Are You Planning on Yelling at Your Children Today?

Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted.  Galatians 6:1

In his sermon series entitled, Loving Little Ones, Douglas Wilson makes application of this passage from the larger church body to the specific microcosm of the Christian home. In our homes we have leaders and followers, teachers and learners, older, wiser ones and younger, foolish ones; everyone in both categories being brothers and sisters in Christ. Pastor Wilson pointed out that in our homes we tend to leave the “ye who are spiritual” part out of the verse. We assume that folks “at church” need to remember this verse whenever they may be admonishing, exhorting, rebuking, or correcting us, but when we get home, this verse does not apply when we are correcting our children. In the church, folks need to remember the “spirit of gentleness” part; especially when they are correcting us.  If they don’t, we get to turn things back around, make an accusation at them, and then completely ignore whatever they were trying to say to us. At home, we pretend like we are the “ye who are spiritual” ones by default, therefore “spiritualness” gets defined by however we are doing things at the moment.

The Lost Tools of Thinking

Last year, our homeschool community, Classical Conversations, introduced the Lost Tools of Writing program as parts of the 7th and 8th grade curricula. This was a good, good thing. I am no expert in the Lost Tools curriculum or in the application of all it has to offer, but what I have seen has been fantastic. I offer you one thought in particular to express my excitement.

Classical Conversations students study grammar and composition through our Essentials program from around 9-years-old through age 12 (plus or minus a few months.) Here they learn how to recognize and use the parts of speech, how to classify a sentence from one of the 112 possible choices, how to make a key word outline, how to diagram a sentence, how to write an essay, how to write from a source, as well as from image prompts, how to present their essay in front of an audience, etc. They also do much, much more than this, but being a dad, I'm not in class with them every week, so my list is shorter than it could be.

Naming God's World

I am currently rereading Nancy Pearcey's Soul of Science. Here's a juicy morsel from the conclusion of chapter 7:

"The primeval paradigm of human knowledge is the account of Adam's naming the animals. Devising a suitable label for each animal required careful observation, analysis, and categorization, based on the way it was created. Adam couldn't very well call a fish 'woolly creature with four legs' or a bird 'scaled creature with fins.' He had to reflect the world as God made it.

Yet Genesis tells us 'God brought the animals to Adam to see what he would call them.' God did not prescribe one right name, one correct way to describe an animal. He left room for Adam to be creative, both in the features he chose to focus on and in the terms he selected to describe the animal. In this simple paradigm Genesis gives the Biblical basis for all the arts and sciences. On the one hand, we root our work in the external world God has created, and, on the other hand, we freely exercise the creativity and imagination He has given us." (page 160)

We're Getting Warmer

Three years ago while building our house we installed both a chimney and an electric heat pump. The heat pump was for present use. The chimney was for the future, standing cold and dormant while the heat pump did its work. For all the benefits that it does have, there is something missing from the heat pump experience—something crucial, like heat. Although a heat pump keeps the pipes from freezing, one cannot stand over the grate and actually get warm. Instead, there’s a draft—a mildly lukewarm breeze that actually sends chills down my spine just thinking about it.

Morning Devotions: The Screwtape Letters, Chapter 6

In Chapter 6 of C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, Uncle Screwtape exhorts Wormwood to “direct the malice of his patient to his immediate neighbor whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary.” Screwtape references the English people as “creatures of that miserable sort who loudly proclaim that torture is too good for their enemies and then give tea and cigarettes to the first wounded German pilot who turns up at the back door.”

Recalling that this book was written in 1942, the English people would certainly have been loving their enemies by caring for wounded German pilots. These Luftwaffe pilots had fallen from the sky, just two years earlier, while attempting to destroy London during their Blitz—37 consecutive weeks of bombing raids, resulting in the destruction of over one million English homes and deaths of over 40,000 civilians. Screwtape’s Enemy (God) told His people to love their enemies, and the English people were actually doing it.

Baby Steps Toward the Masterpiece

Thanks to a blue-light special at the Kindle store last year, I acquired an e-copy of N. T. Wright’s Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense. The first section addresses humanity’s struggle with justice, spirituality, relationship and beauty. His questions are honest and piercing, and his logic so seamless, that I find it hard to decide on a pull quote without doing a great injustice to the surrounding material as well as the quote itself, but, having said all that, here’s a portion that is exceptionally tasty.  It is from chapter 4, For the Beauty of the Earth,

"What we must notice at this stage is that both in the Old Testament and the New, the present suffering of the world–about which the biblical writers knew every bit as much as we do–never makes them falter in their claim that the created world really is the good creation of a good God. They live with the tension. And they don’t do it by imagining that the present created order is a shabby, second-rate kind of thing, perhaps (as in some kinds of Platonism) made by a shabby second-rate sort of god. They do it by telling a story of what the one creator God has been doing to rescue his beautiful world and put it to rights. And the story they tell, which we shall explore further in due course, indicates that the present world really is a signpost to a larger beauty, a deeper truth. It really is the authentic manuscript of one part of a masterpiece. The question is, What is the whole masterpiece like, and how can we begin to hear the music in that way it was intended?

Alfred, Calvin, and Tolkien

On a recent journey from our little hamlet in middle Tennessee to the bustling metropolis of Nashville, I was accompanied by my son, Calvin.  The journey takes about an hour, which gives ample time to listen to a lecture en route.  Dr. George Grant willingly rode in the mp3 player on the dashboard, while Calvin was happy to have the whole backseat to himself.  I asked Dr. Grant if he would tell me about Alfred the Great again, and he obliged.


Dr. Grant began with a lengthy quote from G.K. Chesterton’s, Ballad of the White Horse King. He then proceeded to tell us the story of this great king of Wessex; the king who united a band of tribal chiefs to defend his home and his people from the onslaught of the Viking hordes; the king who sang and prayed with his troops before battle; the king that redesigned a navy in order to quell the pagan plunderers before they reached his island.  As Dr. Grant spoke I recalled what I’d learned about King Alfred from Ben Merkle’s book, The White Horse King. So I paused our inimitable orator to tell my son about shield walls and bezerkers, about Guthrum and the Danes, about bravery and cunning, about a king that learned humility through hardship.  Calvin commented how much the Middle Ages sounded like Middle Earth, and I agreed.  Externally I agreed.  Internally I rejoiced that my son was avidly listening to my stories and listening well enough to have made a connection between Alfred and Tolkien.

I love King Alfred.  I want to be like King Alfred, and I want my sons to be more like King Alfred than I will ever be.  Long ago, I realized that you can’t force your children to love your heroes, but during that conversation with Calvin, I realized that you don’t have to.  Your love for your heroes will be infectious.  Your children will simply catch it. I love King Alfred because King Alfred loved King Jesus and that love saved a nation from utter destruction.  I love King Jesus and I want Calvin to love King Jesus more than I ever will, so that he and I can sing with Alfred and his troops, with Tolkien and his hobbits, and with our beloved Dr. Grant,

When the enemy comes in a’roarin’ like a flood,
Coveting the kingdom and hungering for blood,
The Lord will raise a standard up and lead His people on,
The Lord of Hosts will go before defeating every foe;
Defeating every foe.
For the Lord is our defense, Jesus defend us,
For the Lord is our defense, Jesu defend.