Experiencing God at Home by Richard Blackaby, Tom Blackaby Read Free Book Online Page B

Golden Gate Seminary in San Francisco, is married to his sweetheart Sarah, and is helping plant his second church. He is presently coauthoring a second book with Mike and is currently writing the second novel in a fantasy trilogy series entitled The Lost City Chronicles . He is also looking at entering a PhD program that focuses on “Christianity and the Arts.”
    Carrie
    Just when we felt like we were getting a handle on raising boys, God sent us our princess. Sweet little Carrie has endured the unrelenting torment of her two gross older brothers. After some astute parenting techniques in which we gently steered her away from wanting to be a ninja turtle or a Jedi knight like her brothers, she embraced the finer arts of ice skating and designer clothes.
    Carrie is our family’s health nut. She would rather endure a waterboarding interrogation than eat a doughnut or drink a soda. She exercises continuously and has run a half marathon. Carrie’s kryptonite is worry. I don’t know where she got it from, as she has been lovingly nurtured all of her life. She used to worry about being away from home overnight or attempting new things. She worried throughout college about flunking even as she piled up one four-point semester after the next. Carrie loves to shop, travel, write, and did I mention shop? She graduated from college and is currently enrolled in two master’s programs, one for advanced writing and the other in apologetics from a seminary. She has a fine boyfriend (don’t tell him I said that), and she just signed a contract with a publisher to write her first book.
    So that is my family, at least for the moment. No grandkids yet, not that we haven’t dropped plenty of hints. Each of our adult children loves their parents and God. All three are currently enrolled in seminary and feel called into some form of Christian ministry. The process wasn’t always easy, but we love the product so far! I travel a lot, and so I was often away from home. Lisa is a softhearted, nurturing mother whose solution for most of our children’s problems was to give them a gift so they felt better! I had to be the “heavy” in our home, and some of our kids, especially of the male variety, needed more “heavy” than others. Nevertheless, thus far, it has been exciting to see what God has done in and through our children.
    Family Principles
    We’ll be giving you plenty of illustrations from our parenting experiences in the coming chapters, but for now let me summarize some of the principles by which we raised our children. These are not necessarily the identical rules you should follow in your home. I will simply relate what we did in our home and the kind of family, and children, that resulted.
    1. Trust God throughout the process.
    Lisa and I do not hold ourselves up as parenting experts. We have made far too many mistakes to see ourselves that way! Sure, we have worked extremely hard at parenting, but we also know that other parents have too and yet have suffered major disappointments. I am grateful that my parents regularly prayed for my children. I will be forever grateful that God, in His grace, chose to do in my children’s lives what their parents were unable to do.
    2. Keep the rules few but nonnegotiable.
    We did a couple of pretty unorthodox things as parents. Perhaps one of the most controversial is that we had very few rules! Hey, you can’t rebel if there is nothing to rebel against, right? Actually, we were aiming for character, not conformity. It has been said that it was when ancient Rome had the most laws that its society was most corrupt. We figured that if we kept pushing our kids to act with character, we wouldn’t have to keep telling them how to behave.
    3. Respect and support family members.
    This was nonnegotiable. If your sister was competing in an ice-skating competition, you had better be there! If your sons’ rock band was performing in a downtown café, you had to show up and, if necessary, jump up