Put a lid on the media monster

Friday, 03. May 2013 by Renee Ellison

Here’s the rub: “The parent’s convenience becomes the children’s addiction.”

If raising children is just too difficult without frequent bouts of resorting to seating children in front of media to give us a rest, we are out of step with history. Abraham raised children without the Internet, as did Noah, yes, even when they were tired.  In fact, parents have routinely raised their progeny without any outside help of any kind for 6,000 years.  Conversely, because Lot caved in to Sodom’s version of the Internet, his family wouldn’t even follow him out of town.

Most of us, as adults, have natural restraints on our personal use of media due to our wholesome childhoods, much of them spent outdoors, filled with “doings”, building forts, playing with wooden train tracks, riding bikes, racing up hills.  This is not true of many children nowadays.  They have been raised on “sittings”.  Screens have been their childhood friends and surrogate parents for hours every day.  Some children don’t even know where the “off” buttons are.  This is an engulfing phenomenon that we as parents simply must limit.

Also, we as adults generally have mature spiritual lives with which to evaluate media.  Our children don’t.  They don’t yet have enough of an experience base with God to make quantum hours in front of media safe for themselves.  Their spiritual lives aren’t yet formed; children are not yet stable in this regard.  They are reeds in the wind.  And a reed is easily broken.  Oops.

Here is the thought-provoking cost of allowing our children an ever-increasing addiction to media, if we don’t get a handle on this, and get a handle on it soon.

1.—Media can waste a phenomenal amount of time.  It often takes you in further than you wanted to go and makes you stay longer than you wanted to stay.  Log in your hours and your children’s for just one week and see for yourself.  Try living a week without any of it and you’ll really see how deep this dependency has become for you, and deeper still and more profoundly for your children.

2.—Social media can foster self-absorption in your child as he spends hours presenting himself, crafting his image, and seeking to be popular rather than to be zealously holy or servant-hearted.

3.—Visual reality begins to replace real reality; graciousness begins to give way to irritation with real family members, because they fall short of the “Photoshopped” idealized friends of virtual reality.  Does your husband prefer a virtual wife to a real wife?  How much time did media steal yesterday at your house, from spending time with other family members or from progressing with household duties?  Real life is difficult.  Doing our duty is often difficult.  Virtual realities, on the other hand, are easily engaged.

4.—Texting creates a jerking autonomic nervous system in the child as he hyper-responds to trivia, looking at texts he receives and urgently and aggressively punching keys to send.  For most children, this has become a truly addicting monomania.  Could it result in nervous tics in the future?  You may want to consider limiting texting time to once a day, rather than allowing full vent to this small physical stress syndrome all day long.

5.—All media usage involves small muscle movements—in contrast to large muscle movements—and shallow breathing as opposed to deep breathing, for hours and hours and hours. Time thus spent takes a developmental toll on a child.  When these hours stack up it can amount to fully half of the hours of a normal childhood—hours that are lost to the more constructive massive physical stimulation and activity.  A nervous system that is chronically strained by this can begin to break down the child’s immune systems.

6.—Looking real people in the eyes lets us understand much about them without ever saying a word; this is absent from electronic communication.  Many youth, so trained, don’t know how to look people in the eyes anymore, especially adults.  And they have forgotten to work on their faces, to make them cheerful, deliberately.  It takes effort to think of gracious things to say verbally to real people.  We are losing ground here, as parents.  We are rapidly losing ground in the training of social graces.  Basic social interchanges may soon become extinct—lost dinosaur skills of our youth.

7.—Many children are becoming more interested in the electronic device at their fingertips than in the real person who is inches away from them.

8.—Oftentimes, social media replaces Bible devotions and basic duties—crowding them out of the life totally. Have we spent as much time in the Bible as with the other media?  Which did we do first thing this morning, at our first discretionary moment?  Have we trained our children to finish doing their duty, first?  Did they tend to duty for the entire day today, prior to embarking into social media?  For that matter, do we really need social media at all?  Of what benefit is it to keep up with a myriad of friends’ emerging thoughts and lives, all day long?  What does that do to the development of our own lives?  How many accomplishments do we actually do, under such conditions?  Is social entertainment preferable to productivity?  To what end?

9.—Social media fulfills a longing for attention, and can feed the flesh.  By it we can easily become hypocrites—posing as one sort of person on the screen and quite another in the here and now.  Are your children becoming secretive over the YouTube videos they watch?  Can you see their screens at all times?  Does the screen face the center of the room you all are in all day long?  We used to be able to see book covers when people read; it was a natural curb to desiring to read wickedness, because we knew that others would see the covers.  Seeing what is absorbing your children at all times is crucial to maintaining their accountability to us as their responsible adults.

10.—Movies are a respond-a-thon, in which passivity trumps initiation time and time again.  When the virtual reality is turned off we awake from our stupor and find that we exerted no godly influence upon our families or our neighbors.

11.—The only way to create visual media is to descend into the material world, and at an unnaturally fast-changing pace.  We must have action shots to hold people’s attention, and to intensify that attention we must change what is seen every two to three seconds.  This totally nixes a reflective mind.  Take a family that has read for ten years and place them next to a family that has only seen movies for ten years, and those families will appear as if they came from different planets; the readers will have oceans more depth to them.

12.—Virtual gaming includes watching violence and actors wearing seductive clothing.  There is no morally neutral gaming.  None.  Also, it dangerously moves the person from being an observer to a being some sort of participant.

13.—Media teaches us contentment and excitement without God.  God is generally nowhere to be found.  This often leads to full-blown idolatry.

14.—The virtual world is not eternal, unlike the real world.  So attuned, continually, we can end up giving away our influence—just as easily as Esau gave away his birthright for a pot of porridge.

In conclusion, get a grip on your children’s affection for media. This is a freight train that has no brakes.  See our article on TV Watching Out of Control and read our past blogs on this topic.  This is a large subject, with many facets you may not have considered in this way.  If you become more fully aware of all of its tentacles by reading these, it may well change your current directions.

Surprises on the other side of wifely submission

Friday, 12. April 2013 by Renee Ellison

What if when we go to the New Jerusalem, we find out that the Almighty had additional packages of blessings waiting to give us, as wives, that we never received?  Suppose that these blessings were reserved for us—to be given to us only on the threshold of submission to our husbands!  Many puzzling verses in scripture have more mystery behind them than we know.  They hint at something, perhaps, but could contain great voltage that we simply don’t understand until we enter into obedience to them.  I am beginning to think this is so with reference to a wife’s submission.  It could be TNT—it just might be that hot!

A biblical understanding of a wife’s submission never involves responding to ungodly edicts, and it never involves taking abuses.  True biblical submission is characterized by a voluntary state of her heart that promotes peace in the home.  There are thousands of little daily choices where a woman can resist her husband’s every suggestion, nipping at his heels, like foxes in a vineyard, or where she can voluntarily submit to him in little matters and in big in order to secure greater harmony in the home.  We are talking about a wife who begins to have this as an appetite—an appetite that wants glory in her family’s relationships more than to always “be right” on issue after issue.

Here is what I’m learning personally about submission.  I shared a piece of it with a woman’s group at a recent conference.  Here it is: it is very possible that God works beyond the husband, even beyond his reason, to achieve some good for the woman, if she will submit to the process under His sovereign care.  The Heavenly Father may work some additional good for the woman, often in a non-related area (the connection is only discerned/discovered spiritually, afterwards), if she lovingly submits to her husband.  The more she cultivates submission as a habit, the greater becomes her own beauty.  It seems to progressively create softness in her character, and adds luster to her countenance.  This had to have been Sarah’s case because she was over 90 years old when Abimelech was attracted to her beauty (Genesis 20).

Learning a proper response to authority is a key to personal happiness, and a sure route to experiencing more peace in the home.  Think about it: it is possible to learn to not be agitated over anything.  We read in history that this is where all the great saints ended up, in their souls. The awareness of the beauties of putting themselves under is threaded throughout their writings. They found this to be the key to advanced spirituality.  How I yearn for this in my own spirit.  I’m getting there slowly, but still have a long ways to go.

For example, one time in an airport I was hostile to my husband because he was inordinately slow in getting into the security line and I though we might miss our flight. However, after I pitched my little fit the Heavenly Father told me, privately, in my spirit, that even if we did miss the flight, Todd would learn from that via someone else or some other experience (or from this one), and I might meet a delightful new friend on a different flight, or have a super yummy meal somewhere else, or be invited to see a beautiful piece of scenery that I would have missed otherwise.

It could be that there might be great consequences behind a wife’s submission that escape even the husband’s understanding.  For example: a woman could be upset with her husband because he won’t let her board a ship to England, when she is standing there on the pier ready to do so, and he all of a sudden has decided to become unreasonable (in her mind), telling her she can’t board, after all. Only to hear later, that the ship went down—as in, it sank!

Or, a woman could be told by her husband which way she should drive home, after dropping him off somewhere.  She could rationally think his suggestion unreasonable because it takes longer.  But, suppose she obeys him anyway?  She would no doubt be surprised to find that by going her husband’s route home she missed a severe car accident up ahead that would have involved her at that exact same minute!  Her husband obviously knew nothing of what was behind his strong recommendation.  Because God authorizes headship as a way to get His work done optimally in the earth, He may supernaturally infuse it with validations that escape the rational mind.  He could possibly create urges in the husband to fulfill the Almighty’s own purposes, in His vastly larger story in the universe.

In other words, sometimes the person who is our headship doesn’t know why they lead as they do, but because everyone is in the proper biblical line of authority it later works to everyone’s good, even beyond what the husband, himself, understood at the time.  When God gives a married man authority, the new husband initially has no idea the levels of validation of his authority that God may also give with it, in the celestial court.

I think if women were told this on their wedding day it would make a huge difference in her willingness to defer to her man.  If a wife understood that she isn’t submitting only to her husband, she is submitting to the Heavenly Father behind her husband, it could give her great joy.

This isn’t the last word on this subject.  All truths have paradoxes which we sandwich ourselves between.  There is often spiritual tension from both ends of a concept, that we navigate by the Holy Spirit’s moment by moment promptings of how to apply the principle in each new and ever shifting scenario.  Submitting like this doesn’t preclude a wife’s giving her man all the added perceptions and loving input she wants to give him, but there comes a point when she goes with what he ultimately decides.  Submission is about outcomes, not input.  Nevertheless, most of us miss the joy of experiencing extra benevolences that may be specifically given to us as women (or children) if we believe the text by faith and begin to function in it gladly, sure of these loving outcomes .

See our book Growing Marriage for a fuller discussion of all of the aspects of a godly submission.  It’s a treasure trove of more such wifely mysteries.

What’s hurting us

Friday, 08. March 2013 by Renee Ellison

This blog was written to me (by me) after 25 years of a hunt for answers…

What is hurting our health?
The Standard American Diet (SAD) is hurting us.  We are now the sickest country in the world.  Wealth allowed us to eat large quantities of meat and dairy, while historically the huge populations of China and millions of people elsewhere in Asia ate primarily rice and veggies.  The Aztecs, Mayans, Incas ate corn.  The result?  These people had none of the devastating diet-related diseases we see today.

What is the matter with our diet?  Too much fat.  The fat is cutting lesions in our arteries and is being stashed and stored in warehouses under our skin.  Meat and dairy are particular culprits because they are both loaded with saturated fat.

What is the matter with meat and dairy?

One:
Meat and dairy offer no carbohydrates and no fiber, causing severe constipation. You should be having an easy peanut-butter consistency stool after nearly every meal.  Do you?  We think constipation is normal, because we’ve never known anything else.

Starches, fruits and veggies are loaded with both carbohydrates and fiber.  Athletes have known for decades to binge on carb-loading foods, large plates of vegan spaghetti, or bowls of brown rice, sweet potatoes, beans, squash, etc., before embarking on their marathons, gymnastic meets, pole vaulting, or the like.  They couldn’t do these things if their insides were bogged down with meat and cheese.  They couldn’t get off the ground.  Their bodies knew.

Two:
Too much fat. When you cook with meat, what do your pans feel like?  How easy are they to wash up afterwards?  How greasy do your hands get?  Do you find that you must you use detergent to finally get the grease off your pans, or can you just do it with water?  Now think about inside your body, where detergent never reaches to cut up the grease.  How much water does it take to wash the grease down your sink, and to clean your sink?  Are you drinking that much water?  Are you drinking detergent?

Grease and fat coat your cells, making metabolic function far more sluggish, and oxygen uptake dismal, to say nothing of clogging your arteries, which in turn produces increased rates of dementia and stroke in addition to the increased likelihood of heart attacks.  Your first symptoms of a heart attack will be none other than the heart attack itself.  You don’t get warning symptoms.  Grease is not your friend.  Neither is fried grease from french fries and chips.  All oils slowly kill you.  There are no nutrients in any oils—they are extracted away from the nutrients that are contained in the whole plant.

Three:
Too much protein.  Plant-based foods give you all the protein you need.  Too much protein stockpiles and becomes the perfect luxury apartment for hosting bacteria and virus.  Cysts and tumors love protein.  Protein gives aflatoxins a place to roost and grow.  Without protein you can eat the same toxic substances and they won’t stick around; they will just pass through your body.  The problem is not the toxin, it is the host.

Four:
Too much acid. To buffer this acid, your bones get used up to neutralize the acid.  Your body craves to be alkaline; it’s not optional; your body must maintain the pH within a narrow range.  If your diet is loaded with meat and dairy, you, in effect, will be peeing your bones into the toilet, because the body must pull calcium (which is alkaline) from the bones to counteract the acidity of the animal products.  Welcome to osteoporosis.

Conclusion:
The Atkins meat and dairy diet was a joke.  Its founder looked overweight and unhealthy in the photos in his own book.  After Dr. Atkins died, it transpired that he had experienced troubles with his heart over the years.  Atkins had suffered a heart attack, congestive heart failure, and hypertension.  Research that he paid for himself indicated that “70 percent of the people were constipated, 60 percent had bad breath, [and] many ha[d] headaches.”  There were no scientific papers to corroborate his studies and no thousands of healings from cancer.  Dr. Dean Ornish reported that “A major study was just published in the Annals of Internal Medicine from Harvard. In approximately 85,000 women who were followed for 26 years and 45,000 men who were followed for 20 years, researchers found that all-cause mortality rates were increased in both men and women who were eating a low-carbohydrate Atkins diet based on animal protein. However, all-cause mortality rates as well as cardiovascular mortality rates were decreased in those eating a plant-based diet low in animal protein and low in refined carbohydrates. Although this plant-based diet was called an “Eco-Atkins” diet, it’s essentially the same diet that I have been recommending and studying for more than 30 years.” The Paleo diet is just a re-packaging of this false and failed earlier diet.  It loads you with too much fat, protein and acid.

Wanta get out of confusion re: food and health?  Read the book, The Starch Solution, by John McDougal and his wife Mary McDougal, to finally nail why.  (Not sure?  Read 140+ reader reviews of it on Amazon.com.)  Also, watch YouTube videos of any/all of the men below.  We posted links to many very helpful online videos in an earlier blog.  Go where the healing results are happening today: The Hippocrates Institute, The Gerson Institute, Dr. Joel Fuhrman’s stuff, Dr. McDougal’s stuff, Dr. Pritikin’s stuff, Dr. Esselstyne’s stuff, Dr. Colin Campbell’s stuff.  You don’t even have to read every page of their books—just look at their thick appendixes in the backs of all of their books—loaded with confirming reports from scientific and medical journals.

A dozen or more doctors now know what good for us, nutritionally.  Try it for just one week or so, and you will know.

Of course, everyone will eat as they wish, and always have, and you are right, God did introduce eating meat into history, as well as condone it for eating at the Passover, and at other times, as well.  But here are some further considerations that enlarge the issues a bit.  It is a very complex issue, even Biblically.  Since large numbers of Americans are now sick and ill with the current American diet and DO want some guidance for how to get out of that sickness via natural means, we have attempted to share how some have escaped early deaths. We have offered what a dozen leading medical doctors are now agreeing upon, including Christian men like the Rev. George Malkmus of Halleluiah Acres who turned around his own case of colon cancer by changing his diet and now has recorded 1,000’s of cases of disease reversals under the influence of his ministry. Many of those people are now praising God for their deliverances. Here are some additional biblical perspectives on the subject if you would like them.  If not, just skip them.

The original and best diet the Heavenly Father prescribed for us is from every seed-bearing green plant and tree (Genesis 1:29). After the Flood, He permitted man to add meat to the diet (Genesis 9:3)—but that seems to be His permissive will, not His divine intent, because starting then, the human lifespan took a distinct plunge. Some Bible students think the Father allowed meat to be added to the human diet as a means of shortening the life of man, to reduce the extent of the effects of the sinful behavior of men. We see the shortened life around us now, in our friends and acquaintances. This is not simply a matter of finding what we want to find in someone’s posting on the Internet. A recent report from Associated Press shows that, for the first time in modern history, the lifespan of some American women has shortened.

So, a prior decision is exactly what the foods are that God intended for us to eat.  A notable exception to His addition of meat to the diet is the continued exclusion of pork, shellfish, and other scripturally unclean birds, fishes and animals. The Creator knew, of course, what would be the problems to human health, were men to eat the flesh of scavengers. Only recently has science revealed the many dangers of eating pig, scallops, shrimp, etc. To read a summary of these, download our free pdf on the problems of eating pork. The typical Christian response to this is to point to Acts 10:15, but this is an incorrect reading of that passage, because Acts 10:28, across the page, explains that the point was to show Peter that “I should not call any man common or unclean.” That passage is not about eating, else it would be referring to cannibalism! Similarly, when Paul writes that “I am convinced that no food is unclean in itself” (Romans 14:14), he is using the word “food”, not meat. Scripturally, not all meat is food—just as certain animal products, such as their organs, is not food, nor is rat meat food.

A person is free, under God, to eat any meat that is clean, as defined several places in scripture, including Leviticus chapter 11.  But when they do so, they may be shortening their time here on earth. Currently literally millions are dying very early deaths via cancer, heart disease and diabetes, all of which have clinically been shown to be diet related.  The choice is, of course, totally up to each person.  And, this is not a matter of salvation, it is a matter of quality and length of life.

No matter what a reader does with this information, we are personally thrilled to get answers for our health and to finally know what actually reverses people’s disease conditions.  If 700 pages of The China Study won’t do it and 5,000 and more reversals, and the results at three huge alternative cancer clinics…we don’t know what it takes to convince others.  But we can share information, with love.

Debunking the four traditional reasons to go to college

Friday, 22. February 2013 by Renee Ellison

As you and your family approach college decisions, you may be torn in a dilemma between what college has traditionally been thought to give students and what you see today.  Perhaps we need to re-examine those four main traditional reasons.  We might be surprised at what has replaced them. 

One: To get a good broad general Western Civ. education—not necessarily to gain specific career skills
In the good old days going to college was not just about going there to get a career.  Parents hoped that going to college would broaden their emerging child’s sense of history and depth of understanding the development of all of Western Civilization (and to learn how to express oneself well orally and in writing).  Today, however, Western Civilization courses have systematically and aggressively been replaced with multiculturalism studies in all universities across the nation, both Christian and non-Christian.  Today’s students will be offered things that weren’t even found in catalogs of yesteryear—courses that promote radical homosexual agendas (Harvard’s catalog lists over 20 of them) and radical feminist agendas—courses that teach angry ways to hold onto one’s mini-culture, while despising the culture at large (far from embracing the country’s former melting pot mentality).  Students are not taught how to think, but what to believe.  The impetus of higher education is to indoctrinate students in multiculturalism and liberal leftist socialist brainwashing.  Capitalism is ruthlessly debunked, as is a Judeo Christian faith. 85% of college-aged children from Christian homes will emerge from college with those values, at your expense.  Would you pay someone to come into your living room to do the same?  Because it is behind stately brick and mortar and we don’t see it in our own bedrooms and living rooms, do we somehow believe it is not happening?

Two: To land a career
Let’s not be pretending to go to a four year liberal arts college or university solely to gain a career, when fully two of those years are spent on socialist indoctrination, and there is a drastically shrinking job market pool available any more to professionals, once one does graduate.  Entrepreneurialism may be one of the last trains remaining to ride—and it doesn’t necessitate driving through moral corruption to get to a decent salary.  For certain types of career preparation, attending one- or two-year trade schools, where the studies are focused only upon the career preparation, could be the ticket—along with obtaining online specific career training, tutoring and apprenticing, taking a course or two from a specific instructor, and attending trade conventions, workshops and symposiums.  Currently there are other—and better—ways than the traditional “liberal arts” “higher education” route.

Three: To land a spouse
Historically, many godly spouses have been found in church fellowships, in and around Christian conventions, and among family and friends who hold the same values, not in secular God-bashing universities.  If we list the believers we know and where they actually found their spouses, even historically, it may be surprising to find that many were found outside of college and post-college.  Upon closer scrutiny, it is eye-opening to note what the reality has been in this area, as compared to what the perception has been.

Four: To position oneself to earn more money than someone who didn’t graduate from…
Fully 50% of college students are now currently either unemployed or underemployed.  Far from gaining more money, the college four years actually robbed these students of those wage-earning years.  Multiply a $25,000 a year salary times four and one can see that one lost $100,000—gone—zip, zilch—it’s not there to build upon once the student graduated (assuming that they made it that far).  Not only do today’s graduates not have those earnings, they also are straddled with lifetime debt loads of insane amounts, more than house-mortgages—with nothing concrete to show for it.  These are debts that our forefathers never had to contend with.  These debt loads are burying graduates in deep depression (unless they are in denial of it).  Students are dismayed to find that they have become indentured slaves for the rest of their lives in exchange for this unbridled and heretofore unexamined romp through college.  If they had set pencil to paper, they would have seen that they would have been financially ahead NOT to go to college.

The more serious undertow of college
In addition to re-examining these four traditional reasons for going to college, what happens morally to our young adults is an even graver problem that needs to be re-examined.  What is especially sad is that colleges have become the place of unbridled immorality and infinite license. The experimentation into deviant experiences at college would never happen in one’s own home—or even one’s neighbor’s home in a larger society which is flanked by young and old.  The neighborhood wouldn’t allow a large group sexual orgy in the house next door or an all night drunken brawl at ear-splitting decibels.  The immoralities available at college are activities that are not even experienced under the normal constraints of a moderate society.

We as a culture allow our young people to go into these places because all the deviance happens out of our own purview, behind brick and mortar, somewhere else—it does not invade our personal adult space. If we were personally forced to watch it, to live among it, to hear it, to be inconvenienced by it night after night, to endure the behaviors of roommates who have strange personalities and obnoxious habits—persons we never met before and never would have asked to share our bedroom—we, ourselves couldn’t stand it—there would be complaints the first night about what all the guys are doing in the girl’s bedrooms (yes, even on Christian campuses). The truth is that we don’t want to watch or know what goes on there.  We toss our emerging adults into it and in effect we say, see ya on the other side—I’m not walkin’ in there with ya; sink or swim.

Nowhere else in all of society would these same dynamics present themselves in real life.  Who would ever rent an apartment with someone one has never met before, in all of the rest of one’s life?  Or be forced to listen to someone else’s parties, or breathe their marijuana fumes?  Where else in all of life are these dynamics duplicated or forced upon a person?  No, the moral restraints of a larger society would squelch a fair bit of it.

Look at what happens to a college boy, as a case in point.  Once he’s done with college and living on his own, his current landlord would not allow him to have a girl as a regular visitor in his room, let alone to stay there for four years.  His parents would not have allowed it in their own home, no matter how old he was getting to be.  His grandparents wouldn’t have allowed him to move into their place with any possibility of immorality emerging.  It is not countenanced anywhere but college.  And that’s where he did it.  College became a dark hole, a hidden chapter, an escape from reality and its fallout, a place outside any meaningful civil surveillance from anyone, even surveillance from the necessities of a disciplined necessary capitalism via a boss at work; many college students have no jobs.

At college there are no boundaries, not even the boundary of academics, as freshman by the thousands party and flunk out.  No problem; we are really not concerned as a culture about what goes on there in the soul of a student.  As long as the college collects the tuition and continues to capture more enrollments, the beast marches on.  College is where Bill Ayers got his start in blowing up government buildings, virtually in hiding from society, under the guise of obtaining a higher education.  The college experience fosters group deviance; it fosters experimentation.  As a culture, we have convinced ourselves that this is a necessary chapter, a rite of passage for our emerging youth.  But some have had enough, and are not willing to sacrifice yet another generation on this altar of a perverted education.  Some are doing a double-take, and as a consequence are surviving and are thriving without the corruption. We are often born into assumptions, and until they get bad enough, they remain unexamined.

Pro-college Christian families are making sacrifices of their finances and of the souls of their children under the guise of pursuing an education for the mind.  [Ever notice, a person “makes sacrifices” to whatever gods he or she is serving?]  But while a student is in pursuit of a degree in geology he or she is working as a resident assistant, policing drunken brawls in a dorm.  Or, a student is enduring his or her roommate’s illicit sex.  What is the connection here?  Why does the pursuit of academics require the slavery of the whole person, down to his or her social life, and even requirements as to what building he or she must sleep in?  Huh?  Clearly, the college is after the whole person by requiring freshman to live in the dorm. Whatever for?  Why the requirement?  To protect them?  From what?  From morality?  From living with a family off campus?  Is a ghetto, a herd of young, inexperienced peers preferable to a farmhouse on the edge of town?  What is really the agenda here?

In conclusion, the issue for parents today—and it is a serious issue—is:
(1) After pouring our lives into our offspring’s education and faith, do we want to fund the subversion of our family’s heritage and faith, knowing what the percentages of attrition are, of children from godly homes leaving college without their faith?

(2) Where are increased, unbridled levels of immorality learned and located nowadays?  Are they located in the universities or outside of them?

For further reading on this topic, see www.ChuckingCollege.com (this book is especially for godly gals), and also order these quick Homeschool How-To’s eBooks:
*  How Not to Waste Your Youth
*  Godly Son Checklist
*  Godly Daughter Checklist
*  Young Men Preparing for Marriage
*  Daughters in Waiting

And watch this documentary online: The Price of Admission.

Birthdays under the magnifying glass of the Word

Monday, 28. January 2013 by Renee Ellison

Are you feeling that birthday celebration expectations among your children’s friends could get out of hand?  Do you find that you are spending more and more of your life on birthday party pay-backs and reciprocities?  Does your schedule get eaten up by unexpected additional parties you hadn’t counted on; are you flattered but exhausted?  Are you bothered by the increasing over-the-top materialism, the plastic restaurants that will do it all for you?  You like it, but don’t like it?  Feel trapped?

Are the origins of birthday parties even biblical?  What were its specific pagan practices and for what reasons were they done?  Do we still do those today?  Why?  I remember the day when it struck me as a young mother that playing musical chairs was an AWFUL game.  What kind of values does wanting to hog a chair while pushing another child away, teach?  Wouldn’t I rather like to teach my child to give UP his chair out of deference for another?  There are many things like this that we grew up with in our culture that were simply handed down to us that have not been examined biblically.  Teaching the story of Little Red Riding Hood is another.  What kind of values are in that wretched story of fear and anxiety and unreality?  I can’t name a single person who has ever had to face having a wolf for a grandmother, so why put all that trash in a child’s head?  Whatever FOR?  To what end?!

If you love birthday parties, this blog won’t be for you. But if you have a nagging feeling that something might be off in relation to them, or that you feel more and more uneasy about them, or feel like you are on a roller coaster of expectation from all your friends that you can’t get off from, there might be some liberating thoughts for you from the Bible.  Scripture says to “Love one another”; it never mentions doing that more (or better) on one day over another!  If you were ever to take a fork in the road regarding birthdays, initially, your friends might be outraged that you won’t come to their exhausting parties, but you can be sure that they will cock their heads when you show them more love and thoughtful kindness on an ordinary day, more than they are used to from others.  All our messages about who we are, or who we are becoming, don’t have to get said on a single day!  So here is some food for thought.

The following verse really struck me this morning in a forceful new way:

“They imitated the nations around them, although the Lord had ordered them, `Do not do as they do’ and they did the things the Lord had forbidden them to do” (2 Kings 17:15, NIV).  Apparently it is not enough that we obey the decrees and statutes of Scriptures.  Do we see that we also must NOT do what the heathen do—actions that are typical of heathen behavior?  Should we be putting heathen parts of Christmas and birthdays away, etc., under the ban?  Many of us are still attempting to accommodate both—and this is syncretism.  Are we obeying one and still doing the other?

We, as a family, have grappled with this caving into syncretism in several areas.  Although the pagan practices found in holidays were fairly easy to jettison and replace with Biblical ones, we’ve had a whale of a time jettisoning birthdays completely.  We, personally, as a family still struggle with birthdays.  Although we ended the external parties and invitations long ago, making others focus upon us, which after all IS what happens (and many young mothers have come under the tyranny of ever more lavish birthday parties from ever more friends—coming under a subtle tyranny of giving far more time and money to it than they would really RATHER give), we still privately give gifts to each other, or do dinner, i.e. there is SOME attention drawn to it.  But I’m newly alarmed via this verse about what we perhaps lose of His presence, of His favor, of spiritual heart rest, when we engage in this apparently mild idolatry for a few hours.  Does a mincing degree of it have some death in it for our spirits?  I wonder.

There is nowhere in Scripture where we are told to do birthdays. Accounts of ancient birthdays give us some light on the topic, perhaps.  Pharaoh’s birthday celebration led to the restoration of his cupbearer and the death of his baker, as recorded in Genesis 40:20-22; good for one but not so good for the other?  These ancient birthdays were often occasions of rash behaviors.  John got his head chopped off at Herod’s birthday party (Matthew 14:8).  Job’s sons were apparently doing birthdays, having parties on “their days” and it was apparently not a blessing; their father went out and sacrificed to cover any sins they may have committed, cursing God in their hearts (Job 1:5).

Many birthday practices have heathen origins, not godly ones.  Heathens initiated the custom of making round cakes (in worship of the sun god) on that day; spanking the birthday person to expel wicked spirits; gathering friends, family and loved ones around so as to fend off the attacks of the demons on that day.  Candles were for the sun god.  Wishes were wishes made to demons.

The Messiah Himself never instructed us to celebrate birthdays—not even His own.  He shifted the focus elsewhere to remembering his DEATH, instead: “Do THIS in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:24), drinking the cup at Passover.  There is no Biblical mention of giving gifts to each other as a means of celebrating His birth.  The few examples of birthdays that are in Scripture are devastating.

Perhaps the root of birthdays may be a bit of self-worship?  It may be what makes us so uncomfortable when everyone at a restaurant sings happy birthday to us.  It might be that a mere mortal was never designed to be able to deal with “worship”—only God was made to be able to stand it without making Him squirm or having it go to His head.  It may be that the only reason He requires any worship for Himself is that it looks good on us—that it was designed for our benefit—much like we as parents, insist that our children say thank you.  We don’t need the thank you, the child needs to say it to put his own spirit in a grateful posture for his own well-being—to take his spirit out of agitation and death over little issues and big.  It may be that worship of the Almighty is the survival adrenalin from heaven that keeps the mortal life “centered” in the most life-giving place.

If you find yourself wondering about all of this, carefully observe the emotional dynamics among people at birthdays, and see what you conclude.  Consecration could be not only about doing but also about not doing.  Just like with healthy diets; it is not only what one puts into one’s mouth, but what one doesn’t eat, that brings about optimal health.  Thinking biblically about every single detail of our lives may take us in some surprising directions with some surprising benefits.  The important thing is to THINK—and to pay attention to our misgivings.

For further reading on this topic, see our booklets/eBooks:
+ Party Themes and Activities
+ How to Keep Your Kids from Slipping into Materialism
+ No Stress Holidays for Moms

Our young men: A failure to launch?

Thursday, 10. January 2013 by Renee Ellison

There appears to be a growing failure in our efforts to LAUNCH our adolescent boys successfully in our current culture. It is a travesty. Guys who should become full grown men, remain adolescents indefinitely—into their 40’s—if it EVER gets reversed. This passivity is wreaking havoc in our country.

There is a marked difference between what the American boy is doing at 3 in the afternoon and what some fellows are doing in other countries. Ours, by and large, are fooling around with video games at 3 in the afternoon, fashioning themselves to be rock stars, and/or becoming obsessed with special effects in media, while Israeli boys, for example, are toying with mapping out strategies for the IDF and trekking over the ground they will travel for military service. By this activity they learn the ground’s features so well that they will be able to travel it at night to prepare for surprise attacks. And others are being tutored by men at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology,  which employs hundreds of Israeli scientists who make contributions on WORLD problems that other countries send their way. Israelis (and other young men around the world) are working on real “man endeavors” in real life, not a surreal life.

Americans are doing SOMETHING wrong with their boys. Kevin Swanson (host of the Generations With Vision broadcast), Doug Phillips of Vision Forum, Ken Ham of Answers In Genesis and author of Already Gone) and others are all seeing this as an alarming trend, too, and are increasingly covering the topic in their workshops and preaching. Instead of immersing our adolescent men in real life adventures, travel, and skill development, our sons are passively absorbing Hollywood’s next video and screen obsession, and sitting under women for EXTRA academic drudgeries that don’t matter (we MUST do this underwater basket weaving, or have a Japanese sushi party, or bang African tom-toms)—simply to keep up with the Jones’s.

As I’ve thought about this problem through the years I’ve come to see that boys need MASSIVE amounts of SKILL development in REAL life. What they need is for us, as parents, to aggressively get them tutored under MEN in these real life skills: electronics, mechanics, plumbing, and carpentry—all FOUR. They will NEED every one of them when the economy crashes. Specialists in these fields will not be easily found because they will be tackling problems elsewhere and there won’t be any AVAILABLE, the world will be in such shambles. But young men need a modicum of these skills even to use NOW in the advancements of their own families, and to further steward their limited money from having to spend it on these specialists. There is no REASON young men can’t learn the basics in all of these areas—except laziness and a lack of direction. (Yesterday I heard about a young man who had difficulty with the academic route, but spent a few years in vocational training, got a job right away and is now earning $40,000 as a small-engine mechanic, with no end to the employment possibilities in that field for all of the foreseeable future.)

Parents can even get their boys tutored for a day or two under a sewing machine mechanic and a locksmith, learning how to make keys. Get them to build their own shed; download our free description of how to build a greenhouse and let them go at it (as precursors for building their own house someday in the woods) and hire them to split a hefty stack of firewood. Get them SKILLED. Add to that MORE of even smaller skills like weight-lifting, archery, shooting practice, self-defense, climbing practice, hunting practice, map and compass reading and planning of treks, acquiring all of the survival skills contained in any manual, so titled, work through a Boy Scout handbook, and train themselves via YouTube videos on rope tying, etc. With THESE sorts of tutoring situations, no time will be wasted. Men don’t like to talk much; they like to DO and to CONQUER—and they’re usually happy if anybody watches!

For the rough times that are ahead we are going to need TOUGH young MEN. Abraham Lincoln built fences, split logs and ran a general store in the daytime, while studying around the fireplace only at night. He put in a hard day’s WORK of PHYSICAL labor. This teaches endurance, conquering a PRACTICAL problem, protecting and providing for women with their brawn in their own homes, etc. If you want to get a wholesome appetite for what hard work will do for your boys, get Pastor S. M. Davis’s marvelous CD called “Work”. I’ve NEVER heard one better on THIS topic. Find it on his SolveFamilyProblems website.

Also, have your adolescent boys read Scripture to the family after dinner (only a chapter will do it) and then have them get used to making only ONE remark about that passage. It is THAT simple to train our boys to lead spiritually. They currently do not, even as young husbands, because they never PRACTICED it.

Let us as homeschoolers produce a different kind of man. It all begins with a clear vision of where it is that we are headed and why.  Dare to be intentional on this one.

For further reading, see our quick reads: Young Men Preparing for Marriage and a Godly Son Checklist.

Soft on suicide?

Tuesday, 01. January 2013 by Renee Ellison

Suicides are on the increase in our nation.  As much as we find this topic uncomfortable, it is becoming evident that to protect the adolescents in our homes from this potential tragedy, we as parents need to be out ahead of this alarming trend.  We need to prepare our family’s THINKING on this topic now.  Something is happening to the MENTALITY in our culture that precedes these acts.  THAT is where the battle is won or lost.  We need to fortify our homes against the onslaught of cultural propaganda that all but proclaims that suicide is a viable option for handling our problems.  While having compassion for those who have gone this route, we dare not allow our families to slip into a soft view of suicide.

In all declining empires, consensus views on nearly everything grow more and more twisted toward the end of that culture.  These subtle, gradually accelerating deviant views, in fact, CAUSE the collapse.  A falling nation will grow destructive views on nearly all matters ranging from how to conduct a nation’s finances (to navigate by debt, greed and fraud), to what constitutes a marriage (homosexuality has been prominent in all dying cultures), to what real beauty is (tattooing and carving/cutting on one’s own skin), to that nation’s view of death.  A culture’s view even of suicide is very telling.

Currently suicide in our nation is increasingly presented as a dominant way to solve problems in a growing number of thriller novels, movies, and rock music.  Add to that the addiction of an adolescent (or an aimless grown man) to endless hours of virtual killing via video games, his compulsive thumb-stomping on the button to do it again and again, and you’ve got a real persuasion going on about the non-value of life.  Our culture is saturated with this message.

Let’s analyze the three things that choosing suicide really says, and make a point of discussing these with our family. The person contemplating suicide is THINKING:
One:

“God is not sufficient for me in this matter.  My suffering is worse than anyone else’s, either currently or perhaps in all of history, as far as I can see.”

Two:

“I have the RIGHT to end my life.”

  [Though this is in direct defiance of one of the Ten Commandments that says, “Thou shall NOT murder.”  Note: the moral condition of a person who commits suicide is no different from that of someone who dies in the middle of stealing or committing adultery; in each case, the person is directly disobeying one of the eternal moral laws of God.]

Three:

“My body belongs only to me.”

  [This thought defies the Scripture in 1 Corinthians 3:17 which reads, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?  If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.”]

Committing suicide really says, “God’s word is not to be feared, and I am now God over me.”  Thus suicide, at its root, under the cloak of self-pity, is on some level a final act of rebellion.

There are many people in the world and throughout history who would have GLADLY chosen suicide, but out of sheer obedience to God they didn’t.  People suffering protracted, long severe illnesses are often tempted by the thought of it, but remain restrained out of deep reverence for God and the thought of meeting Him on the other side.  And think of the countless saints who have been mercilessly tortured in concentration camps, who would have loved a way out, but resisted taking their own life, even when they were given the chance.  Some lived through such tortures to the glory of God, for when they were released they went on to preach all over the world, declaring that they found that “There was no pit so deep that God wasn’t deeper still” (Corrie Ten Boom).

The core issue that we need to teach our families is that God has retained the sovereign right over when life begins and when it ENDS for all of His creation, else He would not be Lord.  God alone creates a mortal human being from its first throbbing cell, and then proceeds to sustain it henceforth with every heartbeat.  He retains the sole right to end what He alone began.  To see that this is so, recall that a man has nothing to do with the hour of his conception.  Try as he might, he could not BEGIN his own life.  It follows then, that God alone will choose the hour of his death.  But all this TRUTH is hardly mentioned from our pulpits amidst 100 sermons over a lifetime, and no doubt is thoroughly absent from the rock music songs—because God Himself is absent from the pop hits.  Thus, among the songs of youth any accountability TO God is missing, as well.

Sometimes in Scripture we read that God, as the benevolent parent over all creation, tells us things very firmly.  He has said: “Thou shalt NOT EAT of the tree of good and evil.”  Later in history He said: “Thou shalt NOT TOUCH the ark.”  The man died who touched it, even though he was trying to keep it from falling.”  Strange as it may seem to the modern permissive mind, there are some things God forbids.  When God says “Do not” and we directly defy that mandate, history shows there may be irreversible consequences.  We are not dealing with a moody psychiatrist here or a goofy mad scientist; we are dealing with the eternal God of the universe.  And in Hebrews 12:29 it says of Him that at times He is a “consuming fire” (also in Deuteronomy 4:24 and elsewhere).  What we must teach our families is that suiciders will wake UP from their suicides.  Who and what they meet with will be infinitely more to deal with than what they were dealing with here.

Instead of discussing these things with seriousness, we as a post Christian-culture have descended into a secular view of all life, ALLOWING it to grow in the songs and media that we buy—even to joke about it.  We’ve marketed suicide.  We’ve become soft on suicide.  Secularism always leads to a death wish, be it Hitler’s and Stalin’s camps, or our own nation’s 55 million abortions, the vast majority of which were done for personal convenience.  Suicide, euthanasia, and short-circuiting the job of procreation through a burgeoning homosexuality, quickly follow.  As a result of our secularism, the empire will die—just as it wished for, and argued for, an infinite number of smaller deaths on scores of other topics.

Let us, instead, resolutely choose LIFE by jealously and carefully watching over the messages our children are receiving through the media—because what you are so earnestly teaching in the living room can be stolen in a child’s bedroom through rock music and other media.  Close off the avenues to the bad press.  Have a talk with your children about this deviant message so prevalent among their peers.  Do not be soft on suicide.  The church and family must hold the line on this one.  Speak sternly to your children that this is not an option for solving problems.  Let them hear firmly and clearly that there is a morning after.

Cremation vs. burial for a Bible-believer

Saturday, 29. December 2012 by Renee Ellison

As we face the beginning of a new year, are your family papers in order?  Specifically, do you have a current will?  Here are some thoughts for consideration, regarding a controversial subject that you will have to give personal written instructions for within those papers.

Although cremation is becoming the dominant way of burying American’s dead, is this practice a good idea for a believer?  What does the Bible say about this?  Regardless of how we or our loved ones have responded to this decision in the past, let’s look at what we may want to do in future when we are called upon to make this decision.  Let’s take a serious look at the roots of cremation.  When its origins are considered closely, one can trace the practice of cremation straight to the pagan fires of such countries as India, South America, and China.  The South Sea Islands, for example, had a practice, in the not so distant past, of throwing the living wife on top of the fire of her dead husband (i.e., both were cremated).

Because something is “done” in a culture, doesn’t mean it ought to be done.  As believers, Scripture alone is our rule for all of life and conduct.  If it is not, the culture becomes our rule.  We then are in danger of arriving at a place where ALL issues descend into cases of “anything goes” via current (and ever-descending, in moral terms) public consensus.

Reincarnation is at the root of the idea of cremation.  Pagans HAVE to burn the body because they believe the person comes BACK to earth as a monkey, or cow—so any evidence of the previous life must be eradicated.  On the other hand, at the core of Christian beliefs is that all is REDEEMED, made new, including the OLD body, which is re-gathered.  Consider the dry bones of Ezekiel.  If there were no bones, then “what” would have been re-gathered?  Christians believe that they will see each other in the flesh in the next life.  Hindus do not.

Nowhere in Scripture do we see cremation condoned.  In fact, we see just the opposite.  Consider 2 Chronicles 34:5.  Note that cremation was done to the wicked, as a sign of judgment.  Fire is a sign of judgment, not of life.  All evil practices have an ORIGIN, and the origin tracks with the expression of that practice through all time.  If we don’t agree with what the practice was declaring at its inception, it makes no sense to buy into the practice later.  We, as a people, have not stopped to consider what comes WITH such practices, in the spirit realm.

Believers in the Messiah, instead, want to HONOR the body because it shows our conviction that the person is eternal.  Joseph, looking forward to the next life as he was dying in Egypt, said, “Take my BONES with you to Canaan”.  There is a connected dignity to this life AND the next life for the believer.  It would not be at all surprising to find that some Hebrews will awake upon the exact spot of their future inheritance plot, where they will live on in the coming Millennium.  They believed in an afterlife, as Job said: “Though worms destroy this body, in my flesh shall I see God.”  Throughout Genesis the patriarchs were ALL buried.  The ongoing practice of burial from Adam and Eve to the present day actually is one more evidence today of the Israelites’ deed claims to the very land of Israel.  When ownership of land is being contested via the legalities of provenance (who was originally there, or who was there first), it is hard to argue with the LOCATION of grave sites and burial stones.

Our Lord’s own example as the pioneer in ALL things in our faith, our forerunner, was to sovereignly allow Himself to be buried.  Joseph of Arimathea chose this as a way of restoring dignity to the Lord.  Joseph saw to it that he was careful in all of the details of giving the Lord a proper burial.  If the Lord had been cremated, a major piece of the afterward story couldn’t have happened or been told for all time.  It would have been impossible to show the truth of resurrection without the body.  The same is true of Lazarus’ body.  What happened to his body was a major testimony to a multitude of people about eternal life, as all funerals and memorial services are meant to be, even down to the present age.  All the resurrections that happened simultaneously with the Lord’s own, when the tombs were opened in Jerusalem, would not have been possible, without bodies.  The hope of the resurrected body is one of the believer’s most cherished immortal treasures.  And God personally chose this way of burying Moses himself.  It seems paramount that God wants us to get the message by burying, symbolically copied in our baptisms, by the way, that the body is SOWN corruptible and then is raised incorruptible.

Let’s look finally at two practical aspects.  In order to accomplish cremation, one has to look squarely at the fact that ovens are used in this process.  Flesh burns speedily, but bones do not.  The raging high levels of heat (sometimes 1,700 degrees) necessary in these crematorium ovens, to get the job COMPLETELY done, is atrocious.  They often have to grind the bones, in addition.  (God was upset with the Moabites for burning bones.) It is almost as if the Lord made the body to REFUSE to be stamped out, even after it is dead.  It is difficult to accomplish this with bones.  Because Americans don’t SEE the practice, and are not forced to WATCH the entire process, they remain untroubled.  We cling to the idea that what is hidden is NOT, in our culture.  And why would one want for one’s loved ones the same practice that was used to try to annihilate the Jewish race…Hitler’s ovens?  There is an OVEN involved in this process.  In the Scriptures, fire is a sign of God’s wrath, not of honor.  And it is fire that will destroy the earth, finally.

And what of the ashes?  Rationally, who wants ashes (not a person) in a decorated urn in their living rooms for the rest of THEIR lives?  Whatever do we keep them around FOR?  Another material possession?  We have accepted what is unthinkable—even against our reason, OR our emotions?  Do we really WANT to endlessly hammer on our emotions each time we dust, when the Lord has graciously provided another way to show respect, and to emotionally cope with the finality of death, and hold on to PLEASANT memories of a living person?

Many think they are choosing cremation because it is cheaper.  But for centuries the dead have been buried on the day they die—eliminating all the need for expensive cosmetic afterlife procedures—often in a simple pine box.  Even today the simplest of coffins can be procured at low costs.  Earlier, people of faith (Jewish and Christian) wrapped the body in linen and put it directly into the ground.  Inexpensive grave sites can be found in less populated areas.  We don’t HAVE to straddle ourselves with the huge price tag of a luxurious formal mortuary, by choosing what is Biblically right.  Much of life is about choices.  In the last analysis, we WILL MAKE happen what we WANT to happen, or are convicted should happen.  Let us ask of ourselves if each of our choices is governed by Scripture or by the culture.  Which will we be proud of, or ashamed of, in the next life?  If one hunts for the Lord’s WISHES in Scripture, they CAN be found, in all matters governing our life and death.

Restoring your sanity in conquering domestic chores

Wednesday, 12. December 2012 by Renee Ellison

Ever get in one of those loops where you start out to do one thing but when you get there, some other task looms large in front of you, so you momentarily forget the first thing and tackle that second thing and then in the middle of that second thing a third thing presses its way into your path, demanding attention?  How do you navigate it without ending up buried in deep occupation with the TENTH thing, now on the trivial level, instead of the first?

Here’s how: you write down the second, third and fourth things, and continue DOING the first!  Yup, that’s it.  Domestic insanity replaced with “measured-tread”.

Research shows that if a person, no matter whether it’s a corporation president or the humble janitor, or the pulled-in-every-direction housewife, continues with the highest thing on their priority list and KEEPS it the highest thing, such a person makes remarkable SIGNIFICANT progress in life.  A struggling company told all of its employees to write down their highest three goals EACH DAY, keeping them VISIBLE and prominent, and it turned the company into a business dynamo.  Their bottom line profits broke all their previous records.  For the homemaker?  It turns chaos into cheerful calm!

Wanta know even more secrets that deliver domestic progress for you?!  Order our ebooks, Goal Setting and Time Management and Home Management Strategies.

Chucking College

Thursday, 06. December 2012 by Renee Ellison

College isn’t what it used to be.  And for many of us, what it used to be wasn’t all that great, either.  Some of us parents had good college experiences several decades ago, but many of us didn’t.  All too often, colleges were scenes of great compromise.  Today the college scene is much worse.  Tragically, many young people are losing their faith, their virginity and their finances through this supposedly necessary rite of passage, which has become nothing more than a trip through Babylon.

One dare not speak of not going to college to relatives or friends; college is the last American idol—an untouchable in social circles.  Yet with national student loan debt now at over a trillion dollars, and few jobs in sight for emerging graduates, many college-age young people are finding successful alternative routes for these college years and are actually ending up ahead of their peers.   These daring trailblazers don’t have to carry lifetime baggage from compromises they made under ungodly pressures from professors and unbridled wild peers.  They don’t have the guilt, the emotional scarring, and the bad memories.  And they don’t have to BEGIN life with debt—enormous debt—debt they will be saddled with, in many cases, for the rest of their lives.  They don’t have their faith mangled, either—the very faith they will need to cling to in all of life’s future vicissitudes.

A new book has just been released that challenges these norms with strong convincing data and testimonies that there can be a better way.  Order it at Chuckingcollege.com, where you can read excerpts and reviews of this life-changing and in many respects life-saving book.  Before embarking on a college decision, buy this book.  You won’t be disappointed.  It will put ideas in your mind and convictions in your spirit that are simply not there now, given our cultural vice-grip in this area.  The book is powerful.  Get it—and pass the word.