My sons have an excellent book I recommend to other families called Reverence for Wood by Eric Sloane, which, in classic wording, an image proposes the wonder of wood to the young imagination.  And wood does indeed deserve such instilling at young ages. Wood beckons reverence because of its nobility in itself, but also in how it ennobles and enabl...

One of the cruelest banalities of soft (and false) Christianity is the idea that God alleviates the suffering of the righteous.  In America especially there’s a sense that the lessening of suffering is a sign of your election, of God’s love for you (Calvinism is hard to shake from our imagination).  If you’re not relieved from suffering –...

It is a well-known urban legend in our subculture that a mother’s saliva contains restorative, cleansing and perhaps even healing powers, the real truth of which medical science has not yet either fully discovered nor appreciated. How many among us in our younger days had our tangled or unruly hair smoothed by our attentive mothers spitting i...

The average father cannot easily face the challenges he intuits, because he doesn’t understand them. And it is not because he is unintelligent, but because the force that has overtaken the totality of the developed world is too often unrecognized.  We don’t realize it in the same way we don’t realize air – its total presence is such a give...

For many teenagers, pornography is their primary source of sex education.  This is because the sex education they are getting at home and/or in school is inadequate.  They may learn about puberty, conception and birth, contraception and sexually transmitted diseases, but they learn nothing about God’s plan for sexuality and healthy relationship...

“Maturing is realizing how many things don’t require your comment,” said Winston Churchill.  This might be a hard saying for us today, given that we all love to feel seen and heard by having strings of words alongside avatars underneath articles or pictures on the Internet.  And the authors like to have the comments flow; it gives an even m...

I would like to recommend a book titled The Resurrection: Experience Life in the Risen Christ by Fabrice Hadjadj. It was given to me as a gift for Easter. I found it to be surprisingly insightful and unexpectedly joyful! With a great sense of humor, Hadjadj interprets the Gospel passages pertaining to the Resurrection. He brings a fresh perspective...

I try once a month to take what is called a “desert day”, a day to retreat from all work and technology to be with the Lord and listen to Him, to pray for all the people who have become a part of my belonging to Christ. I spent one of those days hiking Kennesaw Mountain in North Georgia, doing equal parts wandering and taking in the scenery. At...

The world inside our technologies is not the world. It is a construct of man. It can represent and inform us about the world, but it is not an encounter with it. The real world was made by God and is experienced through the senses, in the flesh, not through the medium of media. There seems to be an encroachment of the world made by man into the ...