Grains of Sand

Google Images " Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds and tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates…carefully observe all these commands I am giving you to follow—to love the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways and to hold fast to him— "  (Deuteronomy 11:18-20, 22, NIV) For many parents whose children's schedules of activities already have a strangle hold on them, and for parents whose own priorities have cut them off from any signifanct spiritual influence in their children's lives, making the adjustment to the kind of lifestyle Moses is describing here, will be difficult. Some would say impossible, but apparently that is not so. Author, speaker and pastor, Peter Scazzero describes some of the ways he and his family simpl...

Genesis 48 is a chapter of blessing. Jacob, or Israel, has come to the end of his life. Joseph is called to see his father. He brings with him his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. Jacob recounts the promise that God had given to him and to his ancestors. Then he formally includes Joseph’s two sons in the blessing of the nation that God is going to form. In fact, Manasseh and Ephraim will eventually replace Jacob’s own sons, Simeon and Issachar, as heads of two of the 12 tribes that would make up the nation of Israel. Then Jacob blesses the two sons of Joseph just as his own father had blessed him and his own brother, Esau. Oddly, he blesses the younger with the older son’s blessing. In his own case, Jacob had received the older son's blessing by deceit. In this case, Jacob makes the switch quite deliberately. Stock.xchng photo But what sticks out for me today is the blessing itself. How many of us verbally bless our children, or our grandchildren. We might bless them with...