 It was a grey and cloudy morning. The second day of Cub Scouts Day camp. It was actually quite refreshing after the summer heat of the day before! My seven-year-old son and I had arrived early. As I was chatting with another scout mom, I mentioned how excited I was that Sheppard and I had actually had enough time for a sit-down breakfast of leftover waffles and pancakes from my culinary extravaganza from the Saturday prior.
“Yum!”, said my friend of twin boys. “We had sausage.” “Well, nuts!” I thought to myself, “That sounds much more substantial than my ‘Bob’s Red Mill multi-grain mix. Like it really even matters, Jennifer.” I scolded my pride. “Boys! Tell Jennifer what else we had.” In my mind I imaged a gourmet omelet or hearty nourishing breakfast burrito at this point. One of her boys looked at me with an enormous, satisfied grin, “Pie! We had banana-crème pie!” I burst out laughing, “That’s awesome!” (and no, it wasn’t because it had soothed my pride…. Okay… well, maybe a little bit.). “What a fun breakfast!” They had been cleaning out her Mother-in-Law’s kitchen and pantry. Being from the Depression Era, there was an ample supply of horded food, including some frozen pies that needed to be eaten. She had hoped they would be thawed and baked for after dinner the night before. However, her best laid plans did not “pan” out. The thawing process took longer than expected. Her boys had so been looking forward to those pies she decided to bake them up for breakfast the next day. Clearly, a delightfully fun memory was also the ‘Pie`ce de Re’sistance” served up that morning. It is said, “All work and no play makes Jack a very dull boy.” Ecclesiastes 8:15 states, “… here is nothing good for a man under the sun except to eat and drink and be merry, (in other words, ‘Have fun! And this will stand by him in his toils.” Notice it says, “in his toils?”. Not instead of his toils. But that a “Spoon full of Sugar, or in this case “pie”, helps the medicine go down. We as parents, meaning well, can tend to take raising our kids right too seriously at times. So much so, we forget to just have fun and enjoy them. Let’s face it! Kids love having fun! And where the fun is, that is where they will be magnetized to. Now I am not advocating recklessness or irresponsibility by any means, but breaking code in the middle of the “daily-do’s” is mentally and emotionally healthy for all involved. It’s a perspective changer and lifts the ‘heavies”. As a first born, I can tend to easily be responsibility-oriented to a fault. I have found that humor or a pause for fun keeps me from spiraling down the whirlpool of the daily grind. It renews my mind and refreshes my purpose. It’s not just the day-to-day that God wants us to live. It’s “Life” He wants us to have! Kids need this survival tool too! A balance of “ Merry” to see them through the weights of peer, school, and, yes, even parent expectations. I love writing for Wall of Faith! The ideas are always flowing through my brain. However, to sit down, like now, and write it out, I always tend to make that part a heavier burden in my mind then what it actually is when I just sit down and do it. So yesterday, I decided to join our son in the making of his creation “Snoopy-mobile!” All I ended up doing was painting two wheels, two rainbow stripes, and two white sides. He did the rest. But, oh, the joy of bonding with him and letting my mind relax as I painted was exactly the second wind I needed to sit down today, clear minded and freeing my fingertips to “trip the light fantastic” across the keyboard! So I leave you with this simple “pie-for-life” recipe. Mix a cup of Mary with a cup of Martha and stir until well mixed. Crank up the oven and slice up the pie! Bring “Beauty” to the “Beast” of the worldly heavies and help yourself to a generous “Slice of Life!”
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Empowering Parents and Young Children Without a doubt, this is the best idea book I’ve seen for small children. As a Kindergarten teacher, Early Childhood Director, frequent library patron and a parent of a child with special needs, I have read stacks of similar books. This book is hands-down my favorite. It includes beautiful full color photos of activities, a quick reference section for child-development and uses a whole child development approach. Every day-care, preschool, grandparent and parent should have a copy of this book. I highly recommend this book as a professional development resources for teachers of young children and schools should have copies of it in their parent lending libraries as a parent education resource. This book would make a great baby shower gift or a first birthday present. I am thrilled to own a copy and will use it intentionally with my own toddler.
I received a copy of this book in exchange for this honest review. Michelle K. That's The Book: 2nd Peter The family and I went camping last week. My husband is a master packer. He manages to pack a week's worth of camping gear, several tables, tents, chairs, food and two bikes into the back and top of our LR3 Landrover. This time we each had items tucked in around our feet. Well. Not the driver. But the girls and I had blankets, towels and a friend's birthday present to hold us in place during the 3 hour drive to camp. My husband is an awesome packer. He's not great at waiting patiently in traffic. We all have areas in our life to grow right? At any rate, several times we passed people driving slower. One little slow Hyundai hybrid we happily left in the dust. About a half hour away from camp we came around a corner and saw the traffic ahead was stopped. Cars turned off, people standing on the side of the road kind of stopped. My spouse groaned and slowed. Stopped with a grimace and turned to me. "Why don't you get out and see if you can find out what happened?" So I untangled myself from my nest and took a stroll up the road. I stopped by a little crowd of people and asked what was going on. I'm not sure why I thought they knew. They were parked up maybe five cars ahead. No cell service. What did they know? But not to disappoint the drivers on the side of the road told me there was a wreck ahead. It had just happened. No one had cell service so no emergency responders had been summoned yet. Apparently one of the other drivers had turned and headed back to the other side of the mountain to call for help. The nice woman said she thought the best option was to turn around, drive 30 minutes back and grab the alternate highway to go around. Or sit and wait it out. I walked back to my family. Gave them the news and the proposed plans. My husband had another idea. "See that little road right there? A couple of people went up it and haven't come back. The Landrover's GPS looks like it meanders around and pops out just down the road. If we follow them we'll avoid the wreck, save ourselves the back tracking and we'll be at camp soon. Should we try that? I said "Sure." This was not wise. The book of 2 Peter is a last message from the great church leader Peter. He has become convinced his time left on earth is short so he wrote this book as a plea to the other believers. I think it is right to refresh your memory as long as I live in the tent of this body, because I know that I will soon put it aside, as our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me. 2 Peter 1:13 Peter's message to the church is to not be sidetracked. He wants them to stay on course. He knows hardship may come and false teachers will try to drag them off the road. But his plea was to stay on task. For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge, and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins. 2 Peter 1: 5-9 So here my family and I were on the side of the road. We didn't suck it up and wait patiently. We didn't listen to wise counsel and stay to the main roads. Nope. We saw the other people headed off path and we followed. But there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them - bringing swift destruction on themselves. 2 Peter 2:1 For a while the drive was lovely. Wide vistas. Beautiful trees. Nice gravel road following the GPS line on our screen nicely. Around one corner we came upon a view of a herd of horses galloping across a wide field. Gorgeous. We were free! We soon saw a little Hyundai hybiyd kicking up a cloud of dust. It looked suspiciously like the one we had passed a couple of mountain passes back. He had apparently not waited as long as we had to take the less beaten path. At any rate we started calling him "car guy" and figured if a little four door could make it surely our big tough landcover would be just fine. For they mouth empty, boastful words and, by appealing to the lustful desires of the flesh, they entice people who are just escaping from those who live in error. they promise them freedom, while they themselves are slaves of depravity - for "people are slaves to whatever has mastered them." 2 Peter 2: 18-19 I recognize this analogy isn't perfect. Taking a side road is not being a slave to depravity - but we weren't patient, we were boastful about the features of our vehicle and we were blindly following a clearly out of element hybrid. Did I mention this wasn't wise? Pretty soon the little gravel road became a smaller dirt road. We kept going. The road became a path. Large ruts appeared. Trees had sprouted in the middle of the path. Clearly this road hadn't been used lately. We kept going. The road completely disappeared. Our GPS said there was still a path. But our eyes didn't see the way. We headed down a hill. The girls by this point were poking me in the side and whispering they were scared. I had started to roll my eyes. Large noises came from under the car. Finally we had a pow wow with the car guy and determined we were in fact at a dead end and had to turn around. We started to back track. The car guy was slowly coming behind. I didn't want to hear on the news in the days to come that some man had disappeared off road in a little Hyundai. So we kept his puff of dust in the rear view window. And then the road widened out and we were on flatter ground. The loud noise underneath got louder. I looked in the rear view mirror. Flat tire. Shredded flat tire. Middle of no where, no cell service flat tire. We pulled over. The spare was covered by our mountain of camping gear. We started to unload all our belongings into the dirt on the side of the road. My youngest wanted to get out. I said no. Snake country. Too much to handle. My spouse and I do many things well together. We throw a mean party. We do not change tires well together. I was concerned. My spouse was annoyed. And then up pulled the little Hyundai. It was sporting some new undercarriage and front bumper damage. The driver got out and asked if we needed help. I said yes. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. 2 Peter 3:9 Turns out the car guy is a very nice man named Patrick who works for Boeing as an airplane mechanic. Praises to Jesus. Patrick and my husband changed the tire. I told Patrick he was a hero and had saved our marriage from a rather large roadside fight. He grinned. We repacked all the crud in the car. It didn't fit the same way as before. The girls were buried in extra gear. We threw the flat shredded tire on top of the roof and headed back to civilization.  By the time we got back to the main road the original accident was cleared away and no traffic remained. Our detour had taken hours. We hit Les Schwab with only 15 minutes to store closure and the nice team of tire guys stayed open and happily sold us an entire set of new tires. All wheel drive ya know. Have to replace them all. $1200 lesson in patience. Our bruised spirits finally made it to camp. Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking I them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction. 2 Peter 3: 15-16 I've heard of several people lately deciding to give up the faith. They say it's too hard to understand. That God's decrees can't be right. Too much judgment. Too difficult to hold the line. They have listened to the voices in society preaching an easy freedom. Peter's message is a simple one. Don't believe the lie. Stay the course. The road with its rules and signs and guardrails is the place to stay. The wandering path leads to destruction. Therefore, dear friends, since you have been forewarned, be on your guard so that you may not be carried away by the error of the lawless and fall from your secure position. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. 2 Peter 3: 17-18  ResourcesHere you go! Helpful as always. |
About MeI love Jesus. I think my two daughters can change the world. I think you can too. Past Posts
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