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Category Archives: Musings and Stories

Inspired by Fred’s Blog

30 Nov

The Next Phase

Dear God, I read a friend’s blog this morning and a story from when he was in his 20s reminded me of the enthusiasm of youth. He spent 10 years running a coffee shop and doing street witnessing at night. While I’ve never done anything that bold for that long, I can certainly recognize a zealousness in my 20s that has been dulled over the last 25 years. What causes that? Was I right then and wrong now? Was I foolish then and wise now?

When I really stop and think about it, I think zealousness about one’s own life philosophies or beliefs is inversely commensurate with one’s exposure to a broader world. It’s easy for the child to believe everything their parent teaches them when they are young because no one else challenges it. But as children age, learn about history, meet new people, read different books, and watch different videos (movies, TV shows, and clips they can watch online) they start to have to reconcile their small world with a vastly larger world.

In my own case, I used to be much more theologically conservative. Only some were going to Heaven and the rest were going to Hell. Certain things were definitely sin that needed to be repented of. My dogma was rigid and my ability to judge others was high. But then life starts to present me with certain realities. It’s easy to think homosexuality is wrong until you have to talk to your gay sibling about it and then you start to think about all of the ways that you yourself have grieved God sexually. It’s easy to think that only those who followed the Christian formula are going to heaven until hundreds of thousands of people (most of them Muslim) die instantaneously in a tsunami at the end of 2004 and you as yourself if hundreds of thousands of people just went straight to hell. It’s easy to think that poor people need to just pick themselves up and get to work until you sit with them in person and really understand the causes of multi-generational poverty and also the particular circumstances in their lives. That’s when you start to really work out your faith with fear and trembling. That is just a taste of what life has taught me over the last 25 years.

Father, I am still on this journey. I am still blind to my prejudices. I guess the one thing I have going for me is that I know that I’m ignorant. I know that my faith and love are incomplete. So I submit myself to you, your teaching, and your process for my life. Protect me from outright heresy. Please keep me from going too far in my worldly knowledge and philosophy. Lead me in your Spirit and your Truth. Be glorified in me so that your kingdom will come and your will will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.

In Jesus’ name I pray,

Amen

 
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Posted by on November 30, 2017 in Miscellaneous, Musings and Stories

 

Am I an “Evangelical”

16 Nov

https://thegathering.com/unfaithful-to-holy-things/

Dear God, I read the blog post I linked to above this morning, and it got me thinking (I suppose that’s what a good blog post will do). The author talked about how the word Evangelical has lost its meaning as a description of someone’s faith. He pointed out that it has not only become part of a political demographic, but it has also been saddled with the baggage of being judgmental and bigoted.

The thing that came to my mind is, as an Evangelical by the original meaning of the word, how often to I explicitly share the Good News with someone who needs it? How often do I miss Peter’s lesson in Acts when he and John are walking by the beggar and he says, “Silver and gold have I none…,” and then shares Jesus direct power with him? By the true definition of what we would like Evangelical to mean, how many real Evangelicals are left?

Father, help me to be an Evangelical. Help me to boldly share your love for others’ sake. Offer your hope through me. Let our culture redefine Evangelical back to its original definition and let that start with me.

In Jesus’ name I pray,

Amen

 
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Posted by on November 16, 2017 in Miscellaneous, Musings and Stories

 

Anxiety

02 Sep

This isn’t going to be a typical post. I’ve been thinking about something I thought I would put down on “paper” so I can kind of think it out.

I woke up yesterday morning earlier than I should have. I was experiencing something I don’t normally face–anxiety. As I lie there in bed, I was anxious about everything. From work and different challenges there, to my children as they are now both living away from home as young adults, to my and my wife’s families of origin and different hurdles they are facing, to my own bank account (which doesn’t make sense because it’s probably in the best position it’s ever been in).

I tried to let go. I tried to rationally talk my way out of the issues. But I was locked up. I was anxious. I couldn’t go back to sleep. I got up and did my prayer journal. It was about Ruth and how God provided for her and Naomi through Boaz. I tried to consider that Ruth had faced more trials than I am facing now. Anyone living in the Houston area today (and I know people who live there) would probably trade places with me in a second. Nothing was helping.

As I finished getting dressed for work, the idea occurred to me that some things can only come out through prayer and fasting. So just after I decided I should probably fast for the day my wife came in and told me that she had decided to go to a 7:30 Friday morning worship service at our church. I’ve never gone with her to one of these before, but I decided that sounded like a great idea. I had prayed. I was listening to Christian music. But some corporate worship sounded like a great idea.

Our small town in Texas was founded in 1849. Our church has two sanctuaries. The “Old Church” was built in 1861. The “New Church” was built in 1908. Friday morning services are apparently done in the Old Church. My wife had to tell me that when I tried to go into the New Church. Here’s a picture of the church when it was new in 1863.

slideshow12531_2

I was kneeling in church and praying through my anxiety (much of it foolish anxiety) when I looked up to the ceiling. I looked around the room. I thought of the early settlers. I thought about their daily lives and how hard they must have been. Their vulnerability to drought, hostile Native Americans, disease, etc. They had no means of accumulating a lot of money. They were a community of Germans, here less than 15 years, struggling to start a new life, and in the midst of their struggle they had not only come together to build a church, but they had built a big, beautiful church. The rock and other materials were not easy to find and gather. I imagine that it wasn’t easy to build given the technology of the day and the fact that their numbers were in the hundreds and not thousands. How did they face their challenges? Would any of them have been in bed early in the morning, lie there and just worried about things, or would they have gotten up, put their face to the wind, and gone to work? Is there one of them that wouldn’t look at my situation (the job I have, the house where I live, the car I drive, the money I have in the bank, etc.) and laugh at the idea that I am anxious about anything?

I left that service completely refreshed and renewed. The Holy Spirit had spoken to me and inspired me, not by the sermon or the contents of the service, but by introducing me in a new way to a remarkable group of people who lived by faith, hard work, and perseverance 150 years ago. Not one of them ever imagined that they would inspire someone sitting in that room in the year 2017.

Later that evening, my wife told me about a podcast she had heard where a sociologist described the generalized characteristics of the different generations (e.g. Baby Boomers have these traits, Generation X these traits, Generation Y, Millennials, etc.). They apparently don’t have a good label for the current teens, but they have some interesting observations (and these are all broad generalizations so there are many exceptions to these descriptions). Here is a list of what she told me:

  • For reasons I still don’t understand, a larger percentage of them do not have a driver’s license by spring of their senior year in high school (70% now vs. 90% in previous generations).
  • Politically, they tend to be more Libertarian in their desire to get the government out of their lives. “Don’t tell me who I can marry, what I can smoke, etc.”
  • They are hardworking, with the feeling that the world isn’t going to take care of them so they are going to have to go out and take care of themselves.
  • They avoid joining groups. Religiously, this means that they are skeptical of organized religion. But they love small community with just a few friends.
  • They are more prone to interacting with their community through technology rather than face-to-face. They will sit isolated in a room and visit with people through devices rather than in person.
  • They experience a lot of anxiety.

I thought that last one was interesting. Psychologically, I think there is something about our current society and how we are now entering the world through social media and what the electronic news shows us that is leading us to more anxiety. Here are some thoughts I have as to why, but they are only my opinion:

  • When we look at social media, we only see the best of our friends’ lives, but when we compare ourselves to them, we use our reality, not theirs. And this isn’t a criticism of only putting the good parts of your life on social media. It’s not appropriate to air your dirty laundry out there like that. I’m just saying that as readers we need to remember that there is more to each life than we read about on a computer/phone screen.
  • When we look at news (regardless of your source), we are seeing articles that were written as “click bait” and not what someone thinks we need to know. This makes the stories more opinionated (usually negative opinions) than fact-relating.
  • When we argue or disagree with people, our disagreements are more vitriolic because it is easier to be confrontational typing our anger than it was in the old days when our only option was face-to-face.
  • More money means more problems. Money brings all kinds of unexpected problems that are too numerous to list here, but there is a belief among those who struggle month to month that having more money would solve all of their problems. It would solve some of them, to be sure, but it wouldn’t solve all of them. In fact, it creates problems that would surprise you.
  • When we are physically isolated from people and have too much time left alone with our own thoughts, we rarely lead ourselves in a healthy direction. We were not built to be alone.

If you were to go to any one of the Germans in the picture above and tell them you are anxious about your life, they would be surprised. They surely would have been surprised at me yesterday morning. And I don’t have some great prescription for our society to follow so that we can leave anxiety behind. But I can tell you that I found a path out yesterday by praying to my God, taking the day to fast and pray (confession: I broke the fast after 6 p.m.), and then tapping into the inspiration that a bunch of German immigrants left for me 150 years ago.

 
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Posted by on September 2, 2017 in Miscellaneous, Musings and Stories, Uncategorized

 

Emails to God – Supporting My Wife Going Catholic, Part 3

14 Nov

This is the third part in a series I am doing as a companion piece to my wife’s blog. She is explaining in a six-part series how she came to join the Catholic church this last Easter, so I thought I would flesh out some of the details as I experienced what she experienced. You can read her blog at www.meganwillome.com.

In today’s post, my wife introduces our local priest, Msgr. Enda McKenna. Let me give you a description of Enda. If every priest were like Enda then everyone would want to be Catholic. If every Christian pastor were like Enda then everyone would want to be a Christian. You get the idea. He is a sweet, gentle soul. I often describe him as a doll of a man. Just precious. He’s in his early seventies. He has soft white hair and an Irish twinkle in his eye. He grew up in Northern Ireland, and has that slightly whimsical Irish stereotype about him. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, and I adore him. Here is a picture:

Msgr. Enda McKenna
St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Fredericksburg, Texas

Through my work, I am privileged to be a member of our local ministerial association, even though I joke that I am the amateur Christian among the professionals. That is where I first met Enda. He is the first Catholic priest since I have lived here to actively participate in our ecumenical Christian ministerial association (okay, there has only been one other priest since I lived here, but I was really impressed when he started to show up and participate). Without exception, all of the pastors in the association love Enda. One retired Baptist pastor has particular affection for him. Enda was one of the first pastors to reach out to him when he lost a son to a car accident.

So that’s a description of Enda. Now, back to our story. When last we left off, my wife had started visiting St. Mary’s during the Christmas season, and I was visiting a church that meets in a bowling alley. Our two children, daughter who was 11 and son who was 14 weren’t visiting with us because we felt like were were in such flux, so we were doing family worship services together on Sundays. I also started having a Friday morning breakfast with one of the men from the bowling alley church so that we could share our lives and develop our relationships with God.

Around March of 2011, about three months after my wife and I were attending different churches, I mentioned to my friend, Tom, that I was feeling really disconnected spiritually from her. He looked at me and his advice was profound. I think I have this quote right: “You need to suck it up and go to church with your wife.” Hmm. That wasn’t the advice I was looking for. I had hoped he would encourage me to work through this with her in a way that we would both find a church together. But God obviously had her on a bit of a spiritual quest, trying to make some sense of her own relationship with Him given the loss of her mother and how her own view of her Christianity might have been wrapped up with her mother’s. As I said in my last post, it wasn’t that I resisted going to St. Mary’s because it was Catholic. I resisted because it was liturgical. Having grown up Baptist, visiting Lutheran churches was about as liturgical as I had gone. Worshipping Sunday after Sunday in the Catholic style…scared isn’t the right word. Let’s just say, it didn’t enthuse me.

I started attending St. Mary’s with her in early March 2011, and I talked to Enda at one of the ministerial association meetings about us visiting St. Mary’s. He had seen me there with her and wondered. I told him that Megan would probably enjoy a chance to visit with him about what she was experiencing, so I think he made it a point to visit with her that Sunday morning that she describes in today’s post. That is not to say that Enda wouldn’t have sought her out anyway. He is a generous soul and as accessible a Catholic priest as I have ever known, willing to change his schedule at the drop of a hat for anyone. But I think he was particularly aware of my wife’s quest as a result of our conversation at the ministerial association.

That’s where Megan ends her narrative, so that’s where I’ll sign off too. We’ll see you next Wednesday with Part 4.

 
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Posted by on November 14, 2012 in Miscellaneous, Musings and Stories, Supporting My Wife Going Catholic

 

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Emails to God – Supporting my Wife Going Catholic, Part 2

07 Nov

I am continuing my process of writing companion pieces to my wife’s blog posts about how she ended up joining the Catholic church (click here for her blog). I’m doing my best to line up my posts with her timeline, trying to give my perspective on a fairly monumental shift in our lives.

My previous post about this last Wednesday ended with me saying that our family was in a bit of a church crisis at the end of 2009. My wife, daughter, and I were attending one church while our then 13-year-old son was attending another that he liked better. What I didn’t say was that my wife’s mother was gravely ill. My wife hasn’t written much about this in her “Going Catholic” series, so I want to be careful to not violate her privacy in this area. What I will do is give you a description of my mother-in-law.

In short, the people who knew here saw her as a spiritual giant, a prayer warrior, and thoroughly Godly woman, and she was all of these things. When she passed in March 2010 I would conservatively estimate that there were over 700 people at her funeral. I think I’m safe to say that, without exception, the people there admired her greatly.

She had gone through her own spiritual journey. I’m a little fuzzy on some of the details, but growing up Episcopalian, I believe she would describe herself as having discovered God in a new way in college. It was when she joined Bible Study Fellowship (BSF) in the late 70’s that her discipling relationship with Jesus took off. She eventually became the teaching leader for her group, and started to have tremendous influence on countless women that would continue until her death, and probably beyond. She eventually left the Episcopal church, and by the time I met her she and my wife’s family attended a Bible church. My wife grew up Episcopalian as well, and the change to the Bible church came in late middle school. By the end of her life, however, my mother-in-law and father-in-law had returned to the Episcopal church.

Again, I don’t want to tell too much of my wife’s story and violate her privacy, but instead explain what I experienced during this process. After my mother-in-law’s death in march 2010 my wife found herself being uncomfortable in the church we attended. It wasn’t the church specifically. She felt like it was something within her. We tried different churches, but she never felt comfortable. For my part, being very frank, I have never enjoyed going to church so I was probably not the best-equipped person to lead us through this transition. There were some Sundays that, with no specific place to go, I would just choose to sleep in. This was difficult for the kids because, being middle schoolers and high schoolers by now, they were just like me at that age and didn’t want to go to church–especially a different one every week or two. It wasn’t exactly fair to them make them try a new place each Sunday, so we stopped making them go with us when we would visit a place.

By the end of 2010, we were trying a “family worship service” on Sundays with our son leading music on his guitar and having a short devotion/lesson. That part was going surprisingly well at the time. I had found a church that I liked that met in a bowling alley (obviously, it was an informal group), but Megan was still looking for something different. Then one Sunday (I think it was one where I had slept in), she came home and told me that she visited St. Mary’s Catholic Church that morning and really loved it. It was the first time I had heard her describe a church that way–really ever. I had never heard that kind of enthusiasm from her about any church in the 20 years I had known her. It kind of scared me because I was thinking that there wasn’t a way I could follow that path–not because it was Catholic in theology but because it was liturgical and formal in its structure. My response would have been the same if she had said Episcopalian. It made me nervous and resistant.

That is where our story ends today because that is where her blog ended. In summary, at the end of 2010, my wife’s family was dealing with the loss of her mother, I was visiting a nondenominational church that met in a bowling alley, my wife had visited St. Mary’s for the first time, and we were doing family worship with our children on Sundays. It was also during this time that I started to have a once-a-week Friday morning meeting with a man I met at the bowling alley church. This new friendship proved to be pivotal in how I would support my wife on her journey.

 
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Posted by on November 7, 2012 in Miscellaneous, Musings and Stories, Supporting My Wife Going Catholic

 

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Emails to God – Supporting my Wife Going Catholic, Part 1

31 Oct

My wife has started posting a series on her blog about how she ended up “converting” to Catholicism (www.meganwillome.com). I decided it might be good if I posted corresponding posts to describe my own church journey as it corresponds with hers. I think mine will probably be longer and less succinct than hers, so if you’re game you can read along.

It starts when I was eight years old, and my parents were trying to reconcile after a six-month separation. They found themselves at a marriage retreat at Laity Lodge, which is in the Texas Hill Country about an hour from Kerrville. A Catholic priest lead the retreat, and it was through that process and a prayer my father prayed with the priest during one of the breaks that my father became a Christian. When my parents came home and my dad moved back in (the exact order of events is a little fuzzy for me), we all joined the First Baptist Church in our town. Now, many Baptists grow up with anti-Catholic sentiments, but I never did because of my dad’s experience with this priest. My dad, for his part, grew up Methodist, but during the separation had started attending a Baptist church in San Antonio, so joining the Baptist church in our little town seemed a natural fit.

So I grew up Baptist, absorbing more Baptist theology than I realized. I won’t go into the whole story about my own developing relationship with God, but, suffice it to say, by the time I met my wife 23 years ago I was a discipling Christian as was she. Neither of us felt like we had cornered the market on theology and approached our adult lives post college in a very ecumenical way. We usually drifted towards Baptist or non-denominational churches (which are usually theologically similar to being Baptist), but we remained open to different Christian denominations.

After we moved to our current town nearly seven years ago, we looked for a church our children would enjoy. They were both in grade school, and we were trying to replace a church with a vibrant children’s program. After visiting seven different churches, all of differing denominations, the children chose the Methodist church. This suited us fine, and the kids were happy.

Unfortunately, three years later the church went through a terribly divisive time. We tried to stick it out, but it was difficult because nearly all of the families left. The final straw was when we took our son, who was then in the 7th grade, to the youth room on Sunday morning only to find that it was locked and the lights were out because there were no youth to serve. We needed to find something else.

We visited a Lutheran church for a while that my wife, daughter (three years younger than our son) and I liked, but our son didn’t. They were doing confirmation and he had trouble getting into it. Having grown up in a confirmation-free Baptist world I didn’t know how to coach him through it. So we tried giving him the freedom to go to other churches on his own. He tried the Evangelical Free Church youth group for a while, but he didn’t end up liking that.

This is where I’ll end this part of the story since this is about where my wife’s blog post today ends, but, in summary, by the end of 2009 my wife and I were attending a Lutheran church with our ten-year-old daughter, and my son was visiting the Evangelical Free church’s youth group. Something was about to happen, however, that would send my wife on a spiritual journey that God led me to support.

 
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Posted by on October 31, 2012 in Miscellaneous, Musings and Stories, Supporting My Wife Going Catholic

 

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Emails to God – Fanning the Flame

04 Sep

No verse

Dear God, I think the best preacher I have ever heard is a guy named Louie Giglio. He currently leads Passion Ministries out of Atlanta, but I first knew him when I was in college and he lead a weekly “Bible study” at Baylor. I put Bible study in quotes because it was really more of a church service on a Monday night than it was a Bible study. There were 600-800 people filling up the 7th and James Baptist Church sactuary, and it ran from 7-9pm. It was quite the experience, and, frankly, better than church on Sunday. Louie always seemed to be “on” and I could listent to him preach for an hour and never look at my watch.

I mention this because I took a bike ride this weekend and listened to one of Louie’s podcasts. It wasn’t preaching, but there he was just being enthusiastic and fired up for you. His ministry is called “Passion”, and it is aptly named because his passion for you never seems to dim. I was thinking as I listened to him speak, How does he keep his fire burning so consistently?

I know part of it is regular prayer, but I think the other parts are regular time with other believers and regular mountain top experiences. I think it is true that a piece of charcoal that is left with other coals will burn longer than the coal that is left alone. I think this has been the biggest thing I have missed since I have lived here. I have not found any men with whom I can bond spiritually. I have visited close to fifteen churches and haven’t found one that really inspires me. I feel a lot like a coal that is fighting to fan my little flame, but there just isn’t enough cumulative heat to keep it going.

Father, help me to surround myself in a life that will fuel this fire. Help me to find you in my journey. Help me to feel your presence, not only through my wife, but also through friends, church, work, etc. I don’t know that what I am doing is sustainable. I’ve kept the fire going for the almost seven years we’ve lived here, but is it really burning to the point where I am being effective as a husband, father, employee, and friend?

 
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Posted by on September 4, 2012 in Musings and Stories

 

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Cycling to a Church

10 Jun

My wife posted this poem this morning. I really liked it.

 
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Posted by on June 10, 2012 in Musings and Stories, Uncategorized

 

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Emails to God – My Memorial Day Confession

27 May

I had the privilege of speaking to the “Choose Life” Sunday school class at Fredericksburg United Methodist Church this morning. The teacher asked me to speak about Memorial Day and oure responsibility of service given the freedoms given to us. As I tried to put together some thoughts, I found that other emotions were coming out. I finally ended up writing down my thoughts. Below is what I read to the class as part of my presentation. I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to ever veteran and their family for what you have done for all of us.

I am always a little uncomfortable on Memorial Day. I grew up a privileged child. While I wasn’t born into a wealthy family, by the time I graduated from high school we were a family of wealth. My father could afford to send me to college so I never had to consider serving in the military as one of my career options. I know that there are people of means who choose the military anyway out of a sense of calling or duty, but that wasn’t me. I thought of it as too limiting. Perhaps even beneath me. “I could do better.”

I was 31 when September 11 happened and young enough to join the military at that time, but, in all honesty, the cost was too high. I had a wife, two young children, and a career. People hated us and were trying to kill us in a fairly random fashion, but I let others fight that battle for me and my family. There seemed to be enough people to do it. The government wasn’t making a special plea for men of my age to join. They just wanted to make sure I kept shopping. That was my out and I took it.

There are many times throughout the year when I feel embarrassed about my having never served in the military.

  • When I went once to greet the Wounded Warriors who were visiting Fredericksburg from BAMC. I couldn’t even bring myself to go forward and shake their hands. My embarrassment kept me in the back of the crowd, applauding but trying to be unnoticed. I could visibly see their sacrifice and it humiliated me.
  • When I’m at any event where they recognize veterans by asking them to stand up. I always feel ashamed when I remain seated.
  • When I am talking with a veteran who served in some conflict (whether it be Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East, or even during peacetime). They sometimes ask if I served and my answer is an embarrassed no.
  • When I am at a military funeral and they give the family a flag and give the deceased full military honors. I know my funeral won’t have anything like that.
  • When I see the lists of soldiers who have died fighting overseas. I am glad when news programs run these lists, but I always have the sense of guilt as I watch the names go by and I think of the life that was prematurely lost.
  • When I see friends from high school on Facebook who served overseas in the Middle East (Angelo, I’m thinking of you). I am reluctant to even message them because I am humbled by their sacrifice.

So should I feel embarrassed and ashamed? Would the women and men getting off of the bus from BAMC care if they knew I never served? Would they wonder why I wasn’t by their side while they were over there, or would they simply just want to know how I am using the life they helped to provide for me?

What about God? Does he care that I didn’t serve in the military, or does He simply just want to know how I am using the life that He helped to provide for me?

 
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Posted by on May 27, 2012 in Musings and Stories

 

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Emails to God – Salvation, Grace, and Sex Ed

23 Mar

When one of my children prayed to accept Christ, I found myself at a little bit of a loss. The child was an early teen and, having once been an early teen who foolishly felt compelled to go through the process of salvation over and over again because I felt like it didn’t take the previous 20 times, I felt a huge burden to plant initial seeds that would sustain them regardless of what their spiritual path would hold.

How does sex education fit into this? The best marriage book I ever read was Sacred Marriage by a guy named Gary Thomas. The subtitle of the book describes his thesis: What if God designed marriage to make us Holy more than to make us happy? I went through this book with a men’s group, and Mr. Thomas wisely left the chapter about sex close to the end because I think that’s why most of us in the group were reading the book. In fact, I think we stopped reading it after we got to that chapter. But in that chapter he had a unique point. He said, paraphrasing, that most of us (especially men) have a warped sense of sex as adults because the first time we were ever exposed to the concept of sex was through a worldly, non-Biblical lens. Perhaps it was pornography, or other kids talking at school. Maybe it was something in a movie or on TV. But what would it be like if our FIRST exposure to sex was in the framework within which God intended it to be? Would that impact how we experience it as adults?

My wife and I decided to take this challenge and “beat the world to the punch” when it came to our kids learning about sex. We went to the local Christian bookstore and found a book we felt comfortable sharing with our five-year-old son (and later with our daughter when she was about five). It was designed to specifically discuss sex in a way that God intended it for our lives (in an age-appropriate way). While I will probably never know for sure, in just observing my children, it feels like they are free from at least of a few of the hangups that have haunted me.

That brings me to my child’s salvation experience. I have this young, 13-year-old child who has just made the most important decision of their life. If I can only give them one lesson, what will it be? I went to the bookshelf in our study for some help. What I found was Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel. I decided that the most important message I could share with my child was that God’s grace, love, and acceptance is not about our effort, but His. He loves us radically, and there is nothing we can do to change it.

Not wanting to intimidate my child with a Christian self-help book on their first day as a new Christian, I decided to make up a “Cliff’s Notes” kind of version of the first chapter. If they liked it I would do more. So I put three Bible passages together with 19 bullet points from a 20-page chapter onto two pieces of paper and gave it to them. My prayer is to thank God for bringing my child to faith and ask that He will use the foundation of a strong understanding of His grace to build the rest of their relationship with Him.

If any of you have suggestions about other things parents can do to help their children lay a good foundation and nurture further growth, please feel free to share them here.

 
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Posted by on March 23, 2012 in Musings and Stories

 

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