Posts Tagged ‘Family Life’

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Praying for Your Family is Crucial

Friday, February 26th, 2016

praying-for-your-familyWhy is praying for your family crucial? Because if you do not pray for your family members, maybe no one else will.

Do you think your spouse and children will become the godly people that God requires them to be if no one prays for them? Maybe the enemy has convinced you that your prayers will not make a difference, so you’ve purposely decided not to pray.

Consider that God commands us to pray throughout Scripture, and that our prayers are a sweet aroma to the Lord (Psalm 141:2). God delights in answering our prayers (Proverbs 15:8). If we ask God for bread, will He give us a scorpion? (Matthew 7:9) No! He gives good gifts to those who ask. And who better to bless than the members of your own family, the ones living under the same roof with you?

Pray for each of your children by name, along with their character weaknesses. You will be surprised when God begins to work in those weak areas because you have committed those areas to God. Ask God how your child can overcome those areas, and if you are struggling with the same sin (like anger, for example), ask God to purge it from your life first. Then your child will see how God transforms lives in a tangible way. You can explain exactly how God set you free from the same sin, so that your child can be set free as well.

Why Praying for Your Family is Crucial (Video #8)

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Posted in Prayer | 16 Comments »

The Easter Dress Story

Friday, April 18th, 2014

easter-dress-story

You will love my Easter dress story because you will realize that God is closer to us than we can imagine. He cares about each detail of our lives and is able to provide abundantly beyond all that we could ask or think.

My story begins a few weeks ago when I saw a beautiful Easter dress at Costco. It was perfect for my daughter. I sighed and put it back on the rack. I never buy new clothes for myself or for my children because resale shops are so much more affordable.

Even if I had the money, I would not buy it because money is limited. I either want to use extra money for something of eternal value, or for a refreshment for my marriage (like a getaway), or as an investment in my homeschool speaking ministry (my family business includes product creation, which costs thousands of dollars a year to produce). There is never enough money to do everything. I see money like a giant chess game, where I want to maximize each move to bring the most real joy into our lives.

So I left the Easter dress on the rack.

Easter-dress-story-2

Fast forward a week. A friend of mine was meeting me at the river to go for a walk because of the nice weather. When we arrived, she asked me what size Rachel was, because she had a dress that was too small for her daughter, and she thought it might fit Rachel. It was brand new.

I said sure, that we could look at it after our walk. So off we went for a walk, where I enjoyed sweet fellowship in the Spirit. When we got back to the parking lot, my friend opened her car and showed me the dress.

I had a shocked expression.

That was the exact dress that I wanted at Costco the week before, that I had carefully put back on the rack. And here God was giving it to me through this woman who was obviously prompted by God to offer me the dress.

I was speechless.

This just goes to show how great God is. He is so near. He paid attention to a small detail in my life. I’ve shared with you about how God provided for my needs back when we had no money and a ton of debt. Well, this was different. I didn’t pray about it, but God gave it to me anyway because He knew the desires of my heart.

“Delight yourself in the LORD, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” (Psalm 37:4 ESV)

 

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Posted in Creative Finances | 18 Comments »

A No Good Very Bad Day

Tuesday, March 12th, 2013

a-no-good-very-bad-dayI always thought it was weird when friends would tell me that their day was ruined, that they were having a no good very bad day. Days aren’t good or bad, and they can be turned around at any moment. Yielding to God is the way to turn any day around. I’ve had my kids yelling and pushing each other and complaining and screaming, and we stop what we are doing. We ask God to help us walk by His Spirit instead of by the flesh. At every moment, there is something that God would want you to be doing. Yield to God to find out what it is.

This bad day happened to be a Sunday when we were about to back out our driveway to go to church. Our car wouldn’t start. I looked at the despair in my husband’s face, and I felt it, too. We had no money to get the car fixed. We had just spent $800 to get the two cars fixed (the little car wasn’t big enough for our whole family to go to church). My husband told the kids to get out of the car. He opened the hood and sighed. This is not what he had planned to do on a Sunday morning.

As I went up the stairs with the children, I remembered one night when my parents were watching the children, and my husband and I were on a date. I had left my cell phone in the car. I told my husband I wanted to go back to the car to get my phone because the phone was worth more than the car. He laughed. This was an insult to the car, not a compliment to the phone. I said, “I hope someone steals our car, because it would serve him right.” My husband laughed again. “Our car is worth less than what it costs to repair it, so it might as well just be smashed to smithereens.”

“Why can’t I have a car that works?” I heard my husband say when I walked up the stairs that Sunday morning. I told the kids to go to the living room. I asked God what I should do with them, and it occurred to me to do Bible sword drills. Even though my kids knew the books of the Bible by heart, they never found the Bible passages in time for when the pastor read them. My husband told me that I needed to do Bible sword drills with the kids, and I agreed, but we never seemed to have the time to do it.

I had my kids get their Bibles, and I started by reviewing the books of the Bible. Then I had the kids open to the middle of their Bibles. Some of their Bibles landed in Psalms, others in Isaiah. I told them that the Old Testament books before Psalms were to the left, and the books after Psalms were to the right, including the New Testament. I told them to open to the middle, then try to find the beginning of Matthew. Hold that chunk in your hand. Feel how thick the chunk of pages is between Psalms and the New Testament. Now find the book of Judges. Find the book of Jude. That is Revelation, scoot back a page.

The Old Testament minor prophets are so small that you have to flip more slowly in that area. Same with the epistles of the New Testament. I called out many different Scriptures, and the children were quicker in finding the passages. After spending one hour in Bible sword drills, my kids knew their way around the Bible. “See?” I said to my husband. “God always has a reason for the calamities that come our way. It’s good that the car broke down, because now the children know how to find their way around the Bible.”

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Posted in Family Life | 1 Comment »

The Bird Wouldn’t Have Survived Anyway

Tuesday, October 16th, 2012

bad-kitty

I was praying one morning out on the back porch, pacing back and forth. The cat came up to me and started pacing, too. She stopped and looked at me, indicating that my walking was pointless. The cat yawned and walked away.

I continued to pray. About twenty minutes later, the cat came back with a beautiful yellow bird in its mouth. “Put that bird down!” I shouted. The cat dropped the bird. I picked up the cat and put her in the house. Closing the sliding door, I walked over to the bird, hoping it was still alive. It didn’t move. “I hope you’re just pretending to be dead. Get up and fly. Here is your chance.”

I went back into the house, walking into the dining room and sitting in the window seat. I watched the bird. It wasn’t moving.

I told the kids that our cat had just killed a pretty bird. The kids ran to the window to see. They yelled, “Bad kitty!” to the cat. But I answered, “No, she isn’t bad. She was doing what she does instinctively. One of the reasons we got the cat in the first place was so that she could kill the mice.”

As I walked down the hallway, I heard the sound of the sliding door. I turned around and ran back, asking Rachel if she had let the cat out. “Yes,” she said. I ran to the dining room, looking out the bay window, and sure enough, the bird was gone.

“Sweetheart! Why did you let the cat out? I purposely put the cat inside to get her away from the bird!”

Rachel started crying. “It’s okay,” I said. “The bird was dead anyway.”

“No, it wasn’t! I saw it move!” my daughter wailed. I looked at her. She realized it was her fault that the bird was finished off.

“The bird wouldn’t have survived anyway,” I consoled her. “Birds that are hurt don’t last long.” As she was crying, I asked God what I could teach her so that her sorrow wasn’t wasted. It came to me. “Rachel, before you act, you need to think about the consequences of your actions. You often act before you think. You must learn to think before you act.” She stopped crying and thought about it.

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Posted in Family Life | 18 Comments »

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