Years ago Gladys Hunt wrote Honey for a Child’s Heart, which is a book about books, listing suggestions for young readers. I believe it is in its fourth edition now, and it has a great article in the beginning about the wonder of words. Another book along the same lines is The Book Tree by McCallum and Scott. This is based on the same idea, that we want our children exposed to the best sort of books. Both these are great resources for reading choices.

And, how could I forget this one: Books Children Love, by Elizabeth Wilson. I’ve had this one on my shelf for quite a while as well.

Also, I noticed that one of the Femina readers has a blog with book reviews called Written Windows. Check out these sources, because, as you know, Christmas is coming! But you don’t have to wait until Christmas to be shopping for books.

When we try to navigate through the many things we each have to do and the many decisions we have to make, we need to have some kind of thoughtful grid in place to help us make wise choices about how we spend our time. Keeping priorities is not some wooden thing that we just enforce on our schedule in an external way, but is rather a perspective that requires ongoing wisdom, discernment, and self-discipline.

For the Christian woman, whatever her age, her first priority is obviously to love and serve God. That means living like a consistent Christian, staying anchored to the Word, worshiping each Lord’s Day, and being a woman of faith and prayer. This helps keep us centered on the important things.We don’t make commitments that would take us away from regular worship, and we don’t quit reading our Bibles because we have so much other reading to do for school.

Secondly, we are women. This means we are wives or daughters or mothers, so we have obligations related to these family ties. Daughters must consider their relationship to their parents, keeping connected and continuing to honor them, even while they’re off at college. Wives have husbands to help, and that help must stay on the top of the pile and not get shoved to the bottom. Mothers of  little ones are needed in countless pressing ways, day in and day out. They have to sort out all their other duties in light of the immediate needs of the children, and this is no easy task.

Third, many have a calling as students or employees. This is not your first priority, but your third one, coming after your duties as a Christian and as a woman. This means you are faithful as students or workers, fulfilling your obligations and commitments, being on time, getting the job done, and so forth. And the first and second priorities help  keep this one in perspective. We are not to sacrifice #1 or #2 for the sake of #3. In other words, if you have to compromise your faith in order to ace the class, then it would be better to flunk the class. If you have to lie to keep your job, then it would be better to lose the job.

Finally, believe it or not, our last priority is our free time. (Mothers of little ones, I know you are laughing at the thought of how to manage your “free time”!) But students in particular need to exercise wisdom here. College girls, are you spending your free time hanging out with the wrong people or watching movies that are a waste of time? If you opt to watch a movie instead of write the paper due on Friday, then you are getting your priorities out of whack. Get the work done, then relax. And make sure your entertainments are refreshing and delightful, providing the relaxation you need rather than the kind that you need to confess to God after the fact. That goes back to priority #1. You are a Christian. Your entertainments should be the kind that God is pleased to see you enjoying.

When things come up, and they always do, keep this basic hierarchy in mind. It will help you make wise choices and protect you from getting your schedule all catawampus.

One of our sweet little girls has a hilarious tendency which we refer to as her “drunk driving.” If she is tired, she becomes reckless and disobedient. Her eyes get a little glassy, she gets super rowdy, and you might find her unloading the freezer, or coloring her sheets with a marker, or some such clearly outlawed activity. Once, when she was in the midst of one of these times, I caught her on the kitchen counter getting into something. Surprise was my first response – “What are you doing?!” Her immediate response was to throw her hands up over her eyes in shame. It was at that moment I realized that she didn’t know what was causing it either! She was just as surprised as I was to find herself being so delinquent. It wasn’t any kind of deep malice that got her into those cupboards looking for chocolate chips – it was just a simple lack of control.

I was so thankful for that little glimpse into what was causing what with this little person, and it has really shaped the way we deal with all kinds of behavioral issues. Sometimes parents can discipline behaviors over and over and over like we are playing whack-a-mole. There is a sin! Get it! This can get very frustrating when it doesn’t seem to be helping anything. We think we are being so diligent! But the real problem is that the child doesn’t know what to do with it.

Say it is someone else’s birthday. Say your child wants a present too. Say they start fussing about it. Imagine then that then you say, “Don’t do that. That is bad. Don’t be a fusser. Deal with it.”  How did that help anyone? The child is taught that if the feeling comes over them, they have already failed. That is bad! But what am I supposed to do with it? It doesn’t just go away by itself. Little girls need help sorting out their emotions – not so that they can wallow in them, but so they can learn to control them.

We tell our girls that their feelings are like horses- beautiful, spirited horses. But they are the riders. We tell them that God gave them this horse when they were born, and they will ride it their whole life. God also set us on a path on the top of a mountain together and told us to follow it. We can see for a long way – there are beautiful flowers, lakes,  trees, and rainbows. (We are little girls after all!) This is how we “walk in the light as He is in the light, and have fellowship with one another.”

When our emotions act up, it is like the horse trying to jump the fence and run down into a yucky place full of spiders to get lost in the dark. A good rider knows what to do when the horse tries to bolt – you pull on the reigns! Turn the horse’s head! Get back on the path!  We also tell them that God told us that if we see one of our little girls with her horse down in the mud puddle spitting at people who walk by, it is our job to haul them up, willing or unwilling, back to the path.The ways that this has helped me as a mother are pretty obvious, but I will share them anyway if you will bear with me.

First of all, the horses are not the problem. There is nothing wrong with the emotions. If we have a little rider who is woefully unprepared to control her horse, well then, we had better start with some pretty serious riding lessons. Talk to your daughters about how they might feel, and what you want to see when they do. Give them some practical hand holds, be a coach. Anticipate moments that might be hard,  when the horse might bolt, and help them learn to anticipate it too. Take a little break to say, “Hey sweetie, we are going in this store, but we aren’t going to buy any toys today. If you start feeling like you want to fuss about it, what are we going to do?” Make a plan. Use code words. Wink. Encourage. Give lots of praise when you see her overcoming little emotional temptations. Be right there with her as she learns to recognize what is happening. Little girls can be scared out of their minds when their emotions charge off with them. They need the security of parents pulling them back.

The goal is not to cripple the horse, but equip the rider. A well controlled passionate personality is a powerful thing. That is what dangerous women are made of. But a passionate personality that is unbridled can cause a world of damage. If you see a lot of passion in your little girls, don’t be discouraged. It is just wonderful raw material. Our house is pretty near full to overflowing with this kind of raw material! But don’t treat it lightly either – runaway horses can be a very real threat to your little girls.

“As part of our evangelistic outreach at Cumnock Baptist Church, we have produced a DVD. It is designed to particularly engage young people and adults; to provoke discussion; and encourage a follow-up Christianity Explored Course or church visit.”

Check it out!

What do I mean by this? A wife is to see that she does something herself. Respect is a behavior that the wife is to display. Here are a few things that characterize a respectful wife.

1. She thinks right thoughts about her husband, contemplating his strengths and godly traits.

2. She shows gratitude to him for his work and provision and abilities.

3. She shows concern for his needs and wishes.

4. She speaks courteously to him.

5. She fulfills his requests, submitting to him in the little things and the big things.

6. She speaks highly of him to others.

7. She is trustworthy.

8. She goes to him for counsel first.

9. She prays for him.

10. She forgives him.

Now some women will say, “I refuse to do that. My husband is not worthy of such treatment.”  Then why did you marry him? Some husbands may say that they refuse to love their wives because they are not lovely or lovable. So why did they marry women they couldn’t love? They are still required by Scripture to love them anyway.

This is why it is so important for women to marry someone for whom they have great respect. Otherwise, this is a very high bar. If you have great regard for your husband, then you married the right guy. And respecting a respectable man is not too difficult after all.

But if on the other hand, you are already married to someone for whom you have little respect, the command is still there, but it will be much more difficult to obey. At the same time, if you begin to treat your husband with respect unconditionally, out of respect for Christ and His Word, it will be good for you and good for your husband.

God made us to be small creatures, but He did not make us petty creatures. When Christ became a man, He humbled Himself, but His humility wasn’t in the fact that He became small; it was because He took on our sins.

We, on the other hand, turn small things into petty things. We focus on rules about petty things rather than seeing the big picture. We get all worked up over mud tracked in on the carpet, and that is a petty thing! We let petty things become enormous things.

The gospel sheds light on all the small, ordinary things in our lives and transforms them into extraordinary things. And so we can glory in the mundane. Quoting Thomas Howard, we can find “splendor in the ordinary.”

There are big things afoot in the universe, so we ought to look up! We are going to live forever! When we stare at our feet and the ground under them, we miss what is really going on around us, and we get wrapped up in petty things. Instead, we need to look up! We need to quit looking down and start looking up to Christ, for that is where our life is hidden. God does not want us to settle for petty things or get submerged in the petty things, caught up in shuffling our stuff around. God created us for so much more.

Nothing like the book of Romans to lift us up out of ourselves!

I remember years ago when my son was off at grad school, someone asked me, “Aren’t you so sad to have your son gone?” And of course I missed him. But I told her that there was one thing worse than a son who leaves, and that is a son who doesn’t. The whole purpose of bringing up children is to send them off, not to keep them home.

When our children are wise, they are a great joy to their parents, especially when they start households of their own.