relationships – Page 26

A Godly Education

September 23, 2009September 23, 2009 tlc4women2 Comments

tanzania

In our Children’s sunday school classes, the focus has always been kingdom living. We wanted the children to be able to lay hands on one another and pray, even in the playground. We wanted the children to know memory verses that they could call upon in times of trouble. We wanted them to know that how they acted at school reflected on Jesus. We wanted them to know that even though they were little, they could still pray great big prayers. Recently, I filled in in the Pre-K and Kindergarten class as their teacher was going to be out. When I asked the question, “I want to pray for my mommy and daddy and ask Jesus to ____________” One little girl who is 5 years old said, “let the heavy burdens fall off their shoulders and have peace.” Super surprised I said, “What’s heavy burdens?” “Stuff that makes you scared or mad or not want to come to church.” When I asked one little girl who is 4 “I want to pray for myself and ask Jesus to___________” She answered, “Help to remember to put my plate and cup in the sink, clean up my toys and be nice to my baby brother.” You have no idea how much that blessed me. When we ask the children for prayer requests we get hands raised quickly, “There’s this bully at school” “There’s this test coming up” “My mom yells at my dad to come to church” “My dad drinks too much with his friends” “My friend is sick and missed two days of school” “My brother keeps hitting me” They notice! They love! They understand Jesus will hear them and that nothing is too small or too big.

It’s often the grown-ups who get in the way. Recently an issue popped up. Our kids didn’t know the books of bible. The scramble ensued. Oh no! The kids don’t know the books of the bible. I bought the music they would need to sing and memorize but I didn’t see the point. I kept my mouth shut and went with the plan. Those of you who read this blog on a regular basis know that it lasted about two seconds. I asked a question not to sow discord but to make them think. Bibles have tabs and they have a table of contents, do we really need to know the books of the bible? Is it not more important and to our benefit to know scripture and what lies within those books? Is it not more important to know how to pray for someone or how to pray for ourselves? Is not more important to know that we belong to a kingdom in which no weapon formed against us shall prosper? Oh, it will try to knock us down but we have some promises to call upon. What does knowing the books of the bible do for you in the daily activity of your life? To me, knowing where the book of Ephesians falls in the bible is not important. What’s important is we all understand and know in our hearts and can say in our own words the premise of Ephesians 6:10-18. Just a thought.

To read more about how these kinds of things happened even in the days of Jesus read a good friend of this blog’s site, Jonnysoundsketch2. Click here.

Why I Love Him

September 20, 2009September 20, 2009 tlc4women4 Comments

The Scene: Friday afternoon. Both of us are beat, he more than I. He plops down on our bed, grabs the remote and ice cold water from the fridge. I stop and ask him, “How much do you love me?” He smiles big and says, “A lot, why? What do you need?” I smile back and say, “I want to go see the new Jennifer Aniston movie.” He says, “Baby, I can’t take you till the last showing because I have to take the kids to the football game at 7.” “Oh”, I say, “it’s okay, I was going to ask you to take me to the 4:40 showing.”

He looks at the clock, 4:15. “I can do that, but I won’t have time to shower.” “It’s okay!” So he drags himself up and we go to the movies. As the movie starts I say, “Thanks for bringing me.” He smiles and pats my leg. I get it, he’s tired.

About 10 minutes into the movie he says, “Oh, okay I know what this movie is.” I look over at him and say, “You mean you came with me not knowing what movie it was or anything on a day you were tired? Awww!” He says, “Baby, wherever you are, whatever you want to do, is where I want to be.”

Do Stay-At-Home Mom’s Risk Their Careers?

September 19, 2009September 19, 2009 tlc4women1 Comment

http://www.theparentszone.com/ working-parents tips-to-l...rking-mom

This is part four of a discussion we started on Lies Women Believe.

Marina, a young mother had some valid issues to address in her comments and I wanted to bring them forward as we discuss solutions.

Marina: When I was little, I was sucked into feminist deceit thinking that women should be just as successful as men and we need to rise up and prove that women are actually superior in many areas. I now see that I don’t need to prove anything to anyone!! I know who I am and whose I am. My career focus has been dramatically changed. Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying women shouldn’t work or be successful, God wants to partner with us in our desires so that He can use us wherever we are. The thing is, I have realized the source of many of my desires has come from this prideful, feminist propoganda. This has so touched my heart that I am actually considering what I can do to spend more time at home raising my child and children to come!

According to Tony Robbins, a 40 year study on 1.3 million women show that women are more unhappy today than ever before. So what is the reason for it? I believe we’ve hit on it over the last few days.

You see, when you look at how we were created and when we were created our unhappiness makes sense. In Genesis, the woman, in physical body form, didn’t come on the scene until everything was in place and ordered by God. Her body was formed out of man after he developed a need for her. She was created to be his helpmeet. She was emotion and love and sacrifice and willful and strong and opinionated. She also carries the seed and multiplies into human form, so she is hated by Satan. When you remove her from all that she was created to be, she is lost to her original design.

She finds herself today out of order. She finds herself today, both mother and father, both working and sustaining. Her apron strings long to have children tied to them but her demands are many. She’s painted herself into a corner and yet pride and obligation keep her from her true destiny. Her number one need is security but she finds herself in a world where the only security she has lies in her own abilities.

The biggest thing corporate America will tell her is that she will risk her career by taking a time-out for her family. That statistic is, that in fact, she will make less money and have less ladder climbing ability over her overall career than a women who stuck it out. Hey, facts are facts.

Ask yourself, should you make your lifelong decisions based on financial gain? Are there some things that are more important than money? It would seem that the 1.3 million women who participated in the study that Tony Robbins talks about, will tell you that there’s got to be more to life than what we’ve been given over the last 40 years.

I tell this story all the time but it bears repeating. When my son Anthony was 5 and my daughter Casey was months old, my neighbor came home with a new car. A working mom, her kids in daycare, they were going to Greece that summer for a 10 day vacation. I was beyond jealous. We shared a car and weren’t going on vacation. I determined that day to get a job because I was missing out on the good life. After I put Casey down for a nap and fed Anthony, I was rocking him to sleep. He would nuzzle my neck and play with my hair while he yawned and talked. That day he said, “Mommy, you always smell so comfortable.” It stabbed my heart. Who would rock him to sleep, who would smell comfortable to him? No one but me.

My mom was a working mom. She got to hear about our first word and first step, she regrets she missed her time with us. I was a stay-at-home mom, I could tell you a million stories. The only thing that I regret is that my kids grew up. It was the most fulfilling, happy time of my life. I have a career now and I’m happy with that. Women: you can have it all. I promise you, I am proof of that. I have to now tell you the bad news. You can’t have it all at once! Make wise choices.

Whose Raising The Kids?

September 18, 2009September 18, 2009 tlc4women2 Comments

http://www.blog.thesietch.org/ 200803/13/ we-be-hav...ral-world

This is part 3 of Lies Women Believe.

In part three of the discussion on lies we women have bought into, Marina, a young mom brings up some interesting points that I thought were provoking enough to discuss.

Marina:Many have abortions because the timing is not right, they can’t afford a baby. This has become not just a mindest, but a cultural mindset affecting an entire nation. The laws in place are not a cure for this mentality, it just masks the symptoms. The real problem has come from a cultural shift on our priorities and what we regard as first importance.

Pastor Susan: What happened was that the moms of the 60’s raised daughters who believed that men were trying to keep us from our goals. We also had very guilty feeling moms who knew the heart-wrenching decisions of picking work over their children. Yet, they were stuck. Women were telling other women that they were somehow less than for feeling guilty or for wanting to stay home. They were asking the women why their husbands weren’t carrying 50% of the workload at home. So women sucked it up and did what they had to do. This created moms who were out of sorts, feeling guilty, tired and resentful of the whole mess. Women began to believe they had options. That their needs were more important than an inconvenient pregnancy. Only statistically we see many more women who live in bondage over the decision of abortion than women who live free. They end having deep regret, they think about it each year saying things like, “My baby would have been 14 had I kept it.” If this was such a flippant decision then the residue of that action would not permeate our thoughts in the now. It’s not as easy as women told us it would be.

Marina: I have been struggling with this issue even before I attended this conference because for the last few weeks, every time I drop my child off at the sitter’s I think to myself “I should be the one that spends time with my child during the day, loving him, playing with him and teaching him.”

Pastor Susan: Now there is this shift happening not just in Marina but in her generation who is waking up to the knowledge that women were sold a bill of goods. The adults who were raised as latchkey kids realize they missed out on something. The women of this generation are realizing that we weren’t given more freedom, we were given more burden. Now we are expected to work, raise children and statistically we are doing a majority of the household chores and running of the kids from event to event. We are tired! Women realized that they spent their childhood raising themselves, divorce rates increased in this society and we were not better for it.

The problem lies in that our society has changed. Men, for the most part, and I am generalizing here, don’t want to marry women who want to stay home and raise children. If truth be told, 40% of white, over 50% of Hispanic and over 70% of African American babies are born out-of-wedlock. 65% of kids in prison don’t know their fathers and if they do, they weren’t raised with them. Men also are in an period of finding themselves so they also think they are entitled to stay home. It’s a mess to say the least.

Tomorrow let’s talk about what this all means and what we have to do to make it work for everyone.

Marina

September 17, 2009September 17, 2009 tlc4women1 Comment

http://www.flickr.com/ photos/ lizaedithphotography/ 2423267040/

Yesterday I repeated a blog on Lies Women Believe. Marina commented on this from her perspective as a young mother. I didn’t want her comments to get lost and I want to discuss it further.

Marina:Wow….this article was sent to me by my mother…it is soo true. I myself have been evaluating this issue for the last four days, and here’s why. I was at a conference this last weekend and one of the speakers was Kris Vallaton of Bethel Church in Redding, CA. He gave us a little spill that has had me thinking. He brought up the issue of abortion and how this issue has arised in our culture and how our society’s value of children has been demeaned. America went through the agricultural age with a high value for children. The children helped with the farm and helped to bring income in their family. They were important to the family. They could do more. Somewhere along the line (after the war sometime) the feminist era creeped in and women had an itch to be comparable, to be valued as much as men.

Pastor Susan: During WWII women went to work, while the men went to war. It’s what was needed to keep our country going but what happened is, we really liked working. We liked the independence and we were appreciated in a new sense. This group of women, raised women of my mother’s era. My mother graduated high school in 1959 and for the first time, women of her generation were given options. No longer did they HAVE to get married and have children to be considered decent women. Suddenly they were going to college to get a masters and not a Mrs.

Marina:In the industrial age many women entered the workplace and suddenly the children became a burden for the family. Now we need somebody else to watch our children because he have the responsibility to provide just as the man because now we’re equal! Our mindests become as such: The more children we have the more expenses we have and the children are no longer valuable for helping us, but burdensome for taking from us.

Pastor Susan: This were the dilemma came in. As women, we were supposed to work and bring home the money but society still expected every woman to have a child. If you were a woman who didn’t want a child you were considered selfish or something was wrong with you. We still carry that stigma. If you wanted to stay home and raise your child, you were a stone-aged babe who needed to get with it. The pressure was coming from all angles and we, as women, were just as caught up in the pressure of this new generation as the men were.

Men became accessories in this era. Women determined that men weren’t necessary. We needed their sperm but not their input. We began to teach our sons that they needed to find a woman who would work and help him financially keep the family together. It was a pretty sad state of affairs but you would have never convinced us of this at this time. This is, coincidentally or not, if you see the writing (spirituality) on the wall, where the shift in families attending church services began to decline. I mean, think about it, with all we had going on at the time, we couldn’t fit another thing in. We were tired women and something had to give!

Good points. We’ll continue this tomorrow!

He Perfects All Things Concerning Me

September 14, 2009 tlc4women2 Comments

http://www.flickr.com/ photos/ 28154301@N04/ 3268706918/

God purposes every single thing in our life for good. It’s hard to believe that those horrible things in our lives were for our good but I believe they were. They stretch us and move us out of our comfort zone and our lives aren’t the same yet in some ways better if we allow them to be.

God comes to our aid, and kisses our cuts and bruises, he just doesn’t just pick us up, he walks us through. There is an obvious love that the Lord has for us that shows in the way he handles things for us.

The man that you choose to marry should want to help you right the wrongs in your life. He should want even the heavy and hard stuff to work out in your favor. He should begin with the end in mind. Life isn’t just some roll of the dice thing. Yes there are spontaneous things but for the most part it should be planned. He should not however be willing to do the work for you. The man that is looking to do the work for you is looking for the ego gratification of rescuing a damsel in distress. The minute the damsel is no longer in distress he gets stressed because he’s out of a job. So he goes looking for another damsel.

Expect a man who has planning and that vision. If it’s not there, your life will be a rollercoaster of good and bad with no way to gauge what will happen next. A woman needs to feel secure in her life. We look for that as our number one need. It’s easy to fall into a trap of a man who fixes it all but remember, the bible doesn’t say God fixes it all, it says he perfects it all. We fix our own messes, he helps heal and get us to learn our lesson. He turns the negative into a positive. He never berates us in the process. He never says ‘I told you so’.

Fat, Dumb and Happy

September 5, 2009 tlc4women1 Comment

I wrote this blog two and a half years ago. So what do you say? Have things changed? Looking forward to your answers.

Fat, dumb and happy, this seems to describe the average American right now. We are the most obese nation in the world as well as, fat with information, education, money, resources, have the most consumerism and yet we can’t be filled. There is simply never enough for us as we consume everything set before us and are left empty and desiring more.

Our children are considered the least educated, compared to the countries that are our counterparts. Our teachers scream they aren’t paid enough and more money would fix the problem yet, we spend per capita the most per student of any of these other countries. We have a powerful political teachers union and what is actually eating the money is, the administration of how it is spent, we spend at the top, recruit the best teachers into administrative positions. Then there is the fact that we have some inept teachers, whom we can’t fire because they have tenure, and we can’t hire new teachers, who are on the ball, because we don’t have the funds.

We no longer teach spelling anymore because as the teachers at my children’s school told us, we don’t need to, we have spell check. But if you didn’t come close to spelling the word in the first place, then it’s of little help. Those of us who read blogs see the spelling errors, and know what I am talking about. And forget sentence structure, I didn’t learn it either. Even the newspapers today have misspelled words.

We watch television for all of our information and we rarely read anything. Try to get someone to read a book and they act like Superman with Kryptonite. Some people actually brag, “I haven’t read a book since high school, bless God!” With the No Child Left Behind Act, at least here in California, kids are being passed and yet they can’t read beyond a third grade level. This limits their potential and I don’t understand what we think they are going to be able to accomplish with their life.

We play video games for hours and hours and we allow our children to play them for hours as well. We ignore the violence in them and call them harmless entertainment. When I was in school we had one overweight kid in our class, his name was Carl. The rest of us were just average sized kids. Drive by any school today and average sized kids aren’t the norm anymore. We are a sedentary group who prefers online chat to riding a bike. When we were kids we played outside after school. The increase in childhood illness increases daily and diabetes and heart disease is being detected earlier and earlier. We’re endangering our children and we don’t seem to mind so much. Fast food is what we eat and Super Size It!

Kids have cell phones, portable DVD players, credit cards, every video game known to man, portable video game players and yet, they are always bored.

We have been lulled into thinking this is life! We’ve been told that to be fat and dumb is to be happy. This is a total lie. The fact is people have never been more miserable. Anti-depressant medication is being prescribed like candy. We have more stuff but it doesn’t fulfill us.

We live in the best country in the world, at least I believe so. People are literally dying to come here. Yet we, who should be thanking God that we live here, complain and act apathetic. We can live a different life. We can live a truly content life but it’s going to take us standing up, deciding not to drink the punch of passivity and getting active. Active in determining that we don’t have to live like the neighbors. Determining to be active as we take control of our health and well being. We need to get active in believing that we can live life more peacefully debt free and giving ourselves to service, rather than to consume all that we have and mortgage our lives away. We can get active by more family activities and less stuff. We can learn to read what is really happening in our world and then actively making positive changes to fix it. We can learn to be properly informed about what is going on in the world and that requires not just reading what our media is telling us, but getting some international news and reading a different perspective. There is a whole world out there that we are missing out on.

There was a time when we interacted with one another, now we text, call on cell phone and email and somehow that makes up for fellowship. Yet studies show that people live longer and more satisfied lives when their life is simple and they meet with friends on a regular basis. So the choice is, fat, dumb and happy or healthy, informed and fulfilled. Seems simple but it requires we get off our collective butts and get moving in the right direction!

There Is Nothing He Wouldn’t Do For Me

September 4, 2009 tlc4women3 Comments

/superlocal/ 1355931714/ Korean men carry their woman's purse!

God loves me. He counted each strand of hair on my head and that’s love because I have a thick head of hair. He knew me before I was in my mother’s womb and he chose me to be his before the foundation of the earth. He moved heaven and earth and he sent his son Jesus in human form legally to buy me back when I was sold in a garden. It cost Jesus his life and the pain and suffering he went through during his life was bad enough, rejected by people and called names and lied on and yet it was not the worst part. They tortured him in the worst way and then hung him on a cross to die a brutal death. While those who professed to love God stood by and mocked him and yelled out. He did all of that for me. So truly there is nothing he wouldn’t do for me.

When choosing a man, you need to choose one that is for you and not against you. A man that knows that when you bear his children your bond to that child will be so strong that you will want to stay home and raise them and that he will be willing to get a second job to support you during that time. He will want to protect you and keep a roof over your head and he will never expect you to carry the weight of the family alone. Your man is looking for a partner. The man you chose is a man who has found his passion in life and he isn’t looking around to see if there is a better-looking woman standing around. He loves you. He isn’t comparing you to anyone. He is willing to get you a glass of water in the middle of the night when you wake up with a migraine. He loves you both with a passionate love that one has for their lover and an enduring love that one has for their best friend. He doesn’t mock your ideas or dreams and he wants and expects the best of everything for you. You are his woman and he is your man and together you build a life worthy of each other. He is committed to the long run.

I listened to Dr. Laura one day as a woman called in. She said that she had just had her breast removed because of stage two cancer. She said she desired her husband but was afraid of sexual intimacy because she didn’t want him to see her like that. Her voice was pained and it touched my heart. She continued and said her husband said he loved HER and not her breast and would do anything for her but she was having a hard time believing that.

Dr. Laura softly said something so profound. She said, that the caller had to believe her husband’s love for her and that as he caressed her body with his hand that she had to know that as his hand caressed over where her breast used to be, that he would gladly give his hand to make her whole again.

That’s a godly man. That’s the kind of man you want.

Eating Poison

August 29, 2009 tlc4women1 Comment

I was running errands for the church yesterday and I got a chance to listen to an hour of uninterrupted Dr. Laura on the radio. A mother called in to ask for advice with her children. She said that her teens hadn’t learned a life of responsibility. Dr. Laura asked what she thought the problem was and the mom said she gave them everything without asking for anything in return. Now, they didn’t want to hold their end of the bargain. Oh, I thought, the old you never value what you don’t earn philosophy is true.

The frustrated mom said she’d asked her 19 year-old to move out. Dr. Laura seemed to think this was fine as she asked the mother if she was still giving financial support. The mom sighed and said, she knew she had to stop. Dr. Laura sounded discouraged and said the mother was in essence feeding her child poison. Oh, I thought, so you move your child out but continue to pay the bills so, what does that do?

I listened intently and really got a visual for this. While we as parents have a responsibility to raise independent, respectful, productive citizens of the planet many of us, through overindulgence in many areas, we feed our children poison. It was sad.

I watch a young mom in our church as she struggles with her grade school child. I see her really trying to do the right things and get her child on track. I also see that she is met with opposition by well-meaning people. I try to encourage her and help her in her parenting as much as I can. I see her effort and her exasperation as she takes a deep breath, gets up and goes for it on a daily basis. She is working hard to feed her child the right stuff. Lord, I pray, let it work Lord. Let it work!

Sometimes doing the right thing is hard. It’s not popular in our society. I heard a mom say, “Kids aren’t afraid of their father’s disappointed looks anymore.” I remember wanting more than anything to please my father. Only, the problem is that as the bible says, there are many teachers but not many fathers.

After Dr. Laura’s comment about feeding your children poison, I sat back and realized that we do this in so many ways. When we don’t hold them to a basic standard of living. My husband flips out when he hears fathers who allow their daughters boyfriends to spend the night. He says to me, “Who does that? Come use my daughter. She’s free, hey we’ll even feed you!” It drives him crazy.

My child was caught doing something they had been forbidden to do last week. Of course their first response was to lie/deny. Their second response was to say they didn’t do it and blame “a friend” for the issue. Finally it was to confess and blame us for our “stupid rules”. Only we opted not to feed poison. We offered the rich meal of consequence. Was there hell to pay with the kid? Sure! Absolutely! Honestly, though as followers of Christ it is our job literally to get the HELL out of our kids life by whatever method that takes. And no I don’t mean leave the kid alone. I mean literally get HELL out of their life.

Feeding them poison can be in not giving them a bedtime so that they get enough sleep and can do well in school. Feeding them poison can be by allowing them to be couch potatoes who battle obesity. Feeding them poison can be not giving nutritious meals. Feeding them poison can be through our hateful behavior or being too busy to hang out with them. Feeding them poison can be by overcompensating for our guilt.

So while Dr. Laura was talking to this woman about how to stop financially supporting their child, I saw a bigger picture. One that explains how we get to where this mom is. Don’t let this be us Lord! Please, don’t let this be us!

Street Children

August 28, 2009August 28, 2009 tlc4women3 Comments

During the rebuilding of our church’s building after the fire, we are leasing a store front. Each day there are three boys who play in the parking lot, in the dumpsters, running down the sidewalks, annoying the other offices in our shopping center. They run into our office each time they pass by, “We came for candy and Coke”, they say. Each day that they come by, we give them candy but we don’t drink Coke often so all we have is water which is disappointing to them and they decline.

They generally wreak havoc in the office and then go on to the next office. Today though was different. I was working in what is now the sanctuary. They had found a shopping cart and they were taking turns getting in the cart and running as fast as they could go, before letting the cart go as it ran into cars, windows etc… They got in trouble so they had to let that activity go and they were running around looking for something to get into.

I leave the sanctuary to get a stapler from the office and as I was walking out of the office, I hear the drums and they boys screaming in the sanctuary. I lock up the office and run next door. The scene went like this:

“RUN SHE’S COMING!”
“HANG ON! DON’T RUN! SIT DOWN RIGHT NOW!” This is my best mom voice!
All three of the boys stop dead in their tracks and sit down.
“Now, I’m calling the police because you guys are trespassing.”
“NO! PLEASE DON’T!”
Three boys begin to look really scared.
“Too bad! You guys need to learn a lesson. You can’t just run into places and do whatever you want! There are a lot of expensive things in here and you can’t just go banging on stuff without permission. You have to learn to respect stuff and you have to learn manners.”
“NO! PLEASE DON’T! LET US WORK IT OFF! WE’RE SORRY! WE WON’T DO IT AGAIN.”
A couple of the boys begin to get teary.
“So, here’s the deal I’m willing to make. You have to promise never to do this again. You all can come and play drums and stuff but you have to ask first and you have to be supervised. If you do this again, I really will call the police. Got it?”
“Yes! Thanks! So we can play the drums if we ask permission first?”
“Yes. You can play with permission and with supervision.”
“Okay, and we’ll walk Lulu if you want.”
“No, that’s fine. I want you guys to have stuff to do but we have to have some ground rules. So let me show you how to play the instruments and what you can mess with and what you can’t touch.”
“Do you think we can be in the band?”
“When you’re in 7th grade you can.”
“They’ll let us? Are you really sure?”
“Yes, they’ll let you be in the youth band. I’m really sure. Just use your manners in the house of God.”
“Okay.”

In about 15 minutes they were trying to coordinate a song and trying to drum to a beat. The song? We Will Rock You by Queen.

I know the story of two of these boys. Their moms are stay at home moms and on drugs. The third boy lives with his grandparents but I’m unsure about where his parents are. They basically fend for themselves and no one ever comes to check on them. Ever. They eat whatever we have around the offices. They are generally unclean and unkempt and they have gutter mouths, but you know what? They are little boys. These aren’t big kids. The oldest one is a third grader. Hopefully today we struck a deal. I needed to get their attention and I needed to give them a place to go. You know something? After we made rules, they were sweet. Boys nevertheless, meaning they ran around, they yelled and they played. I wish their parents could see that with some boundaries, care, love and concern they’d have some really great future men to lead our country.