Recipe for a successful VBS:

Take an amateur but talented musician with a lot of enthusiasm and have him put together a live band of equally enthusiastic and talented teenagers to play the music and lead songs for the kids. It would even be better if he could take a week off work to hang out around church and work on last minute details.

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The Inevitable

It has to happen to everyone sooner or later. Hopefully not more than once or twice. And hopefully not serious.

Elliot was in a car accident – at 19 years old, his first collision.

The first concern is – Is anyone hurt? Are you ok? The most important thing is that there were no injuries. Everything else are just minor details – irritating, but minor in the big picture.

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Letting go

It gets easier, but it’s still not easy.

It’s been 2 years since my son started college. When he left Sunday to go back to his apartment, I still feel a wave of sadness.

The hardest part in raising children is not the midnight feedings, or the sacrifice of your career, or paying big money for college.

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Freedom

With great freedom comes great responsibility.

We have the whole summer free – no summer school, no schedule to keep, no particularly time to wake or sleep.

But with freedom comes wasted time. We’ve slept too late, watched too much TV, read too much forwarded email.

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The world

Violent persecution [of Christians] focuses the mind on the fact that the kingdom of his world is an enemy to the kingdom of God. When there hasn’t been any persecution for a long time – as in our part of the world – many Christians start expecting the world to be a friend. They slip into seeking the world’s approval instead of Gods. When the world denies its approval … they go hollow inside.

This is from the book How to Stay Christian in College by J. Budziszewski – his name is not misspelled, in case you were wondering.

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If you were going to only stay for 3 innings of a game, the game on Saturday between the Angels and the Rangers would be the best game to go to.

Amy won a drawing contest that gave our family free entrance to that game. We are not baseball fans, so we decided we would just stay for a few innings and go out to dinner.

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A while back, a friend complained to me that she felt taken advantage of by her neighbor. The neighbor’s work prevented her from picking up her daughter from school a couple days a week. She asked my friend to help her. What began as a small favor to pick her daughter up turned out to be a regular chore.

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