"But I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken." Matthew 12:36

As a father of a very busy soon to be 5 year old, the thought of not having a television around is enough to make me want to scream and holler until they lock me up in the looney bin. I think it is time though. Here is a few random observations on my own behavior after watching television:

1) After watching an episode of The George Lopez Show recently I found myself at Safeway talking to the store clerk. The clerk was Latino, and my speech pattern towards him was so demeaning...and just like the way George Lopez talks on his show. To me it is ignorant and uneducated sounding. Unfortunately, it is also funny and it sucks millions of Americans to the television every night.

Read more!

Carl’s profound revelation for the day is (insert drum roll here) Love is a 4 letter word. That is right, in case you can not count, love is a 4 letter word, and it is spelled T. I. M. E.It is a simple pneumonic really, one that is easy enough to remember. Here is my definition of time.

Teach.

A verse familiar to most parents is Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” We are taught this verse so many different times in our life as parents that we should get the T-shirt that says “been there, heard that” next time our pastor uses this verse. It occurred to me recently that this verse must be important because we hear it so much. Maybe I should remember to teach my child at every moment I can. That does not mean I have to make every part of life a parable to share, but let my life reflect the parables of Jesus. This leads me to I.

Integrity

Proverbs 20:7 tells us “The just man walketh in his integrity: his children are blessed after him.” Doing what I say I am going to do, honoring my family in all that I do and dealing fairly with those around me in business, and in church, is a sign of my integrity. My child, although only four years old, is a sponge that soaks up everything I do and uses it to develop his own character. I recently heard the commander in charge of detention in Guantanamo Bay Cuba on television saying that he could defend what has (or has not) happened there to the media, to his superiors, and others. But the worst segment of the population he had to deal with was the regular phone calls from his children asking “Just what is it that you are doing down there?”

Model

Actions speak volumes more than our words. We are an action oriented society. If you want me to learn it, then do it first. Then I will choose to follow or not. Jesus was the ultimate model. He followed the will of his Father all the way to the cross. It is not promised to be easy all the time. We see Jesus in the garden before His arrest not only asking, but pleading with His Father to let this cup pass before him. We must prayerfully, and with the up most humility, check and cross check our lives to make sure that we are modeling the life of Christ to our children. If we are not, we are going to be judged and found lacking because we do not take our job seriously.

Enjoy

I regularly hear that God does not want us to feel or to be overly emotional. This is a very conservative view, and a very incorrect view. Php 2:13 tells us “For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” God takes pleasure in His creation, in His children and he enjoys them. God enjoyed the company of David when he was a shepherd in the wilderness. We are told that God inhabits the praises of His people. How cool is it to consider that God not only tolerates us and responds to us only because He promised He would, He enjoys us and us living in His pleasure. This is a great model for parents and children. We should not just tolerate our children; we should embrace them in pleasure. When I am with my son it is an excuse to take the tie off, put on the Birkenstocks and go to the park and play like there is no tomorrow. This reassures my son that I love him and that I want to spend time with him and that I enjoy hearing from him.

If you are still reading this, would you take a moment and write to me at Carl@thoughtsofagyrovague.com and tell me how you spend time with you child? How do you make sure to reaffirm and build up your child? Tell me anything about it, and let me know if I can pray for your family as well.

Our wonderful free market economy brings with it an unhealthy insatiability. We need only to look at the lessons from those who have “made it” to bring us up short.

Dr. Avner Offer, professor of economic history at Oxford University has spent the last 20 years studying quality of life questions and has recently written a book called The Challenge of Affluence. In his book, Offer tracks the downside of wealth. Rather than bringing contentment, it seems to foster false expectations, stress, and anxiety. The drive to achieve financial goals creates permanently raised expectations, so that the wealthy forget how to enjoy the simpler things in life. They become acclimated to the “wow factor” with the closed deal or the newest acquisition. Gorging on the fruit of success, many of us forget to savour the taste. Our lives are lived in a vortex of goals and maximum achievement where anxiety and impatience rule.

Read more!

A title like this might raise expectations about receiving advice on preparing a gourmet meal. Sorry, but you have the wrong author and this is the wrong venue for that.

Actually, we are addressing the value of the simple, but long forgotten, ritual of family dinners. Do you remember how it was with “Father Knows Best” and “Leave it to Beaver”? I personally have fond memories of family meals as one of five siblings on our small family farm. The main obstacle to the family meal was when Daylight Savings Time rolled around and we could spend another hour of daylight in the field. What has happened to the idyllic family gathered around the evening meal in the twenty first century? In a word- busyness! Most of you reading this have mixed feelings about this daily discipline. Many of you relish memories of your childhood where Mom, Dad, and the kids gathered around the table at the end of the day and everyone had their opportunity to talk about their particular stories. On the other hand, as overwhelmingly busy parents now, you are balancing after-school activities, work, church meetings, and a myriad of other commitments that make it so difficult to pull off this important family meeting time consistently. The tyranny of the urgent rules and these “life molding” important events suffer at the hands of the urgent events which cry out louder, but offer much less in the way of growing godly, communicative kids and reinforcing the family unit.

Read more!

Can sun exposure cause skin cancer? Absolutely. However, appropriate sunlight actually prevents cancer. Exposure to the sun provides many benefits such as promoting the formation of vitamin D. (Dr. Joseph Mercola)

I don't put sunscreen on my kids. At least, not with any regularity. I think I put it on them twice a year, for the 4th of July and Labor Day, both of which involve celebrations where the children will be out in the sun longer than they are accustomed. I tend to avoid talking about sunscreen with other mothers because there are a lot of opinions about it and I prefer not to cause a stir.

Oh, but I do love to think about things, and so, in honor of the warm sun that is outside my window after a week or more of rain (yes, we basked in its glory without sunblock for a good thirty minutes yesterday afternoon--gasp!), I thought I'd analyze sunblock a bit, just for fun.

I must give the disclaimer that though I have recently read some research that supports me in my aversion to sunscreen, it was not research that originally influenced this behavior.

Sunscreen, and the excessive societal pressure to use it, bothers me a bit because it contradicts what God said about His own creation. On the fourth day of creation, God made the great lights, with the greater light (the sun) to rule over the day. He saw that it was good.

And it is amazing to see this play out within creation as we learn more about how things work. God created man, and when man worked in the garden (in the sun) the sunlight interacted with his skin to produce Vitamin D3. Vitamin D3 is not the same as what you find in fortified milk and cereals (that is D2, a synthetic vitamin, much harder to break down into a usable form).

When Vitamin D3 is broken down and transformed by the liver and then the kidneys it becomes 25-hydroxyvitamin D. And this fancy word symbolizes much that is good: natural protection again cancer (especially female cancers), depression, fatigue, infertility, osteoporosis, some autoimmune disorders, multiple sclerosis, and the list goes on.

When God says something is good, He means it! Now this doesn't mean we should spend excessive amounts of time in the direct sunlight. (Sometimes I think sunscreen was invented as an attempt to avoid the consequences of two behaviors: immodesty and excess.)

And we do know a man who is allergic to the sun, and so the sun doesn't seem to be good for him. But a person being allergic to peanuts doesn't mean that peanuts are actually bad, and the fact that our friend gets a rash from the sun doesn't make the sun bad, either. Sunlight is a good thing.

It is always interesting to me that we can glorify God in literally every square inch of our lives. Sometimes it is as simple as rejecting society's assumption that something is inherently bad when Scripture explicitly says it is good.

Is it out of date for the 21st century or does it remain a vital parental tool?

Imagine this scenario. A father smacks his two-year old in the grocery store. Before he even gets to the checkout counter a policeman arrives. Mom is called to take the child home and Dad heads downtown in cuffs, charged with child abuse. The charges are based on a new law banning any form of physical discipline of children. A bit far out? Think again. The country in which I currently reside, has just such a bill being drawn up by its Department of Social Services. The bill is in response to the rising rate of child abuse. If the proposed legislation passes, South Africa will be the first country in Africa to outlaw corporal punishment.

Read more!

I had written about this trend back on 8/01/05, but more as it related to couples choosing pets rather than children. Obviously there are other reasons. Experts say that wherever education, greater opportunities for women, and market economies spread, fertility rates plummet. Europe is facing serious problems as their birthrate has been in a freefall for the past fifty years. To avoid economic disaster, more and more immigrants are brought in, mostly from Islamic cultures. Given their higher birthrates, Europe will likely be predominantly Islamic by 2100.

America is barely maintaining a replacement rate. The statistics are not encouraging. Growing numbers of American couples are electing to have child-free relationships. Current Census Bureau figures show that about 18 percent of women age 40 to 44 do not have a child. The percentage has risen since 1976, when the bureau found that 10 percent of American woman in that age group reported not having a child. Some experts predict the number of married couples without children could go up 50 percent by the end of the decade. So do we have cause to be concerned as we watch this trend of childlessness? I want to make two observations- one relating to the biblical injunction to be fruitful and the second a little known statistic that might have our liberal friends worried. I credit much of the thought on this second observation to a Dallas Morning News columnist, Rod Dreher.

Read more!

Though there have been beneficial changes from the feminist revolution, I am afraid it may be victimizing our children. I have been watching my own profession (veterinary medicine), as it feminizes. Some current classes at veterinary schools in the US have as high as 90% females. Last year, the gender balance nationwide for graduate veterinarians tipped in favor of women. One is prone to say it is better for the profession because women are more compassionate and nurturing. I would agree they probably are better veterinarians in many aspects.

In my capacity as Professional Outreach Director for Christian Veterinary Mission the last 5 years, I have traveled across the nation networking and recruiting for our organization. In case after case, I found myself interacting with disillusioned, married women professionals whose conscience cries, "Be a Mom!", but whose profession says, "Be the best you can be, motherhood is no hindrance to your practice!" In most cases, they find themselves the primary wage earner. I continue to hear of pragmatic approaches to parenting, with the most common being the stay-at-home Dad.

Read more!

The average age for brides and grooms continues creep higher throughout the developed world. We are seeing this in our own extended family as two nephews recently married in their early thirties and three more are single approaching thirty with no marriage plans that we know of.

Listen to the responses you get when you ask older singles the reason they aren’t married:

1. 1. "I have to wait until I get school debt paid off and have reached a level of financial independence."
2. 2. "I have seen too many lousy marriages (starting with their parents) and I am not sure I want to live with that amount of pain."
3. 3. "My girlfriend is fine with cohabitation. I get the sex without the commitment, so why marry."
4. 4. "I am still waiting for God to show me the right guy/girl."

Read more!

Parenting in Light of God’s Economy

As I write, Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics is #4 on the New York Times Bestseller List. A coveted position, to be sure, this book has become famous primarily because it has turned some of our culture’s conventional wisdom on its head. "Rogue" economist Steven Levitt will tell you that "numbers don’t lie" (though apparently your child’s third grade teacher might), and so his book searches out the mathematical truths "behind everything."

Levitt and Dubner make it clear that their intention is to give a description of how life is. This is not a Christian book, nor even a spiritual book. In fact, the authors state that "the fact of the matter is that Freakonomics-style thinking doesn’t traffic in morality…[I]f morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world." The "actual world" of the chapter entitled "What Makes a Perfect Parent?" revealed to me that there is an agreed-upon definition of parental success that is far from God’s design. I don’t want to spend time criticizing the authors—who never claim to share our faith—or Freakonomics per se, but would rather use this as a starting point to explore a bit of theonomics-style (God’s economics) thinking concerning the subject of parenting.

Read more!

There is a particular passage from the Garden of Eden that delights my heart every time I read it:

For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. Genesis 2:24

Marriage—what a great institution! In Hebrews 13:4, we are told that marriage is held in honor above all. I am an absolute, avid advocate for marriage and all its benefits. I admit that I love the role of matchmaker. Just last month I saw a simple introduction move towards mutual interest, then advance to a steadfast friendship, flower into romance, and finalize with an engagement for a year-end wedding. It was déjà vu for me having started dating in June, proposing in July, and being married in September. Anyway, this 39 year-old woman and 40 year-old man (neither ever married) are in for the ride of their life! Thank you God for marriage.

Read more!