If you search ‘how to protect your child online’, you’ll most likely become overwhelmed with a flood of information. In one corner is the fear monger, spewing forth all the rancid possibilities and imminent demise of your child once they connect to the internet. In the other corner are the shouts for ‘privacy!’ and how...
Author: The Shepherd's Staff
The Gift of Being Present
Spending time with family over the holidays requires a lot of intentional effort. For myself, it begins with taking off from work early in order to get home and pack up for myself and kids. Then on to loading the van with the precision of the 20th level of Tetris- luggage, gifts, snacks and children fitting with only inches to...
Learning to Love
I often contemplate love. I know how important it is because it’s all over Scripture. It’s in every movie, and on the pages of every book. Somehow in a world that is unsure about this whole “God thing,” love prevails as an essential theme of the human race. Even when we are our culture forbids...
A Lesson from Ivan- life on life interaction
Emma was asked to read an award-winning book for school and make a diorama, so we headed to the bookstore to find one. She’s in second grade. She had a few choices —-a Newbery Medal and Honor Book or a Caldecott Medal Book. The Newbery award is given to “the most distinguished contribution to American...
Little Things Make Small Kids Big
My 5 year old daughter has a runny nose and congestion. It’s just that time of year. Lucky for me she remembered to remind me that she needed her medicine tonight as I was tucking her into bed. She’s moved up in the world from the chalky chewable’s (Have you ever tried one? They taste...
Grateful Remembering
I write this during the week of Thanksgiving, a holiday which seems set apart for counting my blessings. This year however is vastly different for me than the ones that have come before, primarily because in the month’s leading up to this Thanksgiving I’ve spent time nightly remembering the day and writing down what it...
A Country Boy Can Survive….But Can He Grow?
I grew up country, in the hills of Arkansas to be exact. This is a fact most people might not notice about me at first. At some point I laid down my thick southern drawl; but I still wear the boots, get my hands greasy under the hood of a car, use duct tape to...
Intimacy – to know and be known
As a therapist working with couples, my goal is to try and give them what I did not receive (or ask for) as a young man engaged at the age of 20. Over a decade of marriage and four children later, to say that I have done the following poorly for most of the years...
Being Sandwiched
Three Short Insights of How to Stay Emotionally Healthy in the Craziness of Caring for Aging Parents According to Wikipedia, The Sandwich generation is “the generation of people who care for their aging parents while supporting their own children. According to the Pew Research Center, just over 1 of every 8 Americans aged 40 to...
Trying to Understand
Marriage may be the most infuriating, brilliant, amazing, and humbling of creations. The Apostle Paul actually describes it as a “profound mystery” in Ephesians, which is probably the best description for it. There are more books, seminars, Sunday School topics, sermons, and research about marriage than almost anything else, and yet most of us are...