Secrets to surviving company

Tuesday, 04. December 2012 by Renee Ellison

Expecting company?  Here are seven tips.

One:  Think ENDURANCE strategies.  Tone down your OWN responsiveness.  Wear a warm, tender smile on your face, and that is ALL.  SAY very little from either your own input, or in response to theirs.  Wait until the END of their visit to add your stories, or to become very responsive to them, so that if you collapse it will be at the end of your time together.  Conserve your OWN energy.

Two:  Examine yourself frequently for stress.  Do tummy checks: “Is my tummy tight?”  And breathing checks: “Is my breathing shallow?”  Consciously do bio-feedback.  Loosen your tummy muscles, deepen your breathing, slow your actions, and lower your voice.  As Shakespeare wrote in King Lear: “Her voice was ever soft and low—an excellent thing in a woman.”  This will all have a calming effect upon you.

Three:  Keep a running private conversation going with the Lord.  Pray over everything—even over what to have for dinner.  This sweet internal fellowship will renew you ongoingly.  Praise Him a great deal in your insides.  Praise refreshes, and restores perspective about the big picture.  Relatives often take us down into the minutiae of the little picture.

Four:  If you feel any criticisms or challenges, play dodge ball.  Don’t answer; don’t take it to heart.  Change the conversation onto something wholesome and out there.  Diverting conversations is one of the most excellent strategies to use with relatives; they never figure out that you are doing it.  Put yourself mentally, at those times, into a God-bubble; remind yourself that your “being” and “actions” bring Him great delight, and that He knows your good MOTIVES for the choices of your own lifestyle.  You will stand before Him alone at the great bar.

Five:  If someone is mean-spirited toward you, operate in the OPPOSITE spirit.  Unhook from the last remark and serve them tea.

Six:  Get away, out of the room, for one-minute vacations.

Seven:  Look for shortcuts for everything: only changing pillowcases during your guests’ stay, instead of the sheets, preparing faster foods, etc., and DELEGATE as much as possible TO your company.  This OCCUPIES them productively, gets their attention off from you, makes them feel useful, and lightens your own load.  It is enough to THINK up the order of the day; you don’t have to DO the day, too.  Administration takes mental energy—don’t forget that.  You are the ONLY one in the group who can DO the administration.  That is a job, in and of itself.

For further thoughts, order our ebooks, No Stress Holidays for Moms and Coping with Personally Induced Stress.  Also, Why We Got Off the Christmas Bandwagon.

Parenting sibling rivalry

Sunday, 18. November 2012 by Renee Ellison

Civility happens on the edges of self-management.  It is the very nature of a child NOT to have learned self-management YET.  That IS what a child IS.  Maturity is all about growing a self-possession.  A child begins as a narcissist and only works into a social worker over time!  Self-management is difficult, even for adults.  As Margaret Thatcher (former Prime Minister of England) said, “civilization is a thin veneer.”  Up the pressures a notch higher, enlarge the gulf between perspectives, up the “toys”, and you have full-blown war.

Maturity means being able to suspend one’s own perspectives long enough to see issues from the other person’s point of view. This adroitness extends to being able to even get into the FEELINGS of others, too.  Social development is a process of recalibrating RESPONSES, after having become fully aware of “otherness”.

So, when one has a houseful of young undeveloped perspectives, how does one parent successfully ride these dynamics?  The wise parent hastens the outcomes by cultivating in the child the strategy of going the EXTRA mile. By repeatedly stretching the limits of what the child is required to DO socially, a normal social development will occur naturally and progressively.  “Let’s see how we can make your brother feel EXTRA special and work him out of his disgruntlement!”  “What can we do EXTRA to give your sister a joy she hadn’t counted on?”

The parent then concludes every challenge by drawing attention to the RESULTS accrued to the “giving” child’s own soul. “If you make your sister feel good, YOU will feel good!”  One can even bait the child on the front end with that comment.  “Wanta feel good?  Go relieve your brother of some burden; give him something; help him.”  The act of going BEYOND is the bunker-buster of self.  The principle is: “Not only are you kind to your neighbor, but once in a while you water your neighbor’s garden.”  This releases the sweet perfume of social harmony.  Relationships were originally designed to bring us untold joy, rather than just exist on the plane of endurance.  It’s a tough swim upstream to discover that, but the sweating parent’s faithful coaching will bring it about.

You can begin this process with the word “Let’s.”  You do it WITH the child to the other child, or other parent.  “Let’s go rub your dad’s feet.  I’ll do one, you do the other.  Let’s make him VERY HAPPY.”  You inspire by giving the child an idea he would have never thought of on his own, and then you go do it TOGETHER.  He then FEELS the joy accrued to his own soul via the new challenge of going TOTALLY beyond himself.  Gradually you wean the child off from having to do it with him, until he is doing these sorts of things by himself and loving the FEELING he gets while doing it!  When he is achieving his own emotional rewards, he won’t need you anymore.

By the way, this principle of doing it WITH your child governs all of your parenting over their challenges.  If they are having trouble with academics, chores, business building, etc., you begin by doing it WITH them, and then subtly backing out incrementally as they discover their own capabilities.

Strategies for getting homeschooling on track

Wednesday, 31. October 2012 by Renee Ellison

The very first place to start is to get those to-do charts up and running for your entire family.  We suggest reading our booklet on How to Make Optimal Homeschooling To-Do Charts, cover to cover, and underline anything that you especially want to remember.

Go get some graph paper with half-inch squares (it must be large enough that you/Mom can read it ten feet away, at a glance) or make some graph papers and fill them out for each child, as explained in our booklet.  Make one for yourself, too.  And post them all on the outside of a hallway door or wall and hang a pencil on a string right next to it.  I’ve put scores of women on this program and it has revolutionized their homes and reduced their stress levels because each child carries his own load, both for chores and academic work.  This motivates your children to become high-octane producers, because there is no more dawdling, wondering what to do.  Using the 15-minute chart method, they can race past their peers in every area.

Now go read the rest of the to-do charts booklet to acquire easier days than you ever imagined.

Hebrew: A great language to learn

Sunday, 28. October 2012 by Renee Ellison

If you are wondering what foreign language to teach your children, you need look no further than Hebrew.  In the early years of Harvard, as a college, every student had to learn Hebrew in order to graduate.  It was considered that important to true scholarship and the optimal development of the mind.

Since Hebrew is the eternal language of God, any study of it is never a waste of time, because it will last forever. All other languages will eventually pass away.  Hebrew is the language the Almighty Himself used when He spoke to Moses at Mt. Sinai (otherwise Moses wouldn’t have understood Him).  He named Himself with a Hebrew name, the Name He told Moses: YHWH.  Millennia later, Hebrew was the language God used when He spoke with the Apostle Paul at his conversion on the Road to Damascus (Acts 26:14).

What is even more fascinating is that Hebrew was the very language God used to create the world.  Because of two recent discoveries we now know that Creation was information-based, not “physical-collision-based”, as the evolutionists blindly assert.  Scientists’ unveiling of the DNA code and the complexity of all living cells shows us that information (i.e., language) had to exist before matter.  Information was needed to tell the matter how to behave.  If the cell were a mere blob as Darwin believed (or, rather, he hoped—because of his fierce desire to find an explanation of beginnings without having to acknowledge the existence of the Creator), evolution could be entertained, on some level, as one of a number of groundless theories.  The 700-page book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (Stephen C. Meyer, HarperOne, 2009) shows us that quite the opposite is true.  With the perfection of high-powered microscopes, researchers discovered that there is an entire city of boundless structure and activity within each cell, more complex than any of us ever dreamed.  Thus, before Genesis 1:1, God was creating codes, i.e. language.  That eternal alphabet was then what He used to speak the Creation into existence by fiat, i.e. by His Word.

When studying Hebrew, one soon discovers that God did an “over-the-top” job of creating it with depth.  Each Hebrew letter has three levels to its essence.

One:  Each letter is infused with a frequency, which matches a specific color of light on the color chart, which simultaneously matches a musical frequency on the scale of sound.

Two: Each letter possesses a numerical value: the letter aleph is one, yud is ten, etc.  The discovery of this gave rise to the Jewish study of Gematria, using numerical calculations as a means of exploring the interrelationship between words and concepts.

Three:  Each letter has meaning, represents a concept, and is a word in and of itself.  These meaningful letters then construct the meanings of words.  Contrast this to the alphabets of all other languages, which evolved by agreement.  A sound was assigned to an image, but the image has no meaning.  We could all agree to call a banana a “Ba”, for example.  But then later an adolescent might say the nonsense sound “nananana” each and every time he grabbed one, to imply “I’ve got one and you don’t!”  So then we could add that to the ba because all of his adolescent friends agreed that was a cool sound and decided to use it too (i.e. because of mere usage), so now the word becomes ba-nana.  But it could have just as easily been called a “murph” or a “clop”.  Not so with Hebrew.

Since the letter aleph means strength, that letter is included in the larger word for the name of God.  Every letter in His name is also one of His attributes.  Meaning is heaped upon meaning.  Most Hebrew root words contain three letters.  If you multiply the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet by the 3 combinations of 3 you get thousands and thousands of root word combinations, loaded with meaning.  When these root words are combined with suffixes and prefixes and other root words, the potential is for enough words to cover any contingency and thus the need for any future word required by technology, and into the infinite future.  Hebrew becomes a language big enough for all time, which shall never lose its meanings.

Further, when you add the number and the frequency of the letter to the meaning you see that the Hebrew letters are teeming with power and voltage.  When God created man by fiat He created not just the function (voltage and energy) of the man, but the very meaning of the man at the same time.  Adam is a word that shares letters with the name of God in Hebrew; thus we get “man made in the image of God.”  And so it is with the entire created order.  Far from a random, chance universe, everything in the created order arrived with meaning.  Thus we find that the magnificent tools of creation were the divine alphabet.

If you want to go for a very deep swim, study Hebrew.  Hang onto any raft to begin with and you’ll comprehend more and more as you go.  Just jump into the water.  If you want an immediate easy nearby raft, start by singing along with the Aleph-Bet video on YouTube.  It’s contagiously happy, and has been viewed nearly a million times.  Then go to Akhlah.com and download their free page of How to Write Block Letters in Hebrew; print them out and start tracing them just a few minutes each day, until you master them.  Kindergarten classes use them; they will be easy for you.  Order our Hebrew Zoom-Type course, so you can learn Hebrew letters and basic words while becoming adept at typing in Hebrew quickly on your regular keyboard.  There now, you are launched.  You have the DNA of Creation right there under your pencil

For an inspiring account of a man who almost singlehandedly revived a language that was virtually dead (the first time in history that has ever happened), read Tongue of the Prophets: The Life Story of Eliezer Ben Yehuda, by Robert St. John.  Ben Yehuda (1858-1922) devoted his life to making Hebrew the language of the nation of Israel that was being reestablished in Palestine.  It’s a free download in a number of electronic formats at http://archive.org/details/tongueoftheproph001031mbp

Amusing ourselves to death

Sunday, 16. September 2012 by Renee Ellison

Our culture is addicted to media.  If you don’t believe it, have your family go for one weekend without it.  Is this REALLY the good life?  What are we trading for it?  Is there any hope of controlling it?

Just because we are getting an abundance of information doesn’t mean we are THINKING.  And just because we are being entertained doesn’t mean we are LIVING.  And social technology may actually be dwarfing relational growth with people right in our own living rooms.  Preference for “cyberspace life” over “real life” could be moving us further and further into territory we hadn’t counted on.

What has happened to our spiritual lives with the invasion of these chronic external stimuli?  Have we lost our spirits beside the road somewhere, while we traffic in the ever-insistent immediate?  Are we praying as much as we are WATCHING?  Are we praying at ALL?  “May the eyes of their hearts be enlightened,” said the Apostle Paul.  This was a blessing prayed over us by a mature brother even where there was NO MEDIA on earth.  He wanted us to put on THESE glasses and SEE these things.  This saint’s coveted wish for us was generated only DURING his prayer (if he hadn’t been praying, he wouldn’t have thought of it) and would only ever be experienced by us during OUR prayer.  Daniel received huge revelations from God only because he was ALREADY praying three times a day.  Those insights were not given to the bum down the street who watched chariot races all day.  Via our intoxication with media, are we closer or further from these blessings of the heart?

Also: because of our ever engulfing submersion in media what has happened to our reach to real need down the street? What have we really gained by chronically riveting our focus onto a 15-inch screen and a 15-second sound bite?  Is information the same as reason?  Is watching the same as doing?  What have we gained by so frequently dropping into altered realities via the visual fantasy life of movies beyond number, as well?  What happens to us when we traffic in moral rot?  What happens if we do even MORE of this?  Where does this LEAD?

Let’s get up and out of our “media caves” for a moment and evaluate what is happening to us.  In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985; republished 2006), Neil Postman showed us incisively how we are replacing READING with watching, and how this is doing devastating things to both our cognition, brain function and our spirits.  This means that information is coming to us outside of a context, outside of a developing and cohesive logic, and outside of reflection time.  Hmm.  Do we become bigger people or smaller people if our brain and spirit are no longer exercised in these disciplines?

If we are at all worried about these trends, how do we gain control?  A good starting place is to give ourselves a moment to evaluate good uses and destructive uses of media.  Then work at remembering our findings tomorrow in the middle of renewed media bombardment.  Let’s purposefully clutch a bit of sanity in regard to our mental diet; insist on its importance in our families.

The bottom line? Give your children a “doing and becoming” childhood, not a “sitting and soaking” childhood.  Passivity was never the starch of heroes.  Applause is simply never given to people who do nothing but watch.

Good uses of media:
Watching conservative evening news (especially for the elderly) can be a good thing if used as a spur to PRAY over these world events, while one’s emotions run hot over these issues.  Commercials would be an excellent time to do a little praying.  But too much news for the midlifers can diminish time to be productive.  Headlines can be snatched quickly on the run.

Any DVD or YouTube video that teaches a SKILL is a wonderful use of media.  Skill development in electronics, construction, cooking, sewing, car mechanics, plumbing, health and nutrition, alternative medicine, etc.  Free education on hundreds of topics is available via the Internet; even excellent job training is available there.  This use of media is not fantasy; it extends our REAL lives.

Bad uses of media:
Using media as chronic white noise in doctor’s offices, restaurants, elevators, hotels, and your own home, is destroying our head space.  What’s the solution for your home?  TURN IT OFF.  Allow your family quiet reflection time as the main ingredient to their days.  Contrary to popular opinion, quiet is not bad.  Quiet has a silver lining.  True progressive UNINTERRUPTED thinking will begin to take place.  Genuine relating will happen more often without the background competition for attention.  A constantly splintered attention span will not produce what you are hoping for in your family.  It is no gift.

What’s the solution for public life?  Take earplugs and a book everywhere whenever you head out (include ones for every child).  Incrementally and progressively become well-read.  Many used bookstores hang the slogan:  “So many books; so little time.”  Tis true.  Habitually reading the rich content of good books will sour you on the shallowness of nearly all media.  Media is swamp and marsh, compared to the mining for gold possible when living in and around excellent books.  And make your reading choices devoid of trash.  Many magazines are insanely dumb; leafing through them is a sheer waste of minutes.  Take your OWN book everywhere.  Reading history frees us from arrogance over the present.  It is a deliverance from popular insistences.

Probably the poorest use of media is to use it as a babysitter for your child.  Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their wives didn’t HAVE this option and somehow they all survived.  Neither was this option available for about 5,900 years.  We CAN get our children through the day without it, as staggeringly novel as that seems.  Turn it off and, instead, include your children in your adult dinners and your adult conversations, and your own projects with a little attendant companion project for them, right next to you.  Keeping your children near you and not near media will profoundly alter the development of the child for the better.  Knowing that there are little ears all around you will help you craft your own speech for purity and richness and will grow a mature child before his time.  Teach children the art of waiting for a space before interjecting a comment, and how to be brief with their comments, always aware of the time needed for OTHERS to have a say of equal length.  Time so used will teach them the almost lost art of ebb and flow to all invigorating and life-giving conversation.  “Conversation makes a ready man” (Francis Bacon).  Conversation is a skill which is progressively learned in the actual act—not by passivity in front of a screen.  Most youth today can’t even look you in the eye, they are so doped up by habitually living in a stupor of dull stares upon a frantic screen.

When you and your family have a choice between another VISUAL fantasy story and reading, you’ll get further in life if you pick the reading.  Hour for hour, minute for minute it culminates in a different kind of person at life’s end—and all the way through.  Start with Eric Metaxas’ 580-page two-inch biography of Bonhoeffer (whose family members, by the way, were avid readers, along with performing excellent music in their home for family and guests at the end of each week) and you’ll feel dwarfed in your human development.  Life can be lived on all sorts of levels, and those who live it deeply have much to teach us through BOOKS.  Most in our culture don’t know that such a life is POSSIBLE.  Do SOMETHING about this sabotage.

For further reading, download this eBook: TV Watching Out of Control: Hidden problems for adults and children. and this free eBook especially for godly young daughters: Melanie’s Favorite Books List.

The anatomy of a trial

Wednesday, 05. September 2012 by Renee Ellison

Trials always take us by surprise.  We get blind-sided by them.  They happen in a moment.  One moment we aren’t in one, the next moment we ARE in one.  No pre-posturing possible.  You just wake up in one.  You take it on the chin.  It’s all over you before you KNOW it.  “Gottcha.”  You don’t ask for them, nor can you avoid them.  They just hit, always unannounced.  Whether psychological or physical, it makes no difference, they are equally taxing to endure and manage.

Trials can range anywhere from someone’s rude remark, to finding oneself in a stifling set of circumstances, to having to make an impossible scissors-choice decision, to becoming increasingly trapped in an unintended embroilment.  Physically, they can ensnare you in barely being able to draw your breath due to a pinched nerve for an hour or so, or being laid up for months after a total bang-up in a traffic accident.  Trials can come and give you a whirl, like pulling the string on a top, and be gone, or move in with you to stay, like Amy Carmichael’s fall in a hole that lasted 20 years in bed, or like the slow erosion of a set of circumstances one can’t get out of.  What ARE these things, spiritually?  Why the land-mines?

C. S. Lewis said:  “Trials come to all mankind, but Christians USE their sufferings; pagans waste them.”  Apparently, trials accrue some benefit for the believer.  Herein lies a mystery.  In some inexplicable way, our hard patches aren’t just hard patches!  In the Scriptures there is a hint that for every trial a believer falls into, he will come out with INCREASED spiritual territory.  It appears that the “deed” to new territory IS the trial.

In Daniel, three Jewish lads were thrown into the fiery furnace but to their surprise, they met up with God himself IN there, and they came out un-singed—not even smelling like smoke.  In addition, they gained a loud proclamation over the land that now everybody must believe in their God!  Not bad for a short trip into unbelievably hot circumstances.  Same with Daniel.  He was dumped into the lions’ den but was hauled out the next morning un-chewed, not even slobbered on, WITH the gain of the conversion of his king.  Consider Job.  In James we are told to think on the OUTCOME of his trial.  Everything was restored double-fold.  You may be tempted to say, “but not the children”.  But ah, yes, the children, too—godly Job will have his original children in eternity, plus seven MORE.  Noah had HIS trial as an older man.  He left terra firma, had a tangle with a tsunami, and landed unharmed.  The first thing he did was worship.  That might not have been on his schedule for that day, as SUCH a priority, ahead of dinner, without the boat-ride.  Nebuchadnezzar’s metamorphosis out of his beastly stupor resulted in an increased rock-solid adoration of God which wasn’t gonna’ diminish anytime soon!

The key to gaining increased spiritual territory FROM trials seems to be what the believer does with the promises of God while IN the trial.  All bets are off if one rails against God.  But with a heart that says: “Though He slay me, YET will I trust Him” as Job said ... and “NEVERTHELESS, even if we die in this furnace, we will believe in our God,” or Esther’s “If I perish, I perish,” the outcomes are different.  Redeemed, somehow.  There is no wavering here.  These believers are STANDING on something.

Here is an odd scripture.  In Hebrews 11:39-40 it says:  “They died without having RECEIVED the promises.”  It doesn’t say that they didn’t BELIEVE the promises right up to their last breath, or that they wavered on the promises.  They just hadn’t RECEIVED them ... yet.  We are assured here, by implication, that the promises ARE given.  Where?  When?

If the promises are not gained now (many promises ARE gained while still in this time frame—there have been millions of answers to prayers through the centuries) then the rest of them must be received yet in the future.  The story is not over.  Far from it.  Our resurrected bodies are given BEFORE entering the promised land (Revelation 20:6).  We gain them, to live in them during that last thousand years while He reigns on earth—else we couldn’t REIGN with Him in the millenium—we wouldn’t last in an unglorified body!  So, too, the answers to the promises are given at that hour.  Think about it.  What promise would NOT be given?  Think of even one.  The promises go WITH the territory—with the transformation.  We are told that “we shall NOT be ashamed” when we SEE Him (1 John 2:28), and entering into the millennium is WHEN we shall see Him.  “His reward is with Him” (Isaiah 40:10 and 62:11).  We eventually GET the outcomes of the trials of our faith—each and every one, specifically!

The promises of God are not fairy tales—they are an extension of His very nature.  We are told that “All the promises of God are “yes” in Christ (2 Corinthians 1:20).  The promises of God are a direct expression of His will toward us—in every detail and area that they speak of.  There can be no doubt.  The devil stakes all his warfare upon the severity and DURATION of the trial.  When the believer is like a “dog on a bone” holding fast to the promises of God—over the length of the trial—the reward is sure and his spiritual territory is always increased.  In the face of a believer’s unshakeable faith, the devil’s wind goes out of him.  He sizzles down into a heap of mild and increasingly meager protestations.  Aha—so THAT is what these things are that hit the believer so out of the blue and temporarily throw him so off balance.  They are but the lance leveled at the bulwark of our confidence.  May it not prevail.  Tighten your bite.

LIGHTS OUT?  Are you ready?

Monday, 03. September 2012 by Renee Ellison

For decades, the Boy Scout motto, “Be prepared”, sparked forethought in sterling young men who became an asset to any situation.  You always wanted a Boy Scout in your neighborhood, at your campsite, and most especially at the scene of your accident!  They were READY.  We are NOT ready, as a nation, for an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) fry-out.

An EMP fry-out is no fairy tale.  Parts of the nation have experienced massive power outages due to natural disasters in recent times.  But power outages could occur from a new type of electrical warfare, too.  All traditional warfare aside, an electrical fry-out would literally bring our nation to its knees, crippling it with malfunction.  Computers and all communications devices would be down, hospitals would be down, power plants would be off-line (no electricity or water or natural gas), fuel and transport would be down due to disabling of the computer chips in the vehicles and no electricity to work the gas pumps, commerce would be crippled, cash registers silenced, banks would close, and electronic money would vanish.  We would be plunged into the Dark Ages, with no skills or tools to enable us to cope with it.  It would be a long nightmare.  We as individuals, however, can be LESS traumatized by such an event in our future daily life if we will get prepared NOW.  As Proverbs 22:3 says, “The prudent FORSEETH the evil [alarming possibility] and hideth HIMSELF”—not his whole nation.  There is NO DOWNSIDE to PREPARATION, as an individual and as a family.  And no one is stopping you.

Is this imminent?  It could be.  There are three potential sources of trouble: weather and earthquake disasters, Iran’s hatred, and the sun. Anytime someone calls you the Big Satan and VOWS to neutralize you, because their eschatology demands it, you’d better get prepared for anything.  Iran’s ideas range from using suitcase bombs to launching a nuclear bomb from a ship near our coast (after they attack Israel, as soon as they are able to do that)—targeting the center of our nation—and from that radius a fry-out would be successful over the whole nation.  And such a fry-out could be accomplished withOUT a nuclear weapon, any host of OTHER ways, by Iran, Korea or China, as well.  There is no defense against such an attack.  Air and cyber warfare possibilities are infinite.  We’ve never faced them before.

The sun’s danger?  Radioactive sun flares.  The sun is fast reaching the peak of its solar activity cycle, belching larger and larger radioactive sun flares that have historically caused the Earth trouble and will do so in greater measure, this time, in the not-too-distant future.  We cannot stop the sun.  It will do what it will do.  And it currently doesn’t look good.  Scout it out for yourself on the Internet.  Scientists are VERY concerned with what this will do to electrical transformers world-wide.

The keys to preparation are forethought and practice.  Mental preparation—living through the event in your head, ahead of time, is first.  Next, realize that practical preparation involves STUFF.  Preparing your stuff has four key steps:

One: Build artificial heat.  Pretend that the fry-out will happen soon—even a week from now.  What is NOT ready?  What is most important to GET ready?

Two: Make a list, prioritize your list, and obtain things in that order.

Three: Think through ADDITIONAL parts to your stuff—fuel, batteries, light bulbs, matches, etc.  Missing just one piece can be as significant as not having the tool in the first place.

Four: Practice.  Improve.  Then practice again and again, until you get it down pat and you don’t lack any key thing that makes your survival “do-able”.

Basic preparation may FEEL overwhelming, but it need not be.  Given some serious focus and a good plan, you can get the bulk of vital preparations all done in a week, if you’ll stick at it.  Go for it and then practice living through a power-outage crisis over some weekend, soon.  Guaranteed, you’ll have a dismal go at it.  Get up, tweak it, and go after it again next weekend.  Your neighbors won’t be doing any of this, as they sit cocooned and captivated by evening television shows.  Imagine the power grid going down tomorrow.  HOW ready would you be?  No one else cares.  No one else will be preparing FOR you.  “Night cometh when no man can work”  The option is to prepare for the possibility that progress will be at a stand still for a long time,  shops will be closed, Amazon.com down, trucks stopped, shipping no more.

There is a host of “preppers” info freely obtainable online.  But we found much of it overwhelming, and began to work very hard at synthesizing the most vital parts of voluminous information into a simple inexpensive DO-ABLE 40-page booklet, Emergency Preparedness for Families.  This is a booklet for believers because it includes vital information about mental and spiritual steps to take, and how to endure persecution.  The optimal PRACTICAL plans here presented will save you hours of reinventing the wheel and will give you the courage to face the MENTAL parts of increased tribulation, too.  Order it in hard copy ($5) or as an eBook ($4) on our website.  You won’t regret it.  Times are tough, and they will only be getting tougher.  Get prepared.

Strive to raise a holy child, not just an academic one

Wednesday, 29. August 2012 by Renee Ellison

Preserving godly seed in this world is precarious, at best. Right from the Garden of Eden, we nearly lost the godly line when Cain killed Abel. Angels held their breath until Seth was born because there was no godly line to replace Abel there for awhile. And angels held their breath again when all but Noah were wiped off the earth. The godly seed YOU raise is terribly important. A frail godly thread hangs in the balance over the entire earth and your child is in that line. This must be your first, and last, obsession. It is your highest call to raise a holy child for the Kingdom, as well as for the child’s own soul.

While the enemy occupies us with academic anxieties over Greek gods (demons), he prowls around to take the SPIRITS of our children. Keep your focus on the “worship factor” in your children. What are they starting to worship? Movie actors? Rock stars? What posters and pictures are going up in their rooms? What are they listening to? Watching? Talking about? Be too busy with godly pursuits to let this worldliness gain any head of steam in their lives in the first place. Let Bible reading, serving real needs in the real world, gaining life skills of all sorts, and running home based businesses occupy those hours, instead. Is their devotion to the one true God SECURE? How MUCH do they love Him? What can you do to raise the spiritual bar in your child in the few short years of influence that you have with him? Is his affection for God locked-in, rock sure? Where does your child run emotionally in his spare moments? What reading does he prefer? How does he use his discretionary time?

There is no downside to raising a godly child. Holy children don’t rebel. Holy children internalize YOUR values—they have no reason to rebel. They love the God you love as ardently as you do, or more so. They enlarge heaven and enlarge righteousness upon the earth, while they wait for heaven. They don’t get side-tracked. They cause no trouble. They waste no life. Their very presence and their choices glorify God while they walk among the sons of men. They are content. They are cheerful. They are selfless. They are mature before their time, as Timothy was.

Most of us as parents are preoccupied…we are chasing the wrong ball…in the wrong ball park…playing the wrong game. The “game” of life is to “glorify God and to enjoy Him forever” (Westminster Catechism) and to raise up godly seed to do the same. Until our children are ambitiously doing that, under their own gumption, without us, even when we aren’t looking, we have work to do. If all we do is focus on secular academics, we COULD raise an intelligent murderer. Our grief will know no end if we worship academics only, but our joy can know no bounds if we groom the spirit to adore the living God. Take up your child, steward him in holiness, and return him to His Maker…just like Hannah did with Samuel.

There are FOUR ways to steward a child in the development of holiness.

1. Set a good example, yourself. Be in a “white heat” yourself in your own love for God. Be daily in His word. Be ever running to Him with the vicissitudes of life. Nothing inspires like example. Turn off the cultural noise (media and all) until you have tended to God as your FIRST priority, EVERY day. No matter how disheveled the schedule, go to Him at your FIRST discretionary moment.

2. Train your child’s will. God takes a lifetime to show us as adults how exchanging our will for His will in all matters in life is actually our most fulfilled life. We were created FOR God, not for ourselves. We will always be slightly off the radar of the real deal, slightly out of focus, when we live for self. Therefore, believe that developing a supple will in your child is THE avenue to his greatest happiness. The goal? Can he submit himself anytime, anywhere over any matter to the will of his parent, as a young child? Has the child learned to deny himself? He won’t always be having to do this; normal days are filled with much give and take. But CAN he do it, at a moment’s notice, when called upon to? A parent who is forever appeasing his child, humoring him out of his disgruntlement, bending his adult will to his child’s will, trains nothing in his CHILD. The parent already knows how to do this. It is the CHILD who needs the practice.

3. Train your child’s character. Teach him that his word is his bond. Train him in personal nobility: not to lie, to follow through with what he says, to be trustworthy. There are around 50 of these attributes. Find out what these are, and go to it.

4. Teach your child to go to (and rely upon) his OWN prayer closet. All of the remarkably holy saints throughout history knew the value of their own prayer closet. Each of them had discovered that THIS is where you recalibrate spiritually and cross-examine your motives as you HEAR from God through HIS Word and YOUR prayer. Daily cloistered away from the world at some moment during the day to transact business with God changes a man like the sun changes seeds in a garden. No sun, no plant, nothin’, zip, zilch. Time spent in this sacred holy relationship is the core difference between raising a holy child and an academic one. This is the fastest route and the shortest distance to transformation. No man who influences the world for God does so without the prayer closet. George Mueller, Hudson Taylor, Oswald Chambers, Jim Elliot, Charles and John Wesley, Isaac Watts, François Fénelon, Andrew Murray, Charles Finney, George Whitfield, Jonathan Edwards, David Brainerd and others (read them all) of historical note lingered there often. What they conversed about in private with God ALONE materialized in a finished lasting spiritual work on the ground in real life.

So even if you do family devotions, then at the opposite end of the day train the child in his OWN devotional life, so that he learns how to rely upon God by himself for that eventful day when he grows up and leaves home. At first do HIS devotions with him, day after day. By virtue of your own excitement about it, make it the best part of his day. Then imperceptibly, bit by bit, remove yourself from his devotions until he is doing them without you with the same eagerness that he had when doing them with you.

Give him his own Bible (while you are still doing devotions alongside him). Start with easy versions and teach him to underline in it like a workbook (right next to you, with lots of smiles and approval) so that he can rapidly re-find his favorite verses. Also, teach him to jot down one gem from his daily devotions in a little notebook. Just one. This causes him to interact with what he reads and not just go through the motions. Teach him to pray for five minutes. That’s it. You grow a spiritual muscle just like you exercise a physical one—incrementally. One chapter, one thought, one prayer. You are growing a HABIT. It will mushroom on its own.

If you have boys sixth grade and up, have them trade off times with the father for leading short daily family devotions, each of them standing up to read one chapter, at the foot of the dinner table, perhaps. At the close of this reading, encourage your son to make ONE VERBAL COMMENT upon what was just read, for the edification of the family. The whole exercise will take a total of about five minutes. Done. (Long devotions turn everyone off, whether by son OR father.) Men don’t lead their OWN future families because they think it is too overwhelming of a chore, they were never in the HABIT of leading, and they were never trained. To NOT do this becomes a lifetime source of guilt and awkwardness when sons later become the heads of their own households. Require this of your sons, and appreciate them IN it, and it will become the coveted joy of a man’s life as God meant for it to be—fueling their manhood and assuring grand influence in the world via the piety and actions of their own family.

Training academics doesn’t hold a candle to training holiness…but usually you will find that the holy saints BECOME the most academic as well! The spiritual discipline fits them for good progress in the other. BOTH get done, concurrently. William Carey cataloged all the known flora and fauna in his village in India as WELL as was a missionary. Albert Schweitzer cataloged the rivers of Africa. Said again, “there is absolutely no downside to raising a holy child!” The results will be the joy of your life. You can count on it!

Additional resources:
Children Can Gulp the Word
Character Traits Coloring Book and Songs
Wesley’s Daily Holiness Checklist

Finding relationships difficult?

Friday, 24. August 2012 by Renee Ellison

I’ve been young and now I’m old and I’ve never seen any effortless relationship or any uncomplicated person! All relationships eventually clash, in little ways or in big, on the hill of unfulfilled expectations from BOTH sides. All human beings find that they begin life and traverse life misunderstood and emotionally needy. Anger toward others, for not fulfilling us, is really only a process of waking up. When we move beyond this disillusionment, we beautifully mature. God alone satisfies the soul. Instead of seeking more self from others, we find that people are OUR CHARGE to learn to love.

Sweet concord under one roof is only possible when all the inhabitants are living FOR the same thing—God’s glory. That is the only true grounds of lasting relational unity. Sentimentalism alone cannot and will not hold a relationship together. Get the stresses of life up high enough and sentimentalism will fizzle. But when all in a household can see the earnestness of each soul struggling to live for God, even though encumbered with ineptitude, relationships thrive. Such a home is full of tendernesses.

We all begin life as victims of total myopia. Ultimately for each of us, as serious believers, life becomes one long journey from self-absorption to self-denial. A supple will, at the end of life, is the gold God was mining. Relational fires can be good things.  Sit tight; they only burn off the dross, to OUR own improvement!

The importance of rescuing a straying child

Wednesday, 15. August 2012 by Renee Ellison

Have a child who is going astray?  Having a child who is not headed in the right direction is a serious, serious matter.  If not corrected it will remain one of life’s greatest griefs.  Finding that a child shows signs of going awry in one’s own home is “high alert” material and demands everything we can possibly marshal to correct it, at the earliest possible hour—while there is yet time.  We must stop at nothing, because unchecked rebellion has the potential of shipwrecking our child, to his or her ruin, and remaining a lifetime sorrow for us, as parents.

God gives us our children to shepherd to the SAME DEGREE that He shepherds us—which is total.  We must do whatever it takes to regain the child’s heart, as young as possible, and sensitively work at thoroughly discipling him or her for God’s kingdom.  God gave us a realm over which to rule, for His sake.  WHAT we do with it, in all of its complexities, no matter HOW trying or difficult or extreme or “impossible”, is terribly important.  What we do in this, our first and closest realm of responsibility, behind closed doors, is far more important than our PUBLIC life and activities will EVER be.  Many pastors have not understood this, to their sorrow, as they have lost their families.  We can find out too late that there was a lifetime price tag on all of our choices, large and small.

As believers, we don’t move BEYOND our problems, as a means of solving them.  Instead, we wrestle, and then continue to wrestle some more, and in the wrestling we find more of OURSELVES revealed as we struggle.  God is not a poor investor; He works on two stories at once.  He works on US, as He works on the child.  Stay ON your problems, like a dog on a bone.  When you show THIS kind of tenacity, you’ll find God heartily in the yoke with you.  His breath comes hot and heavy.

The evil one’s greatest tool in his toolbox is to divert our attention and occupy us elsewhere while he conducts his robberies.  To thwart that, we must ensure that family comes first (after personal devotion to our Creator), and if there are warning lights on THAT dashboard, we must tend to them until there AREN’T warning lights, before we extend our activities BEYOND that sphere.  If our car is malfunctioning, we can’t drive until the dashboard is all clear in our OWN vehicle.  We must redouble our energy, sharpen our focus, and look AGAIN under the hood.  We must go “deep” before we go “wide” in life.  God did not say family would be easy, but He did say it is OURS to plow through.  And He did say that what we do with the family that we’ve been given, and it ALONE, is THE credentialing for us to EXTEND our life beyond that.  That is why OLDER women train the younger…AFTER they have proven themselves in their own soil.  It is the same credentialing required of the men, as ELDERS.  The modern church has traded this requirement for talent and charisma instead, to our spiritual ruin as a culture.

When the child is still of moldable/malleable age, save your outside involvements until AFTER your own child is back on the right road.  Give THAT time to the straying child.  There is more to life than increasing its speed.  Sometimes we have to slow down…slow WAY down and focus.  If one’s child has the spiritual cancer of rebellion, one must work at arresting it now, leaving no stone unturned, because unchallenged cancer only grows.

However, if the child is grown and rebellious, then we shift gears.  Because we can no longer exert a personal daily influence, we are limited far more to prayer.  But this is no lesser power.  Let us remember that George Mueller prayed for five people tenaciously—three of whom came to faith AFTER he died.  We can continue to influence such a grown child via OTHER people’s godly influence.  We can sensitively share books/CD’s/famous quotes/and or verses as life with our straying grown child occasionally gives us opportunity.  But few people can long endure the steady white-heat of a quiet godly love through prayer.  No effort in prayer is ever wasted.  The story is not over until Judgment Day.

[For further reading: a related ebook or booklet is Teaching the Resistant Student.]