Leading Dinner Devo’s with your family
By · CommentsStep 1. Eat dinner with your entire family regularly.
Step 2. Mom and Dad sit next to one another to lead the family discussion.
Step 3. Open the meal by asking if there is anyone or anything to pray for.
Step 4. Someone opens in prayer and covers any requests. This task should be rotated among family members so that different people take turns learning to pray aloud.
Step 5. Start eating and discuss how everyone’s day went.
Step 6. Have a Bible in front of the parents in a translation that is age-appropriate for the kids’ reading level. Have someone (parent or child) open the Bible, and assign a portion to read aloud while everyone is eating and listening.
Step 7. Parents should note key words and themes in the passage and explain them to the kids on an age-appropriate level.
Step 8. Ask questions about the passage. You may want to begin with having your children summarize what was read—retelling the story or passage outline. Then, ask the following questions: What does this passage teach us about God? What does it say about us or about how God sees us? What does it teach us about our relationships with others?
Step 9. Let the conversation happen naturally, listen carefully to the kids, let them answer the questions, and fill in whatever they miss or lovingly and gently correct whatever they get wrong so as to help them.
Step 10. If the Scriptures convict you of sin, repent as you need to your family, and share appropriately honest parts of your life story so the kids can see Jesus’ work in your life and your need for him too. This demonstrates gospel humility to them.
Step 11. At the end of dinner, ask the kids if they have any questions for you.
Step 12. If you miss a night, or if conversation gets off track, or if your family occasionally just wants to talk about something else, don’t stress—it’s inevitable.
A Great question……Are my beliefs really Biblical?
By · Comments I will be the first to admit there are several things that I don’t understand and answers that aren’t easy to obtain when it comes to Gods Word, yet I argue that the Bible has been divinely created to be assessable to all people not just Biblical Scholars. Simply put it means what it says!
With many topics I am quite content to agree to disagree, but on issues concerning the salvation, I admit I get a little stubborn. Truth is that whatever we might believe about some Biblical topics may have little bearing on the whole of our relationship with the lord, but whether or not your in Christ is essential territory to understand. Ironically it seems that in these issues we are the most likely to get emotional aggravated, and stubbornly stick to dogma and traditional definitions while avoiding logical rational discussion.
For a long time I’ve prayed that we as believers might begin to look at our faith through no other filter than that of God’s word, that together we might be the answer to Jesus prayer for unity, that we might restore the power to the Church, Jesus and Gods Word alone!
I recently ran across this video from Francis Chan, he wrote the book “Crazy Love” and is a highly respected minister among Evangelical Christians, he asks of himself the question we all ought to be asking…….
Go Vote.
By · CommentsHey the election might not be too fun, but this gave me a laugh! Kinda sums up how we feel sometimes! 
Things I Learned in the South
By · Comments• A possum is a flat animal that sleeps in the middle of the road.
• There are 5,000 types of snakes and 4,998 of them live in the South.
• There are 10,000 types of spiders. All 10,000 of them live in the South, plus a couple no ones seen before.
• If it grows, it’ll stick ya. If it crawls, it’ll bite ya.
• It is not a shopping cart, it is a buggy!
• When you get out of your car ya “get down”
• People actually grow and eat okra.
• Fixinto is one word. It means I’m fixing to do that.
• Iced tea is appropriate for all meals and you start drinking it when you’re two. We do like a little tea with our sugar.
• Backwards and forwards means I know everything about you.
• You don’t PUSH buttons, you MASH em.
• You measure distance in minutes.
• You switch from heat to A/C in the same day.
• All the festivals across the state are named after a fruit, vegetable, grain, insect, or animal.
• You carry jumper cables in your car – for your OWN car.
• On average you only own five spices: salt, pepper, Tony’s, Tabasco and ketchup.
• You find 100 degrees Fahrenheit a bit warm.
• You know all four seasons: Almost summer, summer, still summer, and Christmas.
• You describe the first cool snap (below 70 degrees) as good Gumbo weather.
• Fried catfish is the other white meat.
My Thoughts on the Fourth
By · CommentsSome veterans bear visible signs of their service: a missing limb, a jagged scar, a certain look in the eye. Others may carry the evidence inside them: a pin holding a bone together, a piece of shrapnel in the leg–or perhaps another sort of inner steel: the soul’s ally forged in the refinery of adversity. Except in parades, however, the men and women who have kept America safe wear no badge or emblem. You can’t tell a vet just by looking.
What is a vet?
He is the cop on the beat who spent six months in Saudi Arabia sweating two gallons a day making sure the armored personnel carriers didn’t run out of fuel.
He is the barroom loudmouth, dumber than five wooden planks, whose overgrown frat-boy behavior is outweighed a hundred times in the cosmic scales by four hours of exquisite bravery near the 38th parallel.
They’re the nurse who fought against futility and went to sleep sobbing every night for two solid years in Da Nang.
He is the POW who went away one person and came back another–or didn’t come back at all.
He is the Quantico drill instructor that has never seen combat–but has saved countless lives by turning slouchy, no-account rednecks and gang members into Marines, and teaching them to watch each other’s backs.
He is the parade-riding Legionnaire who pins on his ribbons and medals with a prosthetic hand.
He is the career quartermaster who watches the ribbons and medals pass him by.
He is the three anonymous heroes in The Tomb Of The Unknowns, whose presence at the Arlington National Cemetery must forever preserve the memory of all the anonymous heroes whose valor die unrecognized with them on the battlefield or in the ocean’s sunless deep.
He is the old guy bagging groceries at the supermarket–palsied now and aggravatingly slow–who helped liberate a Nazi death camp and who wishes all day long that his wife were still alive to hold him when the nightmares come. He is an ordinary and yet an extraordinary human being, a person who offered some of his life’s most vital years in the service of his country, and who sacrificed his ambitions so others would not have to sacrifice theirs. He is a soldier and a savior and a sword against the darkness, and he is nothing more than the finest, greatest testimony on behalf of the finest, greatest nation ever known. So remember, each time you see someone who has served our country, just lean over and say, “Thank you.” That’s all most people need, and in most cases, it will mean more than any medals they could have been awarded or were awarded.
It is the soldier,
not the reporter,
Who has given us freedom of the press.
It is the soldier,
not the poet,
Who has given us freedom of speech.
It is the soldier,
not the campus organizer,
Who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.
It is the soldier,
Who salutes the flag,
Who serves beneath the flag,
and whose coffin is draped by the flag,
Who allows the protester to burn the flag.
That’s how I see it anyway……..
This might make you slow down!
By · CommentsThe other day a good friend of mine sent me some pictures of an experimental speed control device being tested in Canada! Just imagine if you were flying down the road slurping your morning coffee, on the phone, while tuning your radio and you saw this…… 
Now that might make you pop the brake a little! The authorities claim that in initial tests these giant “stickers” are proving even more effective than far more costly forms of speed control……well I guess!! Looks like you could lose you whole front end in one of these! 
They are so realistic that people slow to a crawl and attempt to straddle the holes, not recognizing even up close that they aren’t real. 
Authorities are planning wide spread implementation which will be interesting no doubt. However I fear that if these same tests were conducted in Louisiana they would be met with far less exciting results. I know a few roads that have the real deal and still people drive 70 and 80 hmmm……what does that say about us!! 
Just another normal Day…….
By · CommentsA few weeks ago I ran across this video taken in 1906 in San Francisco only a few days before the devastating quake that forever changed that city. It’s cool to me for several reasons… One, those people were crazy drivers. They were all over the place, and the pedestrians were just as nuts jumping out in front of the trolleys hustling along their way to an unknown destination. Secondly, the background track is really kickin, third and more soberly, that fact that these folks were busy living their lives oblivious to the fact that their whole world was about to be turn upside down. If historians are correct less than three days later one of the worst natural disasters ever in the united states would fall on these poor people. A devastating earthquake and the resulting fires would destroy this proud city and turn it’s majestic skyline to one that resembles a war scene.
It reminds me that life is not forever, to enjoy and live today for something greater than just this life, because before we know it ……it may be gone.
I Was Wrong!
By · CommentsHe wrote these words with a fountain pen before the greatest invasion in history began. The attempt to take the beaches at Normandy against Germany’s entrenched defenses was a fearful risk. The effort would be massive, and if the attempt failed, he wanted someone to blame. Himself.
“Our landing has failed,” he wrote, “And I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air, and the navy did all that bravery and devotion could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine, and mine alone” (Dwight D. Eisenhower, June 5, 1944).
Thankfully that was a message he never had to deliver. It’s ironic to learn that the secret to greatness is the ability to admit failure. Three words, more difficult to pronounce than “Mephibosheth” are, “I was wrong.”
It’s hard in a marriage to learn that the problem with us is me. It’s too easy when we abandon the Lord to blame his church. People wonder why Saul was considered a failure as leader of Israel, and the flawed but earnest David achieved greatness.
It’s not that David made fewer mistakes; he admitted responsibility for them.
“For I know my transgressions,” he declared. We know our brethren’s transgressions. David knew his own. “And my sin is always before me” (Psalm 51:3). In contrast, our sin is constantly repressed in our memories!
How’s your pronunciation of hard-to-say words?
We’re really so small!
By · CommentsIf you’re like me sometimes the arrogance of our fellow humans is a bit aggravating. We pretend to have so much figured out, and believe we have such a command of the world around us, that we forget just how small we are in that same universe. We make bold claims like “there is no God” or “God is dead” when we but only barely understand a sparse corner of the universe! I recently ran across some material sent to me by a friend that might help to put our place in the universe a bit more realistically.
