Wake Up Call: Teens and Sports Gambling
It’s the day after the ending of what was promoted as a “First-Time Ever” five consecutive days of playoff football. And over the two days of NCAA College Football playoffs and three days of NFL playoff action, anyone who watched…
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Your Kids and Your Time
I think often about the story I once heard about a busy woman who was struggling to balance the demands of her life outside the home while being a wife and mother. One night her nine-year-old son approached her as…
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Devotional Reading – 2025
One of the great benefits of being a member of what I hear being called “The 5am Club,” is that waking up early (no alarm-clock needed) offers a nice block of quiet time to focus on spending time in God’s…
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Remembering Those Who Find The Holidays Difficult: A Prayer
Over the coming week, many of us will lift our voices as we do each Christmas to sing these words from Joy To The World: “No more let sins and sorrows grow nor thorns infest the ground; He comes to make…
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Happiness From Self-Sovereignty? Nope. It Just Doesn’t Work.
While cleaning up my desk this week, one of the many buried treasures I stumbled upon was my print-out of the cover from the December 21-28, 1963 edition of The Saturday Evening Post. Two things struck me. . . two…
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Christmas. . . And Piling On The Stuff
These are the days when we really ramp up our thoughts and desires regarding stuff. I can’t point to any hard and fast data, but I can tell you about the seemingly endless parade of trucks from UPS, FedEx, USPS,…
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For Your Thanksgiving Table
The older we get, the more we tend to lean into the nostalgia that comes with remembering holidays past. That’s certainly the case for me. Memories of my early Christian nurture in a home where my dad was at the…
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Youth Ministry: Preaching The Word In Our Kids’ World
Personal confession: I’ve made way too many mistakes over the course of my time in youth ministry. Early on, there were way too many foolish decisions. Most of those had to do with stuff that we thought was fun. Those…
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Walk Carefully On Social Media This Week
I’m throwing this out there as something to think about – as I am – on this, the day before. That which rattles us to the core must be discussed and acted upon. The Gospel demands it. But it’s wise to choose where we…
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Make Life Hard For Your Kids
There’s a parenting memory that makes my heart ache whenever it pops into my head. We were brand new to the neighborhood and all my 5-year-old son wanted to do was hop into the game of backyard football that was…
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Youth Sports: Perspective Needed!
There’s a fire in her belly. . . and it comes from being an athlete, being a coach, and being a parent who kept an aggressive schedule of sports activities for her own kids. And the fire in her belly…
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When Kids Ask “Who Am I?”
I just finished up a Zoom call with a classroom full of high school students in Minnesota. As I looked at them on the screen, I was reminded of just how change-filled their young adolescent lives are as they look…
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