discipleship

The Lord teaches us of His grace and the Gospel through difficult children. We learn what it's like to love like He loved. It is there, in our personal upper room, where we learn to wash the feet of those that are betraying us. It is there, kneeling before our rebellious children, that the real power of God is demonstrated.

(Taft's mother's) losing her firstborn had convinced her that children are treasures lent not given and that they may be recalled at any time. Parents, she firmly believed, could never love their children too much.

Sometimes Eli believed his mother was embarrassed by him. "I swear, my mom thinks if I do one thing differently than the average person, I'm weird," Eli said later. "It's like she thinks I'm a freak or something. No matter what I do, it's not 'normal' enough for her.

The goodness of the mother is written in the gaiety of the child.

Children make theories when they are confused or anxious.

When young people are insecure, they find ways to manufacture love tests _ personal metrics to reassure themselves.

A Christian understanding of the world sees a child's character not as genetically determined but as shaped to a significant degree by parental discipleship and discipline.

The thing you do with a boy it is to show him all the to show. Don't hold nothing back.

We are caught in the in between of what we already are what we are yet to be.

Though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little.

If we cannot all FEEL alike, we can all FEED alike on the Bread Life.

I'm the only English thing they can vent their anger on.

Perhaps, she had dreamed, she would teach some future King, shaping his child mind for a new and better world.

The mother was conflicted between what she knows that what's possible.

How vigilant we must be to ensure that we don__ allow our impression of Jesus to be held captive by the prevailing mores of our secular culture! Rather, it is essential that we continue to return to the Gospels to ensure that the reverse occurs: to allow Jesus to hold our hearts and imaginations captive in response to the dominant thinking of our time. For exiles trying to live faithfully within the host empire of post-Christendom, the Gospel stories are our most dangerous memories. They continue to fire our imaginations and remind us that it__ possible to thrive on foreign soil while serving Yahweh, but it__ the kind of thriving that often rejects popular wisdom. These stories are the standard by which we judge all other stories, all other descriptors of life today. If, after reading these dangerous biblical stories, you can__ imagine Jesus the Messiah as a televangelist, strutting around on stage in a flashy suit, playing it up for the cameras, then you are forced to reject this image and seek another mode of being Christ today.

Jesus was trying to present value of a life of vulnerability in which one would have practical and needed experience of the same. It would be a life without baggage, so one would learn to accept others and their culture instead of always carrying along our own country's assumptions and calling them the Gospel.

Fixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn around the life of a child or an adult in any consistent way, but if you can surround a person with a new culture, and different web of relationships, then they will absorb new habits of thought and behavior in ways you will never be able to measure or understand. And if you do surround that person with a new, enriching culture, then you had better keep surrounding them with it, because if they slip back into a different culture, and most of the gains will fade away.

The formal definition of impact is a forcible contact between two things, and God has designed our lives for a collision course with the world.