Movie Trailer: Defiance

I have high hopes! Looking forward to it...

The Scarlet Pimpernel

This is my favorite movie. Of all time. But if you see it, you might think I'm crazy. I mean, it has drama, romance, a period setting, sword fights, intrigue, betrayal, heroism, self-sacrifice, all that good stuff. But it's a made-for-TV movie, for goodness sake! The truth is, I saw it for the first time at age 9. I've seen it many many many times since then. It's impossible for me to see it objectively now.

When I showed it to my husband, at least he could finally understand why I kept saying "sink me!" every time I synced his palm pilot (you'll have to see it yourself to understand what I'm talking about). But when I showed it to another friend for her first time, I could just feel her rolling her eyes! Maybe I'll just keep my favorite movie to myself. :)

Do It Yourself Seder

We had our second annual Seder the Thursday before Easter.

A Seder is the service/meal that Jews have to celebrate the Passover. Years ago I bought a Seder plate and this book from Jews for Jesus. Last year we decided to start working on developing a Seder we could do with our family. I had to cut a lot...Karis was just a year old. But we invited over another family who had a child who was 3 and could ask the questions. No doubt it is still way more meaningful for the adults, though! But we want to practice it so that as the kids get older it will be very meaningful for them, to show Christ in the Passover. And we love to also include another family with kids a similar age as ours.

So this document shows how we did it, and some advice and tips for myself to make future years flow better and be even more clear.

Why Buy Expensive Baby Toys?

Birthday Letter to Karis from Daddy

My dear Karis,

I’m not sure how much I can add to what your Mommy has written for you. It was beautiful. I loved every word. Karis, I love seeing you when I come home from work. I open my arms wide to give you a hug, but you usually look at me and perhaps walk toward me, and then right past me. And then I go play with you, and sometimes chase you, and that always makes you giggle.

You are focused and busy. I see a lot of Mommy and me in you. I think you will become a strong, intelligent, and observant woman. You learn by watching, and you study intently. But I hope you are not afraid to try new things. Sometimes that’s the only way to learn.

Recently we’ve started throwing a little basketball back and forth to each other. At first, you couldn’t catch it, but you still liked it, and laughed a lot while we did it. But now you can both trap the ball against your body and really catch it in the air. You can throw it about 6 inches. For your birthday party, Daddy is going to set up a little basketball play area for you.

Another one of our things is playing in the water. You love to run right for the water when we go to the beach (just like your Daddy). The only problem is that your mom has to save you from drowning. I’m looking forward to your learning how to swim.

I love reading to you. As Mom wrote, you are getting less squirmy, and that makes Bible story time more enjoyable for everyone. We’ve been reading the book of John together (about a chapter a day), and we just finished chapter 16.

We pray that God will continue to bless you physically, mentally and spiritually. May He show you His character by enabling your parents to be good examples to you, balancing toughness and tenderness even as Jesus Himself did. May He give you a soft, obedient heart to match your strong, determined will. May He use your disobedience to lead you to repentance and faith. May He help Mommy and Daddy to be sensitive to your heart, so that you learn that sin is not merely external, but (at its deepest level) lies in the heart and the mind. Repentance and faith mean turning away from wanting to be God and trusting that God knows best and that heart-felt obedience to Him is the happiest life possible.

We love you so much.

Your Daddy

Birthday Letter to Karis from Mommy

As described in Friday's blog post, here is the letter I wrote for Karis' birthday:

Dear Karis,

You are 2 years old today! It has been such a joy to watch God grow you physically, emotionally, and spiritually from babyhood into toddlerhood.

Whenever anyone meets you, they say, “She’s busy!” And so you are. You are very task-oriented. Every day when you wake up, you immediately tackle your to-do list for the day, playing with all your toys and books upstairs and downstairs. Woe to the one who interrupts you from the task at hand!

You are so independent, and have no fear to go off on your own. You are usually perfectly content to be left in a church nursery or with a babysitter. And you do things on your own schedule. You crawled early at 6 months, even before you could sit up! Then you walked late, at 15 months. You were a champion, seasoned crawler. At 13 months a friend suggested we put you in dresses so that you wouldn’t be able to crawl and so would have to walk. But even a long dress didn’t slow down your crawling at bit. And now you’re not talking much, but you definitely know how to get what you want. You know important words like “more”, “up”, and “down.” You’ll grab any adult’s hand to get the help you want. We’ll work on “please” next. :)

It has been so fun watching you learn things in your own way. When your Grammy got you a puzzle, she couldn’t figure out why you wouldn’t try it and kept guiding her hand to do it. But once you did finally try for yourself, you had already mastered it. I went over the alphabet (which you were totally fascinated by) over and over again with you. I never had any idea if you were “getting” it or not. Then one day I drew a circle and you said, “O”. I drew other letters and you named them. I asked you which one is an “R” and you knew it!

You became a big sister this year. You laughed at my growing belly all summer, and sat perched on top of it when I carried you. Then when Jonathan was born, you were curious, saying “baby,” but never wanting to hold or kiss him. Sometimes when you first woke up in the morning or when we picked you up from nursery you’d ask for him. You were so helpful, coming to get me when he cried, putting his binky in, and holding his bottle. And when he was born you had weeks of dedicated attention from your grandmothers and lots of new toys to play with.

You decided your daddy was pretty cool one day in October when we went to the beach. He was out playing in the deeper water, and we were running through the shallower waves. You saw him out there and yelled “Daddy, Daddy!” for the first time. Now you ask for him throughout the day and love to play with him. When he walks by, your face lights up and you go off looking for him. And while you play a lot by yourself, you love to be held by your mommy and snuggle when you’re read to.

Every night we read you a Bible story. Most of the year you had to be read to in your crib because you were so squirmy! But recently it’s been sweet for your daddy to hold you on his lap. You don’t always look like you’re paying attention, but whatever book we’re reading you carry around all the next day. Before every meal we say grace. You wait expectantly for it, and quietly hold hands. Then when we’re done, you exuberantly say your version of “amen:”MEE-MAH.

Over the course of the year you learned a lot about obeying. “No” was your first word. I appreciated how you’d warn me when you were about to do something you shouldn’t by saying “no no no no no.” After Jonathan was born and I could no longer chase after you, you quickly learned to “come” when called, sometimes even while crying because you didn’t want to, but knew you needed to obey. You have a strong will, but God is softening you to obey and consider others.

You are a beautiful and sweet girl. We delight in your focused curiosity, confident independence, and easy laugh. I miss you so much whenever we’re apart, even if just for your nap. You are a precious gift from God to us. Words cannot express how much I enjoy you and treasure you. I am so happy I get to be your mommy.

Birthday Traditions

Karis turned 2 yesterday! Here are two traditions we are cultivating:

1. Birthday scrapbook: This was an idea from another mom at the mothers' group at church. I've been overwhelmed with how far behind (of course) I am on scrapbooking. She has four kids, and gives each on their birthday the scrapbook pages for the prior year. This is perfect for me! A fairly do-able deadline. I won't have her 2nd year 100% completed on her birthday, but I'll be close. And then I'm only a year behind on her life, and still have 6 months to finish Jonathan's first year. :)

2. Birthday letter: This is an idea sparked by Noel Piper's book Treasuring God in Our Traditions. While the Pipers don't do a birthday letter per se (Pastor John writes a poem), letters are more our style. This year Alex and I each wrote a letter to Karis. I'll post them the next two days. We consider her personality, what we love about her, her accomplishments and milestones for the year, and evidences of grace and God at work in her life. We'll read them aloud to her when we celebrate her birthday tomorrow, and then I'll scrapbook the letters.

Extreme living

We're studying Acts in the Bible study at church. One of the questions we discussed was how did we think Paul and Silas endured the persecution they faced, singing songs in prison, pressing on even when they kept getting kicked out, stoned, beaten, and imprisoned. I think of our friends who are missionaries in some of the most extreme places in the world.

I have no doubt that Paul and Silas were, and my friends are, very aware of the dangers they face, and are diligent to study the Bible, pray together, and sing worship songs. The intensity of their circumstances would make it unthinkable to just get through the day, thinking, "boy, it's been awhile since I had a quiet time. I should think about doing that soon." Even when I've been on a short-term missions trip to Mexico I have been so conscious of my inadequacy and the importance of what we're doing, and have made sure I spent time in the Word and in dependent prayer.

It's easy to dismiss the struggles of missionaries as irrelevant to us in the US where we have no expectation that anyone might be waiting outside the church with guns to disperse us or put us in prison. What God has been impressing on me through this study, though, is that our circumstances here in suburban US are possibly even MORE extreme.

We face dire danger: enough money, enough food, good churches, good friends, TV, video games, and a million comforts and distractions that threaten to make us dependent on things and on ourselves instead of on the only One who can save us.

When our friends left for the mission field, in a country with on-going genocide and war, their parents were extremely concerned that they were taking their 2 little ones to this dangerous place. The pastor "reassured" us at the send-off service that it is far more dangerous, from an eternal perspective, to raise children in this country.

I am convicted that I need to live just as I would if I were on a missions trip, just as I would if I faced the persecution and high calling that Paul and Silas do, because my situation is entirely as intense.

Raising a man

I am very conscious that our culture is doing a great job at turning out video-game playing, late-marrying, long-term adolescents. We want to raise our son to be a man! Thankfully, since he's only 5 months old, we have time.

This was an interesting article by Kay Hymowitz, called "The child-man" (containing some PG-13 content) that I read in Sunday's paper:

For whatever reason, adolescence appears to be the young man's default state, proving what anthropologists have discovered in cultures everywhere: It is marriage and children that turn boys into men. Now that the SYM can put off family into the hazily distant future, he can – and will – try to stay a child-man. Not only is no one asking that today's twenty- or thirtysomething become a responsible husband and father – that is, grow up – but a freewheeling marketplace gives him everything he needs to settle down in pig's heaven indefinitely.

and

Adults don't emerge. They're made.

Great tool for verse memorizing

I had been wanting to blog on how much I love the Fighter Verse Pack, and happily Alex just blogged on the Fighter Verse system. It's a tool developed by people at Bethlehem Baptist Church, which we attended while we lived in Minnesota from 2004-2007. I loved it that the whole church was working together on the same verse(s) each week!

While I worked on Fighter Verses while we went to the church and subsequently, I always felt frustrated on how to keep them. It wasn't until I ordered a Fighter Verse Pack for myself that I really started having a lot of fun with verse memory and find it so much easier to review the verses.

I feel like in this pack is plenty of verses to keep me busy memorizing for years. They are verses selected by people I really trust to help me grow in my faith and to fight sin. And there are handy tabs you can place to quickly find which verse you are working on, which verses you are currently reviewing, and where you will stop and test yourself on the last 50 verses.

We are still memorizing the same verses that the people at Bethlehem are working on, even though they're halfway across the country. But at least Alex and I can do them together. And I practice them out loud when my kids are with me, so that they can start being exposed to verse memory and we can eventually do it together, as soon as Karis starts talking.

While the Fighter Verse Pack I think was the best $18 (with shipping) I've ever spent, the verses are also available for free on pdf on the the Bethlehem website.

Be fruitful and MULTIPLY!

I was glancing through my husband's e-mail when I saw a friend had e-mailed him a link to a sermon that looked interesting. I listened to it just now as I did the dishes. WOW. Voddie Baucham was preaching to pastors, not moms, but I was was encouraged as a mother. He exhorted the pastors to embrace a biblical worldview of youth ministry:
1. Parents are responsible for evangelizing and discipling their children, not church youth groups. It is the role of the church to equip and encourage the parents.
2. Children are a blessing and, as pastors, they should encourage and bless large families.

The message is called The Centrality of the Home. Here is the information about it on his website:

In February of 2006, a group of more than 1,000 pastors and church leaders gathered for the Southern Baptist of Texas State Evangelism Conference in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. During the second night of the conference Voddie Baucham, who had preached at the previous year's conference, was called upon to stand in for Dr. Tim LaHaye who had become ill a few days earlier. No one was ready for what happened next.

In a message State Director of Evangelism, Don Cass called "Truly Prophetic," Voddie Baucham set the auditorium ablaze. The challenge he issued cut straight to the heart of the crisis in contemporary Evangelicalism.

This message has since been heard around the world. Emails from Singapore, Australia, Southern Africa and Central Europe have flooded in along with those from the United States as God uses this message to shake the foundations of ministries, institutions and individuals alike.