Milk or Meat? What are You Serving?

As I was contemplating the passage in Hebrews 5:11-6:1, which speaks on the maturity of the believer, I began to consider how it relates to the family. As parents we see our children born! This is an amazing time of joy as is seeing someone come to a personal relationship with Christ! As parents we nurture, and care for our child, we begin to feed them milk. Now, as a father and husband... if all I had to nourish me was milk I would be very hungry and wanting more. Same goes with our child. As they grow they desire more! Soon we are slowly feeding them from what we eat in bites they can handle, and before we know it they are eating steak and potatoes with a fork and knife on their own. If they are a teenager they are probably asking for more!

So how is it then that we can all understand this basic concept of getting our kids to eat food on their own yet in the area of the scriptures we seem to let them get by with just milk? So often we make sure they know how they are sinners (this needs very little explanation) and how they can have a relationship with Christ. Once they come to a personal understanding of this, we as parents feel better and feel we have done our job. Now it is time for the church to teach them more.

I tend to think that the number one reason we fail to go deeper with our own kids is that we ourselves don't know how to be more mature in the Word. The writer of Hebrews challenges the readers that they should be teaching by now. These believers not only needed to be taught, but they needed to be taught again things they had already learned! Let me encourage you to develop yourself as a mature believer and then teach your own children to do the same. What an amazing thing it would be to see our young people be able to take God's Word and be able to study it for themselves and apply its teaching their own lives!

Please leave some thoughts on this topic of how you have worked to help your child develop in the area of feeding themselves spiritually. We are all in this together!

Spring Break Ideas!!!

As family life pastor I decided to try to write a blog to help us as families come up with good ideas for Spring Break activities. Being new to the area I don't know a lot of ideas, but here is what I've got... Please feel free to add your ideas in the comments!

• Bike rides as a family
• Camping trip
• Fishing in local lakes or the river
• Get a garden started
• Do a family board game marathon
• Build a huge town of Legos with ALL your pieces (this may be difficult depending on how many pieces you have)
• Now give your ideas... 

What is family? Part 1

I have decided to write a brief series on family. As I begin to write this series on family I want to look at several aspects:

1. A family defined
2. A family broken
3. A family restored
4. A family purpose

Looking at these areas I hope to help us all see God's intent and purpose. Yeah I am bringing God into this equation. I mean, after all He did establish the family! In fact that is a great place to begin as we define what family is and is not.

We first see structure. God creates things in a precise order. When God created the concept of family He had an order in which we learn, grow, correct, and repeat. He also created roles for those in the family. We have parents, children, grandparents and for a few fortunate ones great grandparents. We then add aunts, uncles, cousins and so on! This thing gets big fast! But for all intents and purposes let’s look at the local family unit living under one roof. We will look at God's plan in coming post.

A family begins when two people from separate families come together in marriage. They bring with them love, desires, hurts, secrets, baggage, traditions, habits, sins, hopes, expectations, and so forth. See any possible concerns? Hopfully they are brining God into this marriage as well. This is not always the case, even in "christian" homes. Then at some point they plan, or sometimes unplanned, to have kids. These two individuals, still trying to figure each other out are now raising a child. Raising this child requires time, energy, nurturing, guiding, mentoring, loving, disciplining, sacrifice, and a hundred other things all 24/7!

Here is how Webster defines the family:
1 fam·i·ly, plural fam·i·lies
1 a: a group of people who are related to each other *This sense of family can refer to a group that consists of parents and their children or it can refer to a bigger group of related people including grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. It is often used specifically of a group of related people who live together in one house

His definition is a little more concise! Let me make two quick obvious observations concerning defining the family. 1) We do not get to choose the family we get when we enter this world. You may think this is a "well duh" statement, but remember this as our children are coming into this world. What is it that they are getting in to that they had no choice in the matter? 2) We do get to have a choice in how we raise our family! It is in the area of our choices that we will look at as we look deeper into this crazy thing we call family.

Do You Hear Me?

I find there are times we get frustrated in our homes because we just don't feel heard. The sounds, voices, and ramblings we hear each day become common place. There are times when I get home and say something and either my wife or my kids just go on with what they are doing as if I never spoke a word! When I say something about there none response they inform me that they did here they just forgot to respond. I however am just as guilty, there are days I find it easy to "pretend" I don't hear what is being said because it is just easier to go on like you heard nothing. So what do we do. I think we all need to realize that those people we are most comfortable with need to be heard. Even if we have heard it many times before. Our spouse needs to be able to share what is on their mind after a long day. Our children want to know that we care about what interest them. Remember, they are continually learning new and exciting things that we may have known for years. Sometimes they just want our attention in order to know we care. Rather than tune out the things we are used to hearing, maybe it is time to tune in to hear what might be really being expressed.