Good Reminder for Parents

You can find it here

Storyline and God's Will for Your Life

One of the more frequent questions I get asked as a pastor centers on God's will for a person's life.  To be more specific, the questions usually relate to family, friends, and careers/jobs.  What does God want for these essential parts of our lives?  There tends to be two ways to look at these types of questions.  The first is from a determined perspective, where God has a specific person for you to marry, a specific number of children for you to have, and a specific job and company and position you are to have and it's up to you to decipher the 'closed doors' and 'open windows' to get to these specifics.

If that's your perspective, this blog post may not be for you!

The second is a free will perspective, where God gives people choices on these matters, where there is no right answer, and yet God leads through you and in you to the choices that best suit you.  There's more tools available than ever to help you determine God's plan for your life, and one we recently began working through with our small group is Storyline.  Storyline looks at your life like a character in a movie.  It's written in user-friendly terms.  It's considers your life's ups and downs, your abilities and roles, and aims to conduct your storyline- how God has wired you- to make a difference in God's world.  You can do Storyline on your own, in a group, or with a life coach and it's really inexpensive ($30) for the material you are getting.

Storyline is similar to another program I did a few years ago and that our church also offers and is also good.

The key- both focus on your past and how God has wired you as keys to discovering what God wants you to be/do.

One Good Shot

Been reading a book called The Energy Bus on the recommendation of a friend and noticed an interesting takeaway.  The book is a fictional story designed to impart truths or the learning.  In the midst of the story, the main character is challenged to review each day like a golf game.  At the end of a golf game, you remember and talk about your good shots (or so I am told, as I am an epic failure at golf!).  Even if you had a terrible round, you'll remember the sweet drive you hit on #3 or the long putt you made on #7.  It's what keeps golfers coming back.  If all you did was reflect on the negative shots, why even bother dropping serious coin to relive that experience?

But the author says that's exactly what we do with our days- our interactions at work, our interactions with our family, etc.  We reflect on the negatives and the missed opportunities rather than remembering the successes and the good moments.

What if we remembered the good shots of our day and focused on getting more of those?

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Hillcrest gave away free gas last month- you can read the article here.

What's even more interesting than the article, though, is the comments from some who questioned the giveaway, had better ideas on what to do with the money, etc.

Haters gonna hate.

KELO Piece on Hillcrest

KELO did a piece on Hillcrest's adoption program.

Malcolm Gladwell and David and Goliath

In advance of his new book by the same name, Malcolm Gladwell provides some interesting perspective on the well-known Biblical story of David and Goliath.

The Price of Privilege

Really good parenting book here.

Some takeaways:

• Parents who persistently fall on the side of intervening for their child, as opposed to supporting their child’s attempt to problem-solve, interfere with the most important task of childhood and adolescence: the development of a sense of self. 
• We can be overinvolved in the wrong things, and underinvolved in the right things, both at the same time.
• Research and common sense tell us that anxious parents make anxious children.  Children take their cues from their parents. 
• It is when a parent’s love is experienced as conditional on achievement that children are at risk for serious emotional problems.
• Once a child forms a negative impression of himself, it is very difficult to change.
• We should never, ever, allow our kids to buy their way out of trouble.  When we mitigate natural consequences for our kids we deprive them of one of life’s most important lessons: that we are held accountable for our actions.
• Praise does not make us a warm parent
• Is the voice that runs commentary on your day a harsh and critical one, or does it treat you kindly?  This is the same voice that our children hear every day of their lives.