again and that’s stupid. And if we expect any change without changing, according to Einstein, that’s insane. Start today and fight stupidity and insanity with a little change.
For more quick and easy parenting tips for bringing change to your family, we recommend “Parenting at the Speed of Life”
(RICK OSBORNE / Christian Author, Speaker & Bible Teacher)
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yelling During the worship service in church we sang a song from Psalms 84. When I sang David’s words, “better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere,” it struck me that David romanced God. He sang to him, he danced before him, he yearned to be in his presence, he wrote many psalms pouring out his heart and feelings towards him and he showed him his love with extravagant displays of adventurous obedience.
After having that thought, my mind jumped immediately to the same question that yours just did, “Can someone romance God? Isn’t romance reserved as a wonderful dance between a man and a woman?” So I looked up the word romance. While it is true that the word romance has, for the most part, come to refer to the expression of love between lovers, its origin and breath of meaning reveals other possibilities of use for this powerful word.
The word originally referred to a type of popular stories that were written in the Roman language; fanciful stories of extravagant and surprising adventures, featuring heroes and heroines, stories that carried their readers away. A romance is a story. It seems that over time the word began to be used of the romance or the adventurous love story between a man and a woman. Unfortunately, for many of us, the word has merely come to mean taking our significant other out for a dinner or buying them flowers once in awhile. However, what it should mean to us, is to intentionally weave and build your love relationship into a wonderful lifelong tale of expressed love and shared adventure.
Knowing this and seeing that the word’s definition is not just confined to the love between a man and a woman, I rethought David. His whole life story was a romance, full of adventure and all built on the foundation of his love for God and his expression of that love. David’s life was a romance with God.
Wow! I started thinking right away of how I could romance God. Sing him a song, write him a poem, stop more often to thank him and find more ways to demonstrate my love; unexpected, not required, from-the-heart, just-because-I-love-him ways. I want to intentionally build a love story, an unexpected romance between God and myself.
Now stay with me because my musings took me one step further. Jesus said that when we express our love to others, giving to them, caring for them and helping them, that he takes it as if we were expressing our love for him (Matthew 25:45). One way we can romance God is by loving and serving those around us.
When I think of romancing my wife (and now God as well) I look for thoughtful and unexpected ways to surprise with an expression of my love. These expressions begin to build our story or romance.
So one way to romance God is to look for unexpected ways to surprise those around us with expressions of our love for them. I’m calling it ‘Romancing your family.’ Here’s how; stop at the store and pick up your kid’s favorite chocolate bar, hug them when they walk by, write them a nice note, sit down beside them and be interested in what they’re doing or tell them something you love about them etc. Every thoughtful and unexpected expression of your love will build your relationships and begin weaving a wonderful story out of each of them.
My wife has called me a romantic but I want to take this to a whole new level. As I live my life romancing God directly and by loving others, my prayer is that God would weave each effort together so that one day the story of my life can be looked at like David’s and called a romance.
What can you do today to romance God by surprising each member of your family with an unexpected expression of your love?
For more quick and easy parenting tips for bringing change to your family, we recommend “Parenting at the Speed of Life”
(RICK OSBORNE / Christian Author, Speaker & Bible Teacher)
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Teachable Moments Do you remember your parents telling you to not air your family’s dirty laundry? It’s a metaphor which apparently can be traced back to Napolean. The idea being that you shouldn’t do laundry in public (eg hang clothes on a line to dry) that would reveal intimate details of your life and you also shouldn’t tell others about the troubles and private things that happen in your family.
I remember hearing this saying when I was young and my Granny was still alive. I remember wondering why (if this saying were true as a fact as well as a metaphor) she would hang her unmentionables on our clothes line when she visited. Now I should mention that my Gran was a wonderful lady but she was a very large woman and her private garments would attract attention. However, for some reason she seemed oblivious to this fact.
I’m telling this story because I believe that somehow, somewhere along the way, we’ve adopted the idea that what happens behind closed family doors is no one’s business but our own. Which has again somehow led to the idea that we are free to behave in ways in our homes that we would not act in public.
Although I’ve seen this in many Christian homes, it is not God’s idea of how a Christian home should function. Being a Christian is about who we are and who we’re becoming, it’s not just about what we believe. As we submit our lives to God, he by his grace and the work of the Holy Spirit begins (and never stops) to change our hearts and that change should be reflected in our behavior. The first place that our changed behavior should show up is in our closest relationships – in our family relationships.
The Apostle Paul wrote these words. “Do not rebuke an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father. Treat younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity.” (1 Timothy 5:1, 2)
Notice that Paul assumes that our best behavior would be used on our family members and he therefore exhorts Timothy (and us) to treat other Christians how we treat our family. Would it go over well if you treated the people at church the same way you’ve allowed yourself to treat your spouse and/or children from time to time in the privacy of your own home?
In the same letter to Timothy, Paul outlines the qualifications for leaders in the church and reveals that what goes on at home either qualifies or disqualifies you for leadership. Would others question your ability to minister to others if they saw a video (taken secretly) of you at home?
The only Biblical application I can see for ‘Don’t air our family’s dirty laundry’ is that we shouldn’t gossip about our family members or maliciously share their mistakes with others. Our homes should be a safe place to grow and make mistakes but it was never meant to be a place where we can behave badly because we’ve been led to believe that a Las Vegas like slogan applies, ‘what happens at home stays at home’.
Try this, next time you’re reading the Bible, with each instruction ask yourself “Am I living this at home?” If you’re not, stop and pray and ask for God’s help. Also start checking your home behavior, if you’re about to scream or get unreasonable stop and think if you’d speak that way to your pastor. If you’re doing something that you wouldn’t want to talk about Sunday morning then think about why you’d even consider behaving that way in front of the ones you love the most.
Perhaps my Granny knew this to be true and was reversing the metaphor when she hung out her large unmentionables to dry. Or perhaps she just wanted dry unmentionables. I’ll ask her when I get to heaven.
For more practical and Biblical Christian Parenting ideas we recommend the Christian resource, ‘Teaching Kids About God’.
(RICK OSBORNE / Christian Author, Speaker & Bible Teacher)
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So how exactly can God use our Christian families (Christian parents and Christian children) to impact the world and bring God’s blessing to the nations?
I believe he wants us to raise a generation of Christian kids that will do major damage to the gates of hell. Let me explain.
If Israel could become great and powerful by teaching their children to walk with God and keep the Old Covenant how much more can the Body of Christ grow and powerfully impact the nations, according to God’s promise, if we were to teach our children to walk in the power and grace of the New Covenant.
Can you imagine if instead of losing our kids to the world we kept them all in the church. I’m not talking about just having more bodies to warm the pews. I’m talking about a generation that grows up learning God’s Word, walking in relationship with God and growing in his grace. A generation that is excited about being used by God and about taking ground for the Kingdom of God. Like the generation of Israelites that took the Promised Land only each one of these would be under the New Covenant and filled with God’s Spirit.
Right now we try to protect our children from the evil influences of the world and there is a time for that while they are young.
Unfortunately, our children, (for the most part) are not learning about and growing in their Faith during that time. Think about if we taught our children math and science like we teach them their Faith not one of them would ever graduate. So when they get old enough to see what the world has to offer they wander over there to check it out.
Instead we should be training up our children in the Word of God, equipping them with truth, showing them how to grow close to God, walk with him and influence the world for God and change it for his Kingdom. If we did this we would not have to worry about the world affecting our children. The world would have to start to worry about our children changing them.
If we followed God’s plan and raised kids God’s way, we would all leave this world with the Body of Christ stronger and more powerful than it’s ever been.
Do you know why we have youth groups that have to put all their energies into keeping our teens out of the world or retrieving them from it? It is because we have not brought them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. They do not know God, who they are in Christ or what they believe. What they learn from Sunday school and from Bible stories and the occasional Bible reading won’t cut it.
I foresee the day when we won’t need that kind of youth group anymore. If we stuck to God’s program and taught our children well, when they were young, more youth groups would be more like an army headquarters then a long term care hospital.
Think about this, we currently burn out our pastors because a large portion of the congregation is either new to the Faith or they have never really grown in their Faith. While the pastors are getting burned out trying to get a congregation of baby Christians to grow up just a bit, the children of these same people are headed towards the world.
So we burn out the pastor and lose the children. Then when the children who left the church (who never grew up in their Faith) have children of their own, come back and we start the whole process over again.
If we did it God’s way we would focus on the children and grow up a generation of mature Christians who would work with the pastor, reach the world for Christ and train and instruct their children to do the same. The old cycle would be broken and a new cycle of strength and growth would be established.
What God wants to do through families is raise a generation that can have a bigger impact on this world then the one before so that he can bring about his promise to bless all nations.
For more practical and Biblical Christian Parenting ideas we recommend the Christian resource, ‘What Mary and Joseph Knew About Parenting’.
(RICK OSBORNE / Christian Author, Speaker & Bible Teacher)
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In part one we talked about how God wants to have salvation and his blessing come to our families. In part two I would like to talk about God’s calling on Christian families and how God wants to work through them.
Let’s go back and take a closer look at the verses about why God called Abraham.
Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” (Genesis 18:18, 19) Read more
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When my mother gave her life to Christ and started attending church every Sunday she had a husband, (my step dad) six children (ranging from toddler to adult) and a large extended family. She was understandably worried about how her new Faith would be viewed and if everyone would embrace it as well or reject it and her. She even started taking the youngest of my siblings to Sunday School on her own.
One evening not too long after her decision to live her life for Christ, no matter what the cost, she attended a Gospel dinner with a special Christian speaker. That speaker prayed for her and while he was praying, even though he did not know her or her situation, he said, “Don’t worry, today salvation has come to your house.” Read more
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