10 Great Movies From The 80s – 10 more reasons why the 80s rock and the decade you grew up in stinks! DAY 1

I get chills watching this trailer Timothy Dalton, Topol, a soundtrack by Queen, and an obscure star named Sam Jones that we never really heard from again.

Did I say, “soundtrack by Queen”? That alone makes it worth a watch!

Best scene in my book is the fight between Flash and the Baron (Dalton) on that floating spiked platform thingy.

I’m off to google for a Flash shirt!

Great parenting advice in a sentence

I was looking for a parenting teens course by Les and Leslie Parrot when I came across a book of their called The Parent You Want To Be: Who you are matters more than what you do.

Just let that really sink in. In influencing your children, no matter the age…

Who you are matters more than what you do.

What parents pay attention to can influence the faith of their children

I wanted to share something we’ll be hitting during our first series with the teens this fall called The Path Principle.

It’s from an Andy Stanley series. The principle of the last message is that what you pay attention to can influence the direction of your life. It can also influence the lives of others. He relates this to parents by discussing the implications of whether or not we pay attention to the faith development of our children. The following is an excerpt: 

If you’re a parent you need to give and pay a lot of attention to the faith development of your children.

I’m so aware of this right now because I’ve had three conversations in the last two and a half months with parents whose kids are now teenagers like 14 to 15 years old and here’s what they’ve said… They don’t go to church here, one of them doesn’t go to church at all, the other two are in churches where their kids are totally disconnected from the church… and here’s what they’ve said: “You know, now that he’s a teenager, we’d really like to get him into one of your programs over there at the church.”

And I hope they come and if you’re here, we’re glad you’re here, we’ll take you, but my first thought was, you know what, if you waited until you’re kid is 14 or 15 to somehow get them involved in and environment that will engage them in the development of their faith, it may be too late because that’s never urgent. I take that back… the only time the development of a kid’s faith is urgent, is when a parent realizes their kid has none. And then it’s like an emergency, “Where can we find a good program and where can we get him in church?” By that time you have ignored something that’s so important, you’ve ignored something you should have given or paid attention to and now it’s emotional and now something has grabbed your attention. But you could have avoided that if you had just paid attention.

Every once in a while someone will come up to me and say, “My kid’s like to go to the worship service they don’t like to go to Upstreet or Summercraze or whatever and I always say the same thing, “That’s a terrible decision. If they don’t like our program help us to make it to where they like it. Help us engage them. But don’t skip it. Because there’s going to be a day when you’re going to want your kids to love coming to church and the way that happens is if you give or pay attention to it now so that it doesn’t become an emergency later on.”

Adoption Option?

Or is it Biblically mandated?

Great Catalyst podcast with Kay Warren about adoptiong and the mind blowing stuff Saddleback is doing about it.

Consider this… If one family in one of every four churches in America adopted an American orphan, there’d be no more orphans in America.

Six Pack Summit… Huh?!?!

Great… Just great…

The President, the professor, and the politician are meeting over beers to talk about racism.

Do you have any idea how hard you all are making it to convince kids drinking alcohol isn’t a wise thing to do?

Are they talking about racism? I’ m not sure because all I’ve been hearing about is beer. Lose the beer and make this thing mean something other than a contest over who drinks the coolest beer.

Sunday School FAIL???

Been revising how we do Sunday school for teens and then I read that Sunday schools are failing.

Buuuut… it affirms change and what I’ve been thinking about, reading about, and personally experiencing with parent ministry

I look forward to the day when death is no more

One of my running routes takes me through a graveyard. I knew one of the grave markers was for a child because I’d see children’s toys by it every now and then and it had Scooby-Doo engraved on it.

Today I stopped to read it. The boy had lived for 10 days.

My God 10 days.

At the bottom of the marker it said this:

“Step softly here sleeps a dream.”

What’s Twitter good for?

An acquaintance that became a friend last night asks this:

“What’s the difference between Twitter and narcissism?”

Should we use adjectives to describe how “christian” someone is?

The past few weeks I’ve taken note of phrases like, “nominal Christian”, “he/she is not very deep in his/her faith”, “their faith isn’t very mature”… you get the idea.

I heard a sermon this morning that focused on Revelation 3:16 where it says:
“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”

“Lukewarm” sounds a lot like some terms we use to describe some Christians.

It was by Francis Chan and it’s up on iTunes. He had some very powerful insights into the whole thing.

I never EVER thought I’d have this many kids!

Or that they’d be this cool and this good looking!

For our friends that aren’t Facebook saavy…