How do you praise God in when the storms of life hit? Not if, but when—because they surely will. How, when you are diagnosed with a debilitating disease, when you lose a child or a spouse, when you have wayward children, when the pain and pressure builds to a seemingly unbearable level can you still praise God? How do you defeat hopelessness?

Those of you who know me, know I’ve been through two very difficult storms in my life. Today is the 8th anniversary of one of those events: the day my first husband, Jason, died in a car accident.

Ten days after my 25th birthday, I was talking to Jason on my cell phone. He was transporting a load of Christian literature from Grand Rapids to Christian Resources International where he worked in Fowlerville, Michigan. We were talking about when he was getting home, what we were going to do that evening, and why he was later than expected. I was anxious for him to get home. We had been gone for several days, so we hadn’t had any time to ourselves recently.

Right in the middle of our conversation there was a scream.  [Read more...]

We’ve been very pleased with how this year’s devotions have gone for our family. Our kids have anticipated sitting down together each day to open a token to remind them of the gifts Christ has given to us.

For today’s Christmas devotional we bought a new book about the Christmas story called The Nativity. This book is beautifully illustrated by J. Kirk Richards; a keepsake book that we can see reading to our kids at Christmastime for years to come. The illustrations accompany the KJV text of the Christmas story from Matthew and Luke. Bradley and Trisha enjoyed taking turns reading the book aloud to the rest of the family.

It was refreshing this year to keep Christmas morning practically “gift-free.”

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This Christmas devotional sounds as if it should have gone earlier in the series, but there’s a reason for it being number 11. We really wanted to make our object lesson be new Christmas PJs for the kids, so we scheduled this one for Christmas Eve.

The point of tonight’s devotion was to help the kids be thankful for the way God provides us with clothing.

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Each Christmas devotional we do is another opportunity to remind our kids of all the blessings we’ve been given. Tonight’s devotional focused on one of God’s greatest gifts: His Holy Spirit.

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Tonight’s Christmas devotional was to help the kids appreciate that God has given us the gifts of wisdom and knowledge. We homeschool our kids, so this is something we try to impress on them all the time.

For their object lesson tonight we had them open packages with notepads and pencils inside. We asked them about all the things they could do with that notepad and they listed many different learning activities. We also discussed what the boys have recently been learning about—they were excited to reiterate all of the things they’re doing currently for school. From there we started talking about the blessing of being able to learn.

Bradley and Cameron posing with their notebooks (they got creative with this pose)

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For tonight’s Christmas devotional we wanted to impress on our kids that good health is a gift from God.

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Tonight’s object lesson was a small set of photos of the boys’ friends. Last night they got little photo books with pictures of their family, so they added the pictures of their friends to the book. The Christmas devotional was all about God’s gift of friendship.

There are many proverbs in the Bible about friendship and being a good friend. We chose 4 proverbs to discuss: Proverbs 17:17, 18:24, 27:10, and 27:17. This gave us plenty of material to talk about how God gives us good friends to support us in times of need and to challenge us to become better people.  [Read more...]

Tonight’s devotion was all about family. For our 6th Christmas devotional we wanted to tell our kids about why God created families and help them see the blessing of being part of a family that loves them.

For our object lesson/gift tonight we put together a small photo album of some of their family members—not just their immediate family, but grandparents, cousins, and some aunts and uncles they are close with. They had fun flipping through and naming all their relatives.

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The Christmas devotionals continue. Tonight’s devotional with the kids really got their attention—well, it got Bradley’s attention, anyway. We talked to them tonight about the blessing of being a part of the church. And to do this we used a couple dolls. Yes, dolls. (In a house of all boys, we don’t have too many quality dolls laying around, but we pulled it off.)

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