Archives

Quotable

Apr27

From a homeschooled student writing a research paper: “This complex topic was a lot less complex when I knew less about it.”

Someone else on another homeschooling blog mentioned “the cover of The Teaching Home magazine,” and I immediately remembered all those covers from the 1980’s of beautiful homeschooling families wearing matching pastel colored outfits and modest smiles. I also remembered this song by Rob and Cindy Shearer of Greenleaf Press, and I wish you could hear it sung. Classic.

Song Lyrics ‘On The Cover Of The Teaching Home’
(to the tune of The Cover of the Rolling Stone by Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show)

Well, we started home schooling, didn’t waste time fooling
Heard the Moores had a name we should know.
Better late than early, we weren’t in any hurry
Kid was 18 months or so…
We went to all the seminars, we talked to all the stars
We had our stuff down really cold.
Now the kid’s gotten bigger and we want our picture
On the cover of the Teaching Home.

Chorus:
Teaching Home…. Wanna see my picture on the cover
Home…. Wanna buy five copies for my mother
Home…. Wanna see my smiling face
On the cover of the Teaching Home

Well, I told my bride about Mary Pride,
You know our family was just too small.
You can teach just one, but a dozen’s more fun.
We got desks up and down the hall.
We teach K thru 6, we know all the tricks,
Except for how to see each other alone.
Now the family’s gotten bigger and we want our picture
On the cover of the Teaching Home…

(Chorus)

We use Bob Jones, Abeka, and a video school,
We know every phonics song.
We teach from 9 to 5, we got a home enterprise.
What could we be doing wrong?
We got field trips booked until the end of June.
We’ve built a model to scale of Rome
We’re not gettin’ any richer and we want our picture
On the cover of the Teaching Home.

(chorus)
lyrics, copyright Rob & Cyndy Shearer, 1990.

If you remember the covers or the song or both, you’re definitely a veteran homeschooler.

I read this story of how an atheist came to faith in God and thought it was eminently sensible and believable: “I went home and decided that I was going to decide. I was going to either ask God to come into my life, or I was going to end the subject completely and never allow myself to consider the possibility of God again. I was tired of dealing with this decision. I was tired of thinking about it.”

Tough Questions and Real Life Stories

Apr22

This weekend, Easter weekend, a lot of people are thinking about Jesus, and Christianity, and Truth. I followed a link in a John Piper tweet and found this website out of the U.K. called Christianity Explored. The site includes a section called Tough Questions in which real people give preliminary answers for questions such as:

You can’t trust the Bible, can you?
Wasn’t Jesus just a great teacher?
Doesn’t becoming a Christian mean becoming boring?
Hasn’t science shown that Christianity is wrong?
If there is a God, why does He allow suffering?
Why bother with church?
Isn’t believing in the resurrection ridiculous?
How can a loving God send anyone to hell?
Why are Christians so old-fashioned about sex?
Aren’t all religions essentially the same?

I say “preliminary answers” because for each of the above questions there is four minute video of a Christian giving a real introduction to the Christian response to that particular issue. Of course, four minutes isn’t a lot of time to answer most of the complicated and serious questions that people have, so the website goes on to provide further resources, reading suggestions, and more in-depth answers to the questions. Also, the website, Christianity Explored, has a series of short stories of real life Christians telling about how they came to believe in Jesus Christ. And there’s a course that you can sign up for called (no surprise) Christianity Explored, and you can also read the book of Mark, one of the first biographies of Jesus, for yourself.

At the risk of sounding totally frivolous about a serious subject, I must say that you should be careful about watching these videos. Many of the speakers are British, and anything presented with that kind of oh-so-English accent is bound to sound erudite and indisputable. Just sayin’.

I can’t think of a better way to spend at least part of your Easter weekend than to explore the claims of Christ and of his followers. And if you’re an easily impressed American like me, enjoy the accents.

Why Jesus?

Apr19

I was talking to a young man of my acquaintance last week, and we were discussing a friend of his who was dealing with lots of problems, mostly of her own making. I said something like, “Well, you know that ultimately she needs Jesus.” I knew that this young man says he believes in a Creator God, and he prays sometimes. However, he says he’s just not convinced that he has any need for or any faith in “all that Christian stuff.”

And, sure enough, he asked me: “Why Jesus?” Why can’t we just get by with a belief in a Higher Power or God or whatever you want to call Him without having to believe everything that the Bible says about Him? Why do we need to bring Jesus and all the Christian baggage into the equation?

Now I have answers to that question, and I gave the young man a brief response, which was all he wanted or was ready to hear. However, I’ve been thinking about his query, and I thought I’d ask some people I trust or admire to answer in their own words. It’s not a bad question to contemplate as we approach Resurrection Sunday and the celebration of the culmination of Jesus’ ministry and work here on earth.

I asked: If someone asked you, why Jesus? Why isn’t it enough to just believe in God? Why are Christianity and Jesus necessary? How would you answer?

Jared Wilson, pastor and author: God reveals himself to us in Christ (John 14). So to reject Christ is to reject God. God is triune; any denial is acceptance of not-God.

Mitali Perkins, author: A loving God doesn’t make sense in a suffering world without the cross.

Martin Luther: “Either sin is with you, lying on your shoulders, or it is lying on Christ, the Lamb of God. Now if it is lying on your back, you are lost; but if it is resting on Christ, you are free, and you will be saved.”

R.C. Sproul, pastor and teacher: “There is a God who is altogether holy, who is perfectly just, and who declares that he is going to judge the world and hold every human being accountable for their life. As a perfectly holy and just God, he requires from each one of us a life of perfect obedience and of perfect justness. If there is such a God and if you have lived a life of perfect justness and obedience—that is, if you’re perfect — then you certainly don’t need Jesus. You don’t need a Savior because only unjust people have a problem.”

I would add: Apart from Christ, how do you know what God you are praying to or acknowledging? Who is your God? A remote implacable Muslim God? Or a capricious and fallible Zeus? An impersonal “watchmaker” god? The unknown God (Acts 17:23)? Jesus is God’s final and highest revelation of Himself to a fallen, but beloved world. For God, the true one God revealed in Christ, so loved the world, you and me, that He gave His only begotten Son, Jesus, that whosoever believes, trusts, has faith in, Him shall not die but have everlasting, forever, abundant, quality life.

Today and every day as we live toward the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection and eventually toward His second coming to judge the world, I wish you Jesus.

If you have answers or questions to add to this discussion, please feel free to comment.

The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom

Mar19

40 Inspirational Classics for Lent

Miss Cornelia Arnolda Johanna Ten Boom was a middle-aged Dutch watchmaker and repairer when World War II brought the ethical dilemma of the twentieth century to her doorstep, “What shall we do in response to the Nazi persecution and genocide of the Jews?” Corrie and her family hid Jewish refugees in their home and were subsequently arrested. Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp where Corrie learned the lesson that she was later to share with the world: “there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.”

The Hiding Place tells the story of Corrie Ten Boom and her family as they hid Jews in their home in Amsterdam and of their imprisonment in the German concentration camp, Ravensbruck. After the war was over, Corrie Ten Boom, already in her fifties, travelled the world for the next three decades, telling people about her experiences in Ravensbrueck and even more importantly about God’s provision during that time of suffering. She also wrote several books in addition to The Hiding Place, and in 1975 a movie was made also called The Hiding Place and featuring Julie Harris, Eileen Heckart, Arthur O’Connell, and Jeannette Clift in her Golden Globe nominated role as Corrie ten Boom.

Here’s just a taste of the wisdom embedded in “Tante Corrie’s” autobiographical story, a book I strongly suggest you read with an open heart and mind if you never have:

How long I lay on my bed sobbing for the one love of my life I do not know. I was afraid of what father would say. Afraid he would say, “There’ll be someone else soon,” and that forever afterwards this untruth would lie between us. “Corrie,” he began instead, “do you know what hurts so very much? It’s love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill the love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel. God loves Karel, even more than you do, and if you ask Him, He will give you His love for this man, a love nothing can prevent, nothing destroy. Whenever we cannot love in the old human way, God can give us the perfect way.”

I did not know that he had put into my hands the secret that would open far darker rooms than this; places where there was not, on a human level, anything to love at all. My task just then was to give up my feeling for Karel without giving up the joy and wonder that had grown with it. And so, that very hour, I whispered a prayer, “Lord, I give to You the way I feel about Karel, my thoughts about our future, everything! Give me Your way of seeing Karel instead. Help me to love him that way. That much.”
*****************

“Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.”
*****************

“Even as the angry vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him….Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness….And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives along with the command, the love itself.”
*****************

“God’s viewpoint is sometimes different from ours – so different that we could not even guess at it unless He had given us a Book which tells us such things….In the Bible I learn that God values us not for our strength or our brains but simply because He has made us.”
******************

“You can never learn that Christ is all you need, until Christ is all you have.”

You can read more about Corrie ten Boom here.

Crazy Love by Francis Chan

Mar18

O.K. I must admit that this book, and other books like it, frustrate me. It’s a book about being totally, completely, abandoned-ly, sold out for God, about loving Him with your heart, mind, soul and strength. That’s good. I want to love God like that, although I admit that I don’t really. Not always. Not even most of the time.

“He is asking you to love as you would want to be loved if it were your child who was blind from drinking contaminated water; to love the way you want to be loved if you were the homeless woman sitting outside the cafe; to love as though it were your family living in the shack slapped together from cardboard and scrap metal.”

Fine. I’m sure Jesus does ask us to love that way, to that depth. But how does this sort of sacrifice work out practically speaking, or even impractically speaking?

Do I tell my kids no more extra classes–dance, piano, canoeing, drama–no more candy or doughnuts, heck, no more meat, until the entire world is fed and clothed to a certain minimal standard?

Do I quit buying clothes EVER and just wear mine until they fall off me in rags? (Not a great sacrifice for me because I hate shopping, and I wear clothes way past their style-date anyway.)

Do I sell my computer and my TV and my household appliances and give to the poor?

Do I turn off the air conditioning in Houston in the summer to save money to give away to those who are, I admit, much more in need of basics than I am in need of air conditioning? What would my husband, who suffers from the heat much more than I do, think about that sacrifice? Why not just turn the electricity off completely?

Do I tell my mom no more eating out together once a week because it costs too much?

Do we sell our house and crowd eight people into a two-bedroom apartment? Including my 77 year old mother who lives in a small apartment behind our house?

Do we sell our cars and walk? Or are bicycles OK and acceptably sacrificial?

Do we tell our kids “no college” because we’re giving that money to feed orphans in India? (Not that we can afford college anyway!)

Do I give all of my time and energy to serving others and leave my family to fend for themselves?

Do I refuse to read a book or watch a movie because I could be spending that time in prayer and Bible study, and if I really, really loved God, I’d want to spend all of my time with Him? Should I even have read Francis Chan’s book?

Maybe it’s Jesus himself I’m frustrated with. Mr. Chan says, and wisely so, that he can’t tell his readers what sacrifices or what obedience God is calling them to. He says he has enough trouble discerning God’s will for Francis Chan’s life and ministry. However, I’m not sure how to understand what Mr. Chan is preaching in this book. If it were really my family starving in that shack, I would immediately give up ballet lessons, vacations, fast food, meat, cake, books, movies, and anything else I could find to get my family fed, clothed, and loved. But am I to ask my real family to give up everything so that other families and children can have what they need? And where is the line? If there is no line, if total self sacrifice is the call (and I think it is), how do I do that and still remain faithful to the family in which God has placed me? I get the idea that I’m not doing enough, not giving enough, not serving enough, not sacrificing enough, but what’s enough? I can’t out-give God, who gave and gives Himself for me, but what AM I called to give?

I want a checklist and a pencil.

Jesus said to him, “If you want to be perfect, go and sell what you own and give the money to the destitute, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come back and follow me.”
But when the young man heard this statement he went away sad, because he had many possessions.
Is that me?

“The one with two talents also came forward and said, ‘Master, you gave me two talents. See, I’ve earned two more talents.’
His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy servant! Since you have been trustworthy with a small amount, I will put you in charge of a large amount. Come and share your master’s joy!’
Or am I managing what God has given me to the best of my ability, allowing HIm to use me where I am?

I could still go for the list and the pencil.

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

Mar15

40 Inspirational Classics for Lent

I watched this introduction to Lewis’s classic explanation of the Christian faith just a few days ago, and I think it’s quite good. The speaker is Professor Louis Markos of Houston Baptist University:

C.S. Lewis really is the finest Christian apologist of the twentieth century, and Mere Christianity should be required reading for anyone who is considering the truth claims of Christianity.

I could quote from Mere Christianity all day and not even begin to exhaust the wonderful aphorisms, images and exposition that Professor Lewis brings to bear on the questions of whether Christianity is true and what is its essential teaching. Lewis is not necessarily the “Protestant saint” that some make him out to be, but as a writer and interpreter of basic Christian theology, he excels.

“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”

“Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning…”

“Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.”

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

“Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside of the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.”

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

“Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won’t last forever. We must take it or leave it.”
This truth is a partial answer to the whole Rob Bell controversy over whether there is or isn’t a hell as a place of eternal torment. Wouldn’t it be eternal torment to be an eternal being who chose in this life to live apart from, as a rebel to, the living, loving God of the Universe, the one who loves me so much that He gave his only begotten Son to die in my place, as an atonement for my sin. To know that now and fall down in gratitude and love toward Him is is a humbling experience; to learn that God was so merciful and so patient in the face of my repeated rejection and sin and that He had finally honored my rebellion with His divine wrath would be torment beyond any physical pain.
For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad. 2 Corinthians 5:10
for He says, “AT THE ACCEPTABLE TIME I LISTENED TO YOU,
AND ON THE DAY OF SALVATION I HELPED YOU.”
Behold, now is “THE ACCEPTABLE TIME,” behold, now is “THE DAY OF SALVATION.”— 2 Corinthians 6:2

My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers

Mar14

This book is not one to be read in a chunk, but rather a book of daily devotional thoughts written by Mr. Chambers, a Scots YMCA chaplain before and during World War I. Chambers died in 1917, and his wife compiled this book of daily devotional thoughts from Chambers’ writings.

However, the term “devotional thoughts” may give the wrong impression. These daily essays on how to understand and live the Christian life are not your typical little encouraging stories or aphorisms. Here’s an example, the selection for March 14th:

“His servants ye are to whom ye obey.” Romans 6:16

The first thing to do in examining the power that dominates me is to take hold of the unwelcome fact that I am responsible for being thus dominated. If I am a slave to myself, I am to blame because at a point away back I yielded to myself. Likewise, if I obey God I do so because I have yielded myself to Him.

Yield in childhood to selfishness, and you will find it the most enchaining tyranny on earth. There is no power in the human soul of itself to break the bondage of a disposition formed by yielding. Yield for one second to anything in the nature of lust (remember what lust is: “I must have it at once,” whether it be the lust of the flesh or the lust of the mind) – once yield and though you may hate yourself for having yielded, you are a bondslave to that thing. There is no release in human power at all but only in the Redemption. You must yield yourself in utter humiliation to the only One Who can break the dominating power viz., the Lord Jesus Christ – “He hath anointed me . . . to preach deliverance to all captives.”

You find this out in the most ridiculously small ways – “Oh, I can give that habit up when I like.” You cannot, you will find that the habit absolutely dominates you because you yielded to it willingly. It is easy to sing – “He will break every fetter” and at the same time be living a life of obvious slavery to yourself. Yielding to Jesus will break every form of slavery in any human life.

President George W. Bush used to read My Utmost for His Highest each morning when he was president, probably still does. According to Newsweek (2003), “George W. Bush rises ahead of the dawn most days, when the loudest sound outside the White House is the dull, distant roar of F-16s patrolling the skies. Even before he brings his wife, Laura, a morning cup of coffee, he goes off to a quiet place to read alone. His text isn’t news summaries or the overnight intelligence dispatches. Those are for later, downstairs, in the Oval Office. It’s not recreational reading (recently, a biography of Sandy Koufax). Instead, he’s told friends, it’s a book of evangelical mini-sermons, “My Utmost for His Highest.”

You can read these brief, but meaningful daily reflections here.
Wisdom in a Time of War:
What Oswald Chambers and C.S. Lewis teach us about living through the long battle with terrorism by JI Packer.

Pensees by Blaise Pascal

Mar10

It’s Lent, and as a growing Christian you want to read something that will bring you closer and deeper in your relationship with Jesus. Or you’re not a Christian, but you think that this time leading up to the celebration of the resurrection of Christ would be a good time to explore the Christian faith and see for yourself what it’s all about.

I would suggest that first and foremost you read the Bible, but not just any old books of the Bible. If you’ve never read the Bible before I would suggest starting with one of the Gospels, the four books in the New Testament that tell about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Even if you’ve read the Bible several times from cover to cover, springtime and Lent and Easter are good times to review the story of Jesus and let God refresh you spiritually through His Word as it tells about the Greatest Love Story Ever Enacted.

Then, if you’re like me and still want some more reading to inspire and encourage you in your journey, try one or more of the recommended books in this series, 40 Inspirational Classics.

Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and philosopher. He was educated at home by his father and he grew up to be a talented scientist and mathematician. In 1654, Pascal had a mystical experience of the presence of God, a sort of “second conversion,” and he devoted himself to writing a book about the reasons for belief in God and in the Christian faith.

Pensees means “thoughts,” and these “thoughts” are really Pascal’s notes for a book of Christian apologetics that he planned to write, but never managed to finish. Pascal believed that to bring a person to faith in Christ it was necessary to make him want to believe.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.

Make religion attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. Worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature. Attractive because it promises true good.

The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart which knows God, and not the reason. This, then, is absolute faith: God felt in the heart.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. All our dignity consists, then, in thought.

…there are two kinds of people one can call reasonable; those who serve God with all their heart because they know Him, and those who seek Him with all their heart because they do not know Him.

Pascal’s Wager: “You must wager; it is not optional. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God exists. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.”

I found Peter Kreeft’s edition of and commentary on Pascal quite accessible; it’s called Christianity for Modern Pagans. I wrote some reflections on the chapters of Kreeft’s book in these posts a couple of years ago:
Order and Fear of Religion
Sinners Need Silence and Ultimately, A Saviour
Gloom, Despair and Agony on Me
Animal or Angel?
Vanity, Vanity, All Is Vanity
Every Day in Every Way: The Vanity of Justice.

Free Kindle edition of Pascal’s Pensees.

And The Word . . . Dwelt Among Us

Mar7

The Kimyal people of Papua, Indonesia receive the Bible in their own language:

What a celebration. Do we even begin to know what precious truth God has entrusted to us? “To whom much is given, of him much shall be required.” We in the West are abundantly blessed. God forgive us for the misuse and waste we have perpetrated with the blessing He has given us.

And won’t heaven be grand as we all worship the Lamb together, from every nation and tribe?

Observing Lent

Feb24

Easter is late this year, not until April 24th. And so the season of Lent begins in March. Shrove Tuesday is March 8, and Ash Wednesday is March 9. I want to do some special things with our family to observe both Lent and the fifty days after Easter which constitute the Easter feast that lasts from Easter until Pentecost Sunday, June 12.

The following ideas for Lent come from:
Lenten Links: Resources for a Post-Evangelical Lent.
One deep drawer: Observing Lent with our families
10 Lenten Traditions to Enrich Your Family’s Easter Celebration by Barbara Curtis
At a Hen’s Pace: An Anglican Family Lent.
Recommended Reading for Lent at Conversion Diary.

1. Make doughnuts or some other deep-fried treat on Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday.
2. Learn a new song. a song that points to spring coming and new life sprouting.
3. Go for a walk every day. I once knew of a homeschooling family who put a pot of soup on to simmer for lunch and headed out for a walk each day, no matter what the weather.
4. Make a nature almanac recording what you see on your walks.
5. Learn a new prayer to say at meals.
6. Give up meat as a family. or sugar. Give the money to an organization like Heifer.
7. Change your seasonal table or altar. Add a bowl of water to be the waters of life, or a tray of sand to be the 40 years in the desert, our own long journey, our dustiness.
8. Sprout something. Grow something. Plant something.
9. Make bread. to go along with the soup.
10. Celebrate National Poetry Month (April) with a poem a day.
11. Wear purple, the traditional color of Lent, to keep you mindful.
12. Light candles at meals. Turn off the electric light. Enjoy the darkness.
13. Observe silence even for a few moments each day at the same time.
14. Memorize an Easter passage of Scripture as a family. Suggestions: one of the Psalms,
15. Celebrate Purim, March 20-21. Read the book of Esther aloud.
16. Celebrate Passover, April 19-25.
17. Post Bible verses, especially the words of Jesus, on the refrigerator, bathroom mirrors, wherever a busy family is sure to see them.
18. Bake your own pretzels. Pretzels originated as early Christian Lenten treats, designed in the form of arms crossed in prayer.
19. In Matthew 12:39-41, Jesus points to the story of Jonah as a sign of his own destiny. So this is a great time to review it with your children, discussing the issues of sin, obedience, and God’s mercy.
20. Read books together as a family or alone to lead you into Easter Resurrection celebration. Books for Lent to lead you into Resurrection.
21. Read the Church Fathers during Lent.
22. Practice confession, asking God to search our hearts and point out those things in our lives that need to change.
23. Fast on Fridays or fast from meat on Fridays.
24. Decide as a family on one thing that is distracting your family from following God fully, and take that one thing out of your family life at least for the duration of Lent.
25. Participate in World Vision’s Relentless Acts of Justice.
26. Pray and read the Bible daily.