Lazy days

Merry Christmas!

Nothing to prove

One of my favorite songs and all my loved ones plus myself :)

Teach your children well (Alistair Begg)

My young composer

Kids grow and sometimes know more that we do...

How do you encourage and advise Christian parents?

Think long before voting pro-choice

Mother's Day in Poland - a proper article on the Day...

This is a terrific and heartening story of fight, love and victory. This is also an important voice in the debate against abortion.

At 18 months old, Amillia Taylor is already entering the terrible twos.

When life doesn't go her way, she stamps her little foot, pushes out her lower lip and makes her demands with a sweet baby lisp.

She is, her parents say with a smile, a 'proper little madam'. But it's a fighting spirit which has served Amillia well.

Because this bright, beguiling toddler was born at just 21 weeks and six days into her gestation - a whole two weeks before the existing abortion cut-off.

Against all odds: Amillia Taylor's tiny feet in the doctor's hand

Read on...

Life is precious

Spring stroll

Fredrik on a stroll
Originally uploaded by sveana

We had wonderful weather, and a wonderful time together, me and my little boy. It was our first spring stroll this year, and we were looking for flowers and leaves coming to life everywhere. This little boy is a joy to my heart, always happy, kind and willing to obey, a true child of my dreams. A prayer that God answered and blessed us with him in abundance.

Happy Spring!

An update

We have just come home from the hospital. God has peculiar ways of reminding us how precious our life with Him is and how much we need Him all the time.

My little son had an unpleasant accident, he was hit by his older brother riding a moped. We had lots of pain in his right calf, it was swollen and we took some X-rays. Fortunately, no bones were broken and after a night at the hospital we are now declared soon to be fine.

Thank you all dear brothers and sisters in #pros for your prayers - especially DrO.

God is good!

How to Be a Refuge for Your Children

by John Piper

If Daddy is afraid, where can a little child turn? Daddies are supposed to be safe. They are supposed to know what to do and how to solve problems and fix things and, most of all, protect the children from harm. But what happens if a child sees fear in Daddy's face? What if Daddy is as scared as the child, and doesn't know what to do? Then the child is utterly distraught and feels panic. He feels that the one strong and good and reliable place of safety is no longer safe.

But if Daddy is confident, then the children have a refuge. If Daddy is not panicking, but calm and steady, all the walls can come tumbling down, and all the waves can break, and all the snakes can hiss and the lions roar and the wind blow, and there will still be a safe place in Daddy's arms. Daddy is a refuge, as long as Daddy is confident.

That's why Proverbs 14:26 says that "his children will have a refuge," if Daddy has a "strong confidence." Daddy's confidence is the refuge of his children. Dads, the battle to be confident is not just about us, it is about the security of our children. It is about their sense of security and happiness. It's about whether they grow up fretful or firm in faith. Until children can know God in a deep personal way, we are the image and the embodiment of God in their lives. If we are confident and reliable and safe for them, they will be much more likely to cleave to God as their refuge when the storms break over them later.

So how shall we have "strong confidence"? After all, we, too, are little children, clay pots, weak and broken and battling anxieties and doubts. Is the solution to put on the best show we can and hide our true selves? That will lead to ulcers at best, and God-dishonoring teenager-repelling duplicity at worst. That is not the answer.

Proverbs 14:26 gives another answer: "In the fear of the LORD there is strong confidence." This is very strange. It says that the solution to fear is fear. The solution to timidity is fear. The solution to uncertainty is fear. The solution to doubt is fear.

How can this be?

Part of the answer is that the "fear of the Lord" means fearing to dishonor the Lord. Which means fearing to distrust the Lord. Which means fearing to fear anything that the Lord has promised to help you overcome. In other words the fear of the Lord is the great fear destroyer.

If the Lord says, "Fear not, I am with you, be not dismayed, I will help you," (Isaiah 41:10), then it is a fearful thing to worry about the problem he says he will help you with. Fearing that problem when he says, "Fear not, I will help you, is a vote of no confidence against God's word, and that is a great dishonor to God. And the fear of the Lord trembles at such dishonoring God.

If the Lord says, "I will never fail you nor forsake you," so you can confidently say, "The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid; what can man do to me?" (Hebrews 13:5-6) - if the Lord says that to you, then not to be confident in the Lord's promised presence and help is a kind of pride. It puts our reckoning of the trouble above God's. That is why we read the amazing words of the Lord in Isaiah 51:12, "I, even I, am He who comforts you. Who are you that you are afraid of man who dies And of the son of man who is made like grass?" Who are you to fear man, when God has promised to help you? So it is pride to fear man. And pride is the exact opposite of the fear of God.

So, yes, the Proverb is true and a great help to us. Fear God, dads. Fear God. Fear dishonoring him. Fear distrusting him. Fear putting your assessment of the problem above his. He says he can help. He is smarter. He is stronger. He is more generous. Trust him. Fear not to trust him.

Why? He works for those who wait for him (Isaiah 64:4). He will solve the problem. He will rescue the family. He will take care of the little ones. He will meet your needs. Fear not believing that. Then your children will have a refuge. They will have a Daddy who "has strong confidence" - not in himself, but in the promises of God, which he trembles not to trust.

Learning to fear the Lord for the sake of my children,
Pastor John

By John Piper. © Desiring God. Website: www.desiringGod.org. Email: mail@desiringGod.org. Toll Free: 1.888.346.4700.

Moments

Short precious moments of joy and happiness when you are a parent of small children... To see a sweet smile, to hear a joyous laughter of an innocent heart, as a response to your own openness and gladness - is to see a bit of Heaven in your gray day.
Thank You Lord for the children and for their presence in our lives. You gave us this great responsibility of taking care of them, of nurturing them, of showing them Your Truth. It is because we have them, we can better understand Your Love for us. Help us, Lord, to make them Your children, too, to show them Your Righteousness and Your Mercy. Help us to make them our Siblings in Christ.
Amen.

About being a parent...

Oh those precious moments of insight when being a parent allows me to ponder over myself ;)
I became a mother rather late in life, when I honestly did not expect it to happen. I was 34 when my first pregnancy occurred, but this one was quickly over, lots of tears, despair and sadness following it, and an excruciatingly difficult procedure in a hospital. They called it "missed abortion", and what it means is simply that the fetus died at a very early stage and had to be removed.
Our first son was born two years later, and our second one five years and two weeks after the first one. You can count the years yourselves... The oldest son is now 9.5 years old.

The children are growing and leaving more and more space for my personal life. The baby time is over, the sleepless nights are history, and I finally have space to develop my own world once again. But everything is different this side of parenthood.

Before becoming a parent I lived a pretty happy-go-lucky lifestyle, tending only to me and my husband, who pretty much was taking care of himself. Children changed everything, throwing me from my own pedestal and making me put them on it. Children are demanding, selfish and precious. They are pretty, too, luckily for them, because life with children is not always pretty itself.

Anyway - as I look at it today - my life changed and became enriched, first by changing the focus of my priorities, and later by multiplying the points of view and needs by 3, plus my husband's.

My sons are growing and putting on their own personalities more and more. They simply are individuals with their own lives, interests and longings. At the same time, their lives are intertwined with my life, closer at some points, and more casually at some others. The connections will loosen up, children will become adults, and the separation is unavoidable some day. What I pray for is that there still will be some thread between us, some connection between me and them, in form of a word or of a gesture, in a form of some subliminal understanding, the likeness of spirit, LOVE.

What I also pray for is that they will know God and give their lives to Him. This pedestal thing - it is no longer me, and no longer my children on it - the Honor and Glory is only to Christ. For in Him and by Him we live and prosper, and to Him we are going. Children and parents, all.

Where's the logic gone?

First you have none.
Then you want some. And you discover you cannot have any.
So you go into despair - and the very wise man in a white rock tells you that you may have some.
You pay a lot to try, but money is never enough, and you end up risking it all on one shot. And you win - you get many.


Too many.

Not all can go on, you have to get rid of some - the very same you so desperately wanted before.

The wise man offers help. Now you have only two. The others are gone.


*****************

What am I talking about? Something that made me stop, sit down and listen in tears to what a horrible species we have become.
We have condemned Mengele in Auschwitz, for his experiments on children. And rightly so. But are we so much better than him? I do not think so.
People play God. People will pay the price.

What I am talking about is this:

Selective Reduction


According to Wikipedia:

Selective reduction (or fetal reduction) is the practice of reducing the number of fetuses in a multifetal pregnancy (i.e. those involving more than one fetus). With selective reduction, a specific fetus or fetuses are "selected" for termination, usually after a congenital defect has been identified. Prenatal diagnostic testing may be used to determine which of the fetuses has a greater chance of chromosomal defect or genetic disease. Those fetuses are then targeted in selective reduction because of the probability of their health being inferior to that of the others.

The term multifetal reduction describes a procedure to reduce a higher-order multiple pregnancy (one with three or more fetuses) to a twin or singleton pregnancy, without targeting a specific fetus for reduction. It can also be used to reduce a twin pregnancy to a singleton one, but this is less common as the risks in twin pregnancies, while existent, are much lower than in higher-order multiple ones. The aim of multifetal reduction is to avoid the medical issues generally related to multiple births (including premature births, low birth weights and associated medical problems).

It is reasoned that if some of the fetuses will be terminated to preserve the well-being of the others and the mother, the ones that are terminated might as well be the ones that would, if born, face more health issues in addition to the ones inherent to all multiple births. This adds a new dimension of controversy; beyond the already controversial nature of abortion, critics charge that reduction is a form of eugenics.

The reduction procedure is generally carried out during the first trimester. The most common method is to inject a chemical solution or feticide into the fetus or fetuses selected for either genetic reasons or for ease of accessibility. Generally, the fetal material is reabsorbed into the woman's body. While the procedure generally reduces the over-all risk level for the remaining fetus or fetuses, reduction does have its own risks, including the possibility that one or more of the remaining fetuses will also die.

Selective or multifetal reduction can be a very difficult decision for those who choose to make it; in many cases it is a decision faced by couples who used fertility treatments that resulted in a multifetal pregnancy.

Children adopted from an orphanage

Something I read in a Christian magazine. I do not have the date of the event, nor more details, so if anybody knows more, you are welcome to leave the information in the meta.

In Omsk, Russia, an orphanage that was in contact with the local Baptist congregation, was about to be closed. The families from the congregation adopted then all 40 children, children who would otherwise get dispersed to various orphanages elsewhere.


It is a beautiful story. John Piper has a great message on Adoption - the Heart of the Gospel.

Fatherhood Crisis

There is a country valuing equality. In this country nobody is better or worse just because of his or her natural construction, race, sexuality, political preferences. All religions have the same rights. People have been trained into this notions for years, and believe that they like the situation.
In this country men have to do exactly the same things as women do. To make it possible, small children are being raised as humans, and not as girls and boys. Everything must be well-balanced, everybody in a kindergarten is taught to play with all toys, any sign of masculinity is hastily being suppressed, any sign of femininity likewise finds no approval.
Boys will be boys, no matter what. So will be girls - even if they discover the truth growing up and seeing their bodies function differently than boys'. But the system in this country seems not to pay attention...
To get a divorce is like shopping in a shoe shop, easy and cheap, with assistants helping along the way. If the customer is a parent, it may take 6 months to be free, but still, what is 6 months?
Children of divorced parents are subjected to the same equality principle that governs the whole society. Most of them spend 50% of time at mum's, and the other 50% at dad's. Sometimes things get ugly, but let us talk about this wonderful equal picture, right?

Wrong.

Fathers have started protesting lately. Fathers experience that their absence in the children's lives is not good.

What is really wrong is the divorce, dear fathers. What is really wrong is the egalitarian ideology driven by the feminist movement. What is really wrong is the rejection of God in your lives. Because if you were men of God, you would cherish your families and do everything possible to keep them together, instead of taking the easy way out of them. Because if the society as a whole remained faithful to the Lutheran teachings, no raging feminists would be able to hijack the lot.
I do not know what is necessary, apart from a mass movement towards the traditional values, and against the society so ill of depression, lack of purpose, emptiness and consumerism...
What used to hold the societies together and promote the sound development - the family and God - has been dismantled in the name of progress and modernity. One look at the results is enough to see what we have got now: ruins and pieces, and nobody able to clean the mess up, and nobody caring to do it. It is as if S_O_M_E_B_O_D_Y did it on purpose. The very same O_N_E from my yesterday's post...

What would you do if...

DNA-testing for fathers. A powerful technology allowing men to make sure that the children they take care of are biologically theirs.
Over 2000 tests were carried over in Sweden, 2 142 tests in 2006, 2 011 in 2005.
The results show that 25% of the men are not the fathers...

Now that is alarming, because it shows a trend in society, and the trend is not good. Considering that this is only the tip of an iceberg, the overall picture does not present the women as angels. Rather, it points to the infidelity and lack of responsibility in their lives, creating much greater problems than any person can think of.

Let us imagine a father who suddenly finds out that the child he has been caring for, loving and providing for, is not his flesh and blood. This in itself being a shock, is only the beginning of a chain of events that would disintegrate his whole world, and the world of this child, as well.
Very often, especially when the child is a baby, the couple split, and the child grows up without a father, often impoverished, because his single mother must now provide for them by herself. But it also happens that a man leaves his family when the child is older, because he is not able to stay with the child's mother after having learned about her infidelity and deceit. Imagine the pain this causes for the innocent child. I cannot even begin to imagine that!
But there are cases when the man stays, accepts the child and gets over the pain and deceit, for the sake of his children and his wife.
None of these solutions is easy. And all of them might be avoided if only people followed the Law of God, telling them to stay faithful and loving their spouse.

Sin has the enormous power of multiplying itself and damaging everything in its proximity. This is a very good illustration of the phenomenon.

But, my question is: what would you faced with such a predicament? Would you leave? Would you stay?

A gift

That little hand you take care of, your whole world in miniature
the smile on that little face, warming you up inside
those trusting eyes watching your every step
seeking your approval and love amidst the daily sorrows

Have you told him that you love him?
Have you hugged him this infinite number of warm hugs today?
Have you given him the chocolate cake he was dreaming of?
Have you...

My motherhood is a precious gift to me,
Do you also feel as if you had your heart on your shoulder?
Are you his whole world? Your hand around his?
Do you see yourself in his big blue eyes?

Ania Björk

A tiny insight into how He feels

To be a parent gives you a perspective on life you never had before. Everything is changed and the focus gets shifted from "me" to the child, and then the next children. Somebody has even called this as
"constantly living with your heart outside you". I like this expression. Kind of makes you soft...

Now this brought me to thinking about God and His relationship with His creation, and with us. We call Him Our Father, and though it is impossible to picture Him in our human way and understanding, yet we know that He created us in His own image, so we should have some common features, starting from those attributed to parenting.

I really love my children and would give my life for them. So does God...
I grieve when they are disobedient, but I forgive them. So does God...
I must discipline them sometimes, to learn them a lesson. So does God...
I show them how to live, how not to make mistakes, how to be a part of a community. So does God...

They look up to me and my decisions, because they know that what I do is for their good. So do we towards God...
They grow in understanding and respect, sometimes reluctantly, but continually. So do we towards God...
They give witness of my personality and my methods - in the way they are towards others. So do we give witness of God and His working in us...

If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
(Mat 7:11)

P.S.
A reminder: go to my map and mark your existence there :)

Leave me alone

This little person knows what he doesn't want.
Like my son yesterday in church - he also knew that. He was completely 'anti' to everything and everybody, and there was not much I could do about it. It was hard to watch, and even harder to swallow, but when things like that happen in public places, you have to play along. The problem was that his brother went to another place for his Sunday School, and the little one wanted to follow, but had to stay. This made him furious...
Stubborn to the point of hurting himself in the process, but not wavering one millimeter from his standpoint. It is fascinating, though, how they can keep it up. One day you have a sweet baby, and next day this little monster opposing you and trying your patience.
Frankly, I have no idea what the sermon was about. This is unfortunate, but I was forced to somehow control my offspring, and it took my whole attention away from the pastor. Sorry, Ron.

I pray next Sunday will be better.

My flesh and my heart fail; but God is the strength of my heart, and my part forever.
(Psa 73:26)