Husbands and Wives: Reconcilable Differences
Never having learned how his needs should be met while growing up, Mark looked elsewhere, finding comfort in an on-again-off-again affair with another woman.
This is an encouraging article about setting limits to nurture your marital relationship.
Husbands and Wives: Awful to Awesome: Restoring Broken Relationships
expectations that went both unmentioned and unfulfilled. Lysa emphasizes having open and honest conversations about expectations, saying, “You cannot possibly meet the expectations of another person if you don’t know what they are.”
This article offers a good prayer on God rebuilding you so you can unselfishly focus on the needs of your mate.
Redeeming Halloween with the Gospel
What to Do About Halloween: The Pumpkin Gospel
How do we become a new creation when Jesus comes into our hearts? (We learn to love Him more; we’re no longer filled with yucky stuff; we become God’s children.)
This is a great idea to teach children that God wants us to show others the depth of our love for Him.
Husbands and Wives: How to Be a Great Mentor
Care for them. When you meet, simply ask the two mentoring questions, “What are your priorities?” and “How can I help?”. Then relax and enjoy the relationship.
What to Tell Your Children about Love, Sex and Relationships: Themes to Discuss With Your Child 0-3 and 4-7 We practice modesty by not barging in while our brother or sister is getting dressed. You can set an age when this should be in full practice — 4-year-olds may not be ready, but a 6- and 7-year-old should practice this at home.
Building the Intensity of intimacy
When I was a new mother, David Gatewood told me that to connect with my son I needed to look him right in the eye attentively when he was talking to me, touch his hand and be sure to let him know that I heard him. When you’ve had a long day that is a hard lesson to follow. But I’ve seen it work. My son knows when I’m really “with him” and when my mind is wandering.
What to Tell Your Children about Love, Sex and Relationships: Self-Concept Is Critical
Abandoned little girls will seek an unsuspecting boy to fill the void in their heart. Angry young men can become emotionally distant to protect themselves from pain — never letting someone close enough to have their heart.
Boys and girls are both excellent; you are exactly as God wanted you
Financial issues Before Marriage
Part of the maturation process, especially for men, is becoming capable of providing for a partner and a family. The bible has some sobering words about financial responsibility.
Crosswalk.com - Accepting Our Children
as I raise my kids, I don’t want to acknowledge their success as much as their effort. And I don’t want to acknowledge their effort as much as their being created in the image of God.”
Countering Radical Feminism’s Agenda
Before your son reaches puberty, start teaching him to treat girls and women with respect. Establish a clear set of guidelines long before he starts dating. Model respect in your own marriage.
How Radical Feminism Harms Boys
“I submit that men tend to emphasize values such as discipline, power, control, stoicism, and independence.
My son had the saddest look on his face when he came home from school today. I asked him what happened. He says his teacher doesn’t like any of the boys in his class. She has repeatedly reprimanded my son for being too rambunctious. Now, he’s deathly afraid he is going to fail second grade.”
Strategies for Marital Conflict Resolution
Focus on the Family Magazine: Fighting Fair
Touch. Hold hands. I don’t know why, but this position softens the heart. It makes us vulnerable to each other instead of making us feel like kung fu fighters. We are more willing to be reasonable and caring than win at all costs when we hold hands. We’ve stuck with the holding hands approach because we like what it leads to: praying together.
TrueU.org | Focus Institute: An Invitation to Question
Why would you believe in and follow a God who could be blown away by the slightest philosophical breeze?
This piece offers a few good points on being unafraid to question the God of mystery, who by His very nature invites debate.
Andrew was looking for truth: truth about God, truth about God’s promise of personal change.
This article is a good example of trusting God. One doesn’t need to know everything about Him, just enough to believe what he says is true.
TrueU.org | Student Lounge: In Defense of the Punt
This is because we come to the conversation from different contexts and with different personalities and motivations (you could also use the word “agendas,”
This is a relatively good article as it discusses the importance of refraining from putting words/ thoughts in others mouths. No one has this right or to assume someone’s motivation.
The Benefits of Family Hobbies: Why Family Identity Matters
My friend with the grown kids says they remember their outdoor adventures as an antidote to the teen culture. Looking back they say, “We were never tempted to drugs or drinking because we had tasted the high of nature and the mountains, in the context of family love.”
It offers excellent points to foster family bonding.
TrueU.org | Lecture Hall: How Spiritual Disciplines Work
TrueU.org | Lecture Hall: How Spiritual Disciplines Work
one does not simply engage in a one-time act of dedication to the master-teacher. To “present one’s body” to a golf instructor requires repeatedly engaging specific body parts in regular activities done over and over again,
Interesting perspective, as submitting each aspect of your life to Christ rather than just confessing sin.
Helping Too-Busy Teens Beat Burnout: Stressed Out
List all the activities you’re committed to — daily, weekly, seasonally, occasionally Divide them into 3 groups: essential, important and pleasurable Beside each, write down something you must say “no” to in order to make that item a priority. Take your time and be honest.
Helping Too-Busy Teens Beat Burnout: Stressed Out
List all the activities you’re committed to — daily, weekly, seasonally, occasionally Divide them into 3 groups: essential, important and pleasurable Beside each, write down something you must say “no” to in order to make that item a priority. Take your time and be honest.
Sex Education in the Public School
Evaluating Your School District’s Sex Education Program: Participation in the Process
Attend meetings with suggestions of possible curricula, studies and supplemental materials that support your views and desires for the sex education program.
Challenge your committee to give parents as many choices for their child
as possible in this most sensitive subject.
Overcoming a Bad Church Expereince
Husbands and Wives: When Spouses Don’t Agree About Church
Individuals feel like they didn’t “fit in” at the church they attended. B. They felt confused or overwhelmed by church expectations. C. They felt rejected, humiliated, or hurt by someone in church.
This is a basic article on Biblical support for overcoming church conflicts and commtting to a one.
The End of Courtship: Part 1 of 3
early sexual satisfaction makes love and real intimacy less, not more, likely — for both men and women.
Some of the ideas in this article seem out of date but it is interesting to see the reasons for the decline of courtship.
“Ask Christ to scour out every stain of dishonesty, of excuse-making, and of self-deception from your heart. Ask Him to make you not only honest, but in love with honesty. That is the kind of prayer He loves to hear.”
Only the first article has any real value.
The Emotional Rollercoasting of Dating
While we give God many areas of our lives, too often we rely on ourselves to find true love. Yet if we’re truly living our lives for God, we must give Him our love life as well. God wants us to be pure for our future spouse. So if you decide to date someone, make sure you’re strong enough spiritually so that God can lead the relationship.
Some Good basic points and boundaries, especially for teens.
Avoiding the Same Mistakes as Parents
I realized he wasn’t telling me to break up with a girl because he was mad at me or that he didn’t want me to be happy. He was telling me because he didn’t want me making the same mistakes.
There are only a couple good points. One of which learning from your parent’s mistakes is a blessing.
Lessons from a Bear of Very Little Brain: The Place of Children’s Literature in Education
“the seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, only properly grow in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes, romances, adventures-the thousand good books of Grimm, Andersen, Stevenson, Dickens,
It has a good point on reflection. We should not approach literature as what we can get out of it, like a lover. This will not create love.
Teaching Teens the Life Skill of Renewing Their Minds.
Teaching teens to look for who God is and what His world is really all about through helping her understand that reading the Bible is having a conversation with God. As she reads, she can look for things that apply to her own circumstances and place in life.
Putting God’s Word into perspective
Preparation for Renewing Their Minds
Meaning is Derived from the Authors Intent?
TrueU.org | Lecture Hall: The Meaning of Meaning: The Politics of Reader-Centered Interpretation
A brilliant commentary on post-modern, feminist literary analysis demonstrating that its logical conclusion is that, “No,” no longer means, “No.”
When Your Spouse is in a Spiritual Desert
Focus on the Family Magazine: Desert Places
If your spouse is in the midst of a trial, cling to God and try to understand more of what your partner is feeling.
This is an encouraging resource of how to pray when in a spiritual desert place.
Three Essentials to Worldview Training
If it can’t be proven by science, then it cannot be considered definitively “real.” I followed his comment with: “Is justice real? How do I prove that?” This is why God’s Word is the source of all primary truth. Because it speaks to all the questions about who God is, who man is, what is right and other core questions of human existence, the Bible must always be the defining reference point for all primary truth.
The Importance of Thinking Critically
Help Your Teen Develop a Biblical Worldview
If the sheer persistence of these messages forces us as parents to teach our teenagers how to think about life and learn to filter messages for themselves, then we have given our young people the ability to think critically. And, hopefully, our teens also will be trained to defend their faith in a world increasingly hostile to family values and Christian faith.
This is a key value in selecting a school for your children.
XXXchurch.com X3 Operation Save The Kittens
In all of the years I have worked to assist people addicted to erotic and/or pornographic materials to walk free, this has to be one of the most blatantly unhelpful sites I have ever been presented with.
Think about it for a moment: We do things we shouldn’t for two reasons — we have not had our needs met in legitimate and effective ways and we always do whatever it is we are told not to do.
The fact that we are doing things we are told not to do — things which we know are less then beneficial for us — causes us to feel shame. Shame causes us to avoid community with other people and with God (The two places God created for us to have our needs met) and, so, our needs then can not be met in a legitimate manner.
The above reality has been known since the early days of Freud and most legitimate Christian counselors (Those who are not simply secular therapists who happen to be Christians) are trained in such from the first weeks of their training.
Why then does the Christian church insist on continuing to use/play off of unmentionably stupid tactics of blatant shame (Every time you masturbate, God kills a kitten) as a means of arresting undesirable behavior when they know full well that it is this shame that caused the problem to begin with?
A pastor I know mentioned a few weeks ago that he had confronted one of his colleagues — a man who had been in his graduating class — with this reality. He had asked him why, if he had been trained in the same seminary and had the same knowledge of grace, did he continue to preach shame and condemnation from the pulpit?
The second pastor’s response, though it put him in a significant amount of distress, was strikingly honest. He said, “Yes, I know all that but, if I ever started to preach that grace, how would I control my flock?”
I have to honor that second pastor — that sort of honesty can be worked with. So few Christian leaders are that self aware.They wouldn’t be able to stay that way if their congregations woke up though.
Healing of any brokenness starts when we admit that we can’t get free, that we don’t even want to be free, that we kinda like our addictions and then we ask one more critical question: “I wonder if there is someone out there who can love me — not as I should be — but just as I am.” (Yes, Billy Graham had it right all along…)
When we finally begin to seek love instead of hide in the shadows and seek performance (Which we will never attain no matter how hard we white-knuckle it…) we have begun to take the first steps out of our brokenness and the first steps towards a ABBA who has the power to so deeply meet our needs that we will never want what we were settling for — never again.
The opposite of white-knuckling is grace — and grace is freedom.
If I Do Not Date Am I Not Normal
Dear Susie — Music, Courtship, Dating and Spirituality
But don’t let the media or your friends determine what’s normal! Only God can determine normalcy. God looks at you as His princess. He’s totally in love with you. In fact, He smiles every time you come to His mind . . . which is constantly!
“And just as we should not draw hard lines between sexuality, spirituality and real life, we cannot separate the mind, soul and body. Our soul doesn’t reside in some cavity in our chests, it is woven throughout our flesh. Because of this unity, when our spirit joins in prayer with another’s, an emotional bond is formed. In the same way, our lips cannot do something without it affecting our soul.”
This is a stunningly balanced article detailing, among other things, the difference between lust and love and how God calls engaged couples to a deep and passionate movement towards oneness on spiritual, emotional and, within limits, sexual ways as they move towards marriage.
Boundless: The Dating Game: The Dangers of Cash-Based Courtship
“Bailey writes that until the beginning of the 20th century, dating as we know it did not exist. If a man wanted to get acquainted with a woman, he came calling at her parents’ home. He sat on the porch or in the parlor, drank lemonade, and perhaps listened to the young lady play the piano — all under the watchful eyes of her parents.”
This author has come to the rather strange conclusion that, as a result of the socio-cultural shift from a courtship/arranged marriage model to a dating model, women have essentially become prostitutes forced by guilt to perform sexual and emotional favors for the finances that have been spent upon them. The assumption, therefore, is that a great many of the trends towards sexual promiscuity etc in our society are the result of such — ignoring the reality that the underlying causes of sexual promiscuity usually have much more to do with a child’s need for love then with money spent upon them.
This article has value — but only in that it could cause a woman to rethink any feelings of indebtedness sexually — not as any sort of well-reasoned reevaluation of dating.
The Evil One’s attack on Marriages
Husbands and Wives: Successful Marriage
This article contains a series of questions about marriage that must be addressed now, before Satan has an opportunity to put his noose of discouragement around your neck. Set your jaw and clench your fists. Nothing short of death must ever be permitted to come between the two of you. Nothing!
Feeling Idolatry in Friendships
Husbands and Wives: Couples in Crisis
“Now we begin to see why groveling, crying and pleading by a panic-stricken partner tend to drive the claustrophobic partner even farther away. The more he or she struggles to gain a measure of freedom (or even secure a little breathing room), the more desperately the rejected spouse attempts to hang on.”
A direct and somewhat blunt assessment of how we further damage weakened relationships.
Husbands and Wives: Lifelong Love
Remember, the dating relationship is designed to conceal information, not reveal it. Both partners put on their best faces for the one they seek to attract. They guard secrets that might be a turn-off. For anyone contemplating marriage, here are seven straightforward recommendations that will increase the chance of living happily ever after:
Some very solid advice about dating and picking a mate that can actually meet the dreams of your heart. Key focus: Dating a Christian must be a non-negotiable.
Your Future Mate is in God’s Hands.
Talking to Your Child About the Facts of Life: Get a Vision
“These kids are way too young to be thinking about dating. That’s why we’re allowing you to date at 17.” Or, if you have decided that courtship is the best option for your child, you might say: “These kids are way too young to be thinking about dating. You’re free of that stress because you’re waiting for the husband/wife God has for you.”
Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality
Dr. Joseph Nicolosi writes a stimulating assessment of the individual attempting to change his or her sexual orientation — a group he feels hs been neglected by the mental health profession in its attempt to support the liberation of gays. In it he details how, in its attempt to support the liberation of gays, the mental health profession has pushed underground another population. Because it no longer categorizes homosexuality as a problem, it has cast doubt on the validity of the struggle to get free of a homosexual orientation.
Challenges in the Teen Years: Dating vs. Courtship
This is the most direct answer Dr. Dobson has, as yet, given to the entire Josh Harris model in which, he both addresses the fear that dating has become a training ground for the absence of commitment and yet still states:
“Many parents, and undoubtedly the majority of teenagers, would consider the courtship model to be extreme and terribly restrictive. Not every teenager would tolerate it. I believe it’s a good idea in those settings where both generations are committed to it and are willing to work together to make it successful. Courtship is not recommended in cases of adolescent rebellion or where there is great resistance to the idea. Whether or not to take this approach is a matter for individual families to determine.”
Debate of I kissed Dating Goodbye
Three part interview (Josh Harris, Part 1)
Joshua Harris is probably one of the most controversial authors of our time in that he created either instant delight or instant disgust in the majority of North American evangelicals. While his attempt to arrest a culture of sexual exploitation is valid, his methods are highly suspect.
Harris is essentially an extremely simplistic and legalistic author (Though he has taken great pains to paint himself as the opposite of such.) His writings are highly reactionary and tend towards black and white thinking shunning altogether as invalid any legitimacy in the need of adolescents to learn how to form romantic attachments.
He tends to see any emotional pain of early relational formation/disintegration as without any redeeming qualities and blindly insists that it should be natural and normal to have absolutely no physical intimacy prior to the wedding day.
It is worth noting that the results of studies on groups of young people who have followed this type of approach are beginning to come in. At this point, the results are not fully in but, while this approach appears to delay the onset of sexual activity about 18mo, it seems to actually result in higher levels of it later and a willingness to participate in extreme high-risk activities such as unprotected anal intercourse.
This is one author we cannot recommend. Invariably, we have seen that when an individual approaches a normal relational bonding process with this degree of fear and rigidity the result is either no relationship or a shame based relationship. People simply cannot bond within the parameters he defined — as he mostly admitted a number of years ago before the entire YC youth convention in Edmonton — and not even his wife would fully go with his theories for their own relationship. Because they cannot bond within this structure, they bend the rules to make it happen. This leaves them with the relationship they desire — and false guilt or shame.
When a person attempts to form a bond intended by God to be shame free (Genesis “Naked and unashamed”) under this level of legalistic rigidity, the inevitable result is a damaged bond of intimacy. As with all things, attempting to fight one imbalance with another never results in balance. Rather, it simply polarizes and fans the flames of chaos.
Interdependent Need in Marriage
Husbands and Wives: Creating Intimacy and Friendship in Marriage
A wife’s loving companionship was designed by God to meet her husband’s number one relationship need. Evaluate your level of intimacy with your husband, then consider whether you might have been neglecting your husband’s needs for affection, comfort,
It is a good foundation article.
Conflict management through empathy
Teaching Kids to Be Kind: Show Kindness to Siblings
Do not deny your child’s feelings, but help him learn to express emotions in an appropriate way. If you see your child acting jealously, encourage him identify the emotion by saying, “I understand that you feel bad because …” or “I know you hurt because.…” Helping your children figure out the causes of their actions will help them learn how to deal with problems in the future.
Some good points to pray.
Teaching Kids to Be Kind: How Teachers Can Teach Kindness
You are completely safe in this room. I would not permit it. Do you want to know why? Because it hurts when you do things like that to others.
It isn’t the best example. However it raises some good basic points.
Character is formed in Friendships
Teaching Kids to Be Kind: Kindness and Friendship Go Together
Constantly remind your kids how important they are. When they blow it, put your hands on their shoulders, look them in the eye and say, “You are too important to be making those kinds of choices.”
Suggestions to Discourage Exclusivity
Healthy Friendships: Avoiding Cliques and Accepting Others
Discourage an attitude of superiority. 3. Read books that present the message that everyone is unique and has something valuable to offer. 4. Ask your child to reach out to a classmate who is playing alone at recess or eating by himself at lunch.
Helping to Nurture your Child’s Confidence
Healthy Friendships: Nurturing Your Child’s Self-Confidence
nvolve your child in socially interactive activities, such as sports or music. • Encourage your child’s friendships. Throw birthday parties and invite one of her friends over for dinner every other week
Healthy Friendships: Healthy Friendships
Compassion. By teaching your child to understand the hearts of others, she will be more likely to offer sensitivity to those who are hurting or needy.
Readers comment on, “The family bed.”
Weekend Magazine - Family Bed Feedback
Are you truly doing it because you believe it is in the best interest of your child, or could it have more to do with your own emotional needs?