Contentment is a heart issue. We cannot change our emotions and selfish desires by force. Our only hope is to look to God, to ask Him to teach our heart to be contented, to want to trust Him and not live in ungratefulness or in looking to what others have. Choosing to be content, resting our desires and dreams into God's hands, learning to love and bring light into broken places is the beginning of learning to be content.
Episode #218: Creating Peace Through the Holidays
As you prepare to cultivate a people, a place and a community within your family and at table, remember, it is the daily celebrating of life together, that will prepare for you a heritage and deep friendships that will satisfy the deepest places of your soul the rest of your life. It is a gift to inherit and one of the greatest works of your life.
Episode #217: Making Gratitude a Habit (24 Ways #9)
This week, every day, notice the things that God has provided. Practice thanking Him for each way He has worked and blessed in your life. Have your children write thank you cards to friends of family for whom they are grateful. Breathing thankfulness into all the minutes of the days, creates a great pattern for life and helps you and your children to become more satisfied with what God has given.
Episode #216: Fostering Great Conversation At the Table (LGT 5)
True discipleship must reflect the fact that God values our voice, thought, and will. Dinnertime discussions reflect and enact this value, making a place where everyone can be heard, be exposed to truth, and have the space to develop convictions in the context of community. Through dinnertime discussions, convictions can be formed, confidence can be gained, conversation can be practiced, and consideration can be taught.
Episode #215: Forgiving & Covering An Offense with Love
As we approach this week's way, let us understand that helping our children practice forgiveness over and over again, will establish a pattern in their hearts to remember when they must make this choice as adults. Train up a child in the way he should go--in forgiving 70 X 70 X70 and so on, and forgiveness will become a part of his paradigm for life. If we all loved this way and forgave, the world would indeed become a place open to the heart and message of Christ.
Episode #214: C.S. Lewis and My Thoughts about Shaping Table Culture
I am so excited to share this Mini-Podcast with you. We sat down quickly together and recorded this conversation after a quick breakfast the morning I left for Nashville. I know you will enjoy hearing his lovely accent and his insight about stories, an inspirational poem and thoughts from C.S. Lewis about table time.
Episode #213: Invest Words that Give Life & Bring Beauty
The starting point of your influence is the state of your own heart, mind and soul. If there is purity, wisdom, strength, faith, love and righteousness there, then when you pour out your life, those around you will be blessed indeed.
Episode #212: Creating Beauty as a Backdrop for Changing Life
“The love of beauty is taste, the creation of beauty is art.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Episode #211: We Learn to Serve One Another (24 Family Ways #6)
Serving others helps children to learn how to think of someone other than themselves. Often, serving others softens their hearts, and when they are the one served it comforts them in times of need, and obviously makes their loads in life easier. Serving is a skill and character quality that is easy to spot because it is so rare in adults today.
Episode #210: Faith by Feasting: Giving Life to Your Table & Sarahstrone (LG Table #2)
The story of the Clarkson family has been written at tables. Not with pen and paper, but with words and people, food and fellowship, talk and time. Whatever kind of table it might be—breakfast, lunch, dinner; picnic or deck; plain or fancy; small, tall, wood, metal, or rock; bare or cloth-covered; even the ground—it becomes our family table when we sit down together to eat and drink and be and belong. The delightful fruits of God’s creation we share together fill and fuel us as God’s life- breathed and image-bearing creatures, and our shared story grows from the table’s Spirit-infused life coming alive in us.