Raising kids is a lot like negotiating with terrorists.

    Trying to work things out with your children, helping them see that you’ve got to work out a balance between everything you need to get done versus everything they want to get (and get done). Even teenagers who understand this are always trying to tip the scale in their favor. They can be relentless.  Raising kids is a lot like negotiating with terrorists.

Who Cleans Your Classroom?

This last Sunday in my sermon, I talked about how looking at life through the lens of Jesus Christ changes the way we see the hierarchies and pecking orders our society lives by.  The cross shatters the labels we use: achievers vs. slackers, brilliant minds vs. not the sharpest tools in the shed; winners vs. losers.  The ways of God are not our ways, and the Biblical witness is that those the world overlooks are very often the ones God uses to bring attention to His power and wisdom.

This is an illustration I came across last week. I was preaching about how the gospel of Jesus Christ shows up in so many of our great stories.  The gospel is about what God has done for us—all that we cannot and could not do for ourselves—has been done through the death and resurrection of Jesus.  It is good news—it is joyous news.  Talk about joyous news…Ice Cream is good for you!  Even if we don’t know why.

When trying to illustrate a point in my preaching, I try to find topics that are non-controversial or at least non-partisan.  This last week I used the idea of Gun Rights vs. Responsible restrictions on those rights to talk about the balance between Rights and Responsibilities.  I’m sure there are going to be folks who think I leaned too far one way or the other when describing the debate.  In any case, I kept trying to come up with an example that might highlight how those on the Left also want to defend certain rights and ignore responsibilities.  This is what I came up with but—with a sermon much longer than it should be—didn’t have space for.