This year Joshua took a class at our homeschool co-op entitled For Boys Only. They have studied finances, banking, insurance, renting policies, and COOKING.

This evening our family was the grateful recipients of Joshua’s final project.

Dinner for Seven hosted by Joshua

Chicken Bake Appetizers
Fresh Veggie Crudities
Yogurt Fruit Salad
Homemade Rolls (Mesa Manna recipe)
Juice Spritzer Punch
Baked Potatoes w/sour cream, shredded cheese, and turkey bacon
Steamed Broccoli
Salad w/toppings
Grilled Steaks
Layered pudding dessert as the finale

Joshua worked for hours preparing the meal. He planned the menu, organized the recipes, and did the shopping. He even used existing groceries rather than spend too much at the store. It was truly a culinary gift to the whole family. He set the table in fine style and helped (through his exhaustion) with the clean up.

I’ll have to share his chicken bake and layered pudding recipes because they were quite the hit with the family.

Thank you, Joshua, for the amazing meal.

Kathy
Project 366 - Day 107

Have you ever forgotten one of your children? You know, had a busy evening, watched movies, worked on the computer, exercised, and even done some laundry. All the little ones are safely tucked into their beds, the house quiet and dark. Suddenly you remember you were supposed to pick your beloved oldest child from church.

15 minutes ago.

With two of his friends.

And you live a good 10 or 12 minutes away.

And it’s almost midnight.

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

“We’re drinking a toast to you, Mom!”

Kathy - Shooting for that elusive Mother of the Year Award
Project 366 - Day 95

A couple of weekends ago I took my oldest son away, so that he and I could complete the Passport 2 Purity curriculum. Almost two years ago, Kathy purchased the CDs and workbooks, but they gathered dust on a shelf in our mud room, waiting on my convenience.

I wish I hadn’t waited so long. At 14, my son is mature and knowledgeable, but the Passport 2 Purity materials were designed for a younger, less mature audience. Even worse, in the past year Joshua has really begun to exercise a greater level of sovereignty in his life, and is becoming more and more reluctant to talk about certain subjects. I understand it is a natural (and possibly unavoidable) process, but it still makes me sad to see it happen, and it made for some awkward silences during the time that we had.

Still, we did have some good discussions.

We had a great weekend. As recommended by authors Dennis and Barbara Rainey, we organized the time around a recreational event, which I wrote about in an earlier post, Travels with Faramir. We completed all five of the sessions, with time to spare for questions and general discussion.

… and Faramir didn’t even push me in the lake!

The choice of theme verse seemed a bit unrelated to the study. On reflection, though, it provides a common thread that permeates the discussion in a very satisfying way. Christ should be the head of every aspect of your life - relationships, purity, studies, and so on.

And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.
Colossians 1:18

I’m not going to say a lot about the content of the Passport 2 Purity sessions, since there is some element of surprise to it, and I don’t want to ruin the event for any of my younger readers and their parents. Suffice it to say, that the material is an excellent way for a parent to begin to discuss the topics of sexuality, purity and dating relationships with a child on the brink of their transition to adulthood.

Naturally, we had technical difficulties, and had to scramble for a backup CD player.

One of the things I really liked about the weekend course is that it covers the basics without being too heavy-handed. The tone is light and informative, and Rainey repeatedly circles back around to emphasizing the importance of the child-parent relationship.

Perhaps the most surprising part of the material was the fourth session, in which the Raineys talk about purity. He quickly gets your attention: “I’m not going to tell you that the standard for Christians before marriage, is virginity.” Instead, he teaches that the Biblical notion of purity extends well beyond that ‘line in the sand’ which so many well-intentioned folks have drawn. Using the metaphor of a cliff-edge, Rainey walks both parent and child through an exercise of arranging various levels of physical contact in order, from ‘least dangerous’ to ‘most dangerous’. He talks about the tendency to progress through levels of physical intimacy, as a relationship extends in duration. “Where will you draw the line?” he challenges. “How much of your purity will you give away before your wedding day?”

These are sobering questions. Many parents of my generation are in the unenviable position of having to tell their children: “Don’t do what I did.”

Were we ever that young?

Parents today cannot assume that their children will remain pure by default. Our culture bombards children with sexual innuendo and explicit images, through TV, movies, magazines and the internet. As one of my friends recently joked, a parent dare not assume that his children are innocents in this area:

Dad: Well, son, now that you’re a freshman in high school; it’s time that we had a talk about sex.
Son: Sure, Dad. What do you want to know?

Rainey works hard to bring the listener (both adult and child) to the understanding that a decision about purity must be made in advance, in order to hold to any kind of a moral standard. He warns that if you wait to decide what you will do when you are already in a relationship, you are practically guaranteeing that you will bow the knee to temptation.

I wish my parents had walked me through a curriculum of this nature, while I was still in their home. Although Kathy and I stood at the altar as virgins on our wedding day, there are lines of intimacy that we crossed, before we were married, which I regret.

Ultimately, an unmarried young man may find it helpful to think of himself as guarding his own purity and that of anyone he dates, in trust for their future spouses. I think this is a teaching that would have resonated with me, as a man who highly values honor and integrity. I think young Christian men are entirely capable of restraining their lusts, especially if they see themselves as honor-bound to guard and preserve the purity of the young lady they accompany. For some reason, this concept never took root in my mind, though it seems blindingly obvious, in hindsight.

The course included lots of interesting secret projects

Parents with eleven- or twelve-year-old children should rush out and purchase the Passport 2 Purity package, and start making plans to get away with your son our daughter for a weekend as soon as you are able. I strongly recommend this curriculum to your immediate attention. Kathy and Rachel are already scheming about their weekend away together.

Tim

I’m not sure this technically counts as a Works for Me Wednesday post. It’s a trifle long, but very worth reading. I can say that somewhat objectively since I didn’t write it.

I call it:

A Lord of the Rings Inspired Hike — by Tim

Every three or four years, I like to venture out into the Great Outdoors™, if only to maintain my reputation as a master woodsman.

It seems like only yesterday when I hiked with my two oldest sons (Slug and Weasel) in the beautiful Duckabush valley. Still, my dedication to the sport is such that I rarely let more than a decade go by, without some excursion or other into the hills and forests. Even a man in peak physical condition like myself must take care to maintain his physique.

We had to park 1/4 mile from the trailhead, because we forgot to buy a parking pass.

I had occasion recently to spend a weekend with my oldest son, as we carefully navigated the excellent Passport 2 Purity curriculum published by Family Life Today. While that is worthy of some discussion, I’ll write about it some other time. My wife, Latte, is often critical of my long, wandering and pointless blog posts. “The server only has 300 gigabytes of storage, you know,” she fleers. (If there is anything worse than a techno-phobe spouse, it is one that knows just enough to be dangerous. But I digress.)

One part of the weekend that the Family Life people recommend, is to bake in 2-4 hours of time for some kind of fun event, in case the rest of the weekend is miserably uncomfortable. “You want this weekend to be a happy memory,” they sagely advise. I asked my oldest son what he would like to do as a father-and-son activity, giving him several attractive options:

• Normalizing a relational database together
• Collaborating on the design of the middleware for a data integrity application
• A joint effort in organizing all the tools in our garage
• Teaming up to mow the lawn
• Hiking together up to a lake in the Olympic Mountains
• Sharing a visit to a local history museum

For some reason he didn’t really consider any but the last two (he is, after all, a history buff). Worried that my manly physical prowess might shame him, I tried to steer my son toward the museum. “Tell ya what,” I wheedled. “If you pick the museum, I’ll throw in a large milkshake and a couple of bucks to spend in the souvenir shop.”

Unmoved, he stuck with the hike. “C’mon, Dad,” he scoffed. “It’s only 3 miles to the lake — how hard can it be? Har, har, har.” While he cannot compare to my brother, Torpid, when it comes to sniggering, Slug has a pretty good evil laugh. “Har, har, har,” I agreed, grinding my teeth.

Editor’s Note: My oldest son has decreed that he doesn’t like being called ‘Slug’ anymore. As a mature father, not desiring to exasperate my son, I’ve reluctantly agreed. In honor of his recent obsession with Tolkien’s work, I’ll bestow upon him the moniker, “Faramir”, although I can’t say I really like being Denethor, even by implication. Denethor was a lot dumber than I ever aspire to be.

Naturally, the forecast for the weekend was rain, sleet, wet fog, showers, drizzles, and a bit more rain. Undeterred, Faramir and I laced up our boots and set forth into the trackless waste.

The Olympic National Forest actually abounds with trackless wastes.

“Ummmm, there sure are a lot of tracks, signs, and candy wrappers in this ‘trackless waste‘”, quipped Faramir, pointing at the large informational kiosk and the well-defined trailhead. My oldest son never has been very sophisticated when it comes to writing (or even living) heroic literature.

“Who’s going to read a story about two bold heroes if they stick to well-marked trails all the time,” I challenged. “‘What a bunch of sissies,’ they’ll conclude, dismissively. No, for proper epic narrative, it’s trackless wastes or nothing.” But there was no use explaining that to an unlettered man of the forest like Faramir.

I let my son lead the way so that he could set the pace, not desiring to leave him behind in the murky forest as I effortlessly bounded up the mountain. Realizing that he would feel pressured to overextend his strides if I followed behind him too closely, I dropped back a bit. “Say, Dad,” my son shouted from three switchbacks above me. “Do you think you’ll be coming along, soon? It’s starting to get dark, Har, har, har!”

He’s a hoot, that boy Faramir. Some time later we found a bridge, and re-enacted the famous scene between Gandalf and the Balrog, in the mines of Moria. “YOU … SHALL … NOT … PASS!” Intoned the wanna-be Gandalf. “I don’t want to pass,” I muttered, under my breath. “I want to go back to the car.” I reflected on the foolishness of Balrogs, which cheered me up considerably.

It turns out, the whole bridge conflict in the Mines of Moria was the result of an innocent misunderstanding.

After trudging at least six or seven miles, much of it bordering on vertical, we encountered another hiker heading down the trail. “How … much … farther,” I gasped. He looked at me in some concern, and then at the nearly flat trail segment I had just traversed. “Not much more than another mile,” he assured me, heartily, with an encouraging smile. His guileless visage radiated integrity and goodwill, so I recognized him immediately as an agent of a dark power.

It is a little-known fact that the Forest Service hires spiteful, ill-intentioned men and stations them on trails all around the nation to spread false hope and to prey upon unsuspecting travelers. Once when particularly enraged, I managed to wrestle one of them to the ground, and, breaking a few of his fingers in the process, snatched a fragment of his guidebook:

“You must always work to lure the unsuspecting hiker deeper into the forest, with optimistic promises that their destination is ‘just over the next rise’ or ‘just around the next bend’. Work to communicate a sense of hearty cheer and use vague measurements of time and distance wherever possible. Freely use your imagination to extoll the beauty and majesty of the destination, especially since it is unlikely the hiker will ever actually find it. Be careful not to …

Unfortunately, the fragment was torn at that point, and the Forest Service operative had already made his escape. I have often wondered what it was, that they were supposed to be careful not to do?

Not more than five miles later, we encountered another troll bridge, where Joshua amused himself playing Gandalf again. “How come I always have to be the Balrog,” I whined, somewhat out of character. It didn’t seem fair that he had a stick, but my whip had to be virtual.

In spite of prejudice, some Balrogs are actually very mild-mannered and thoughtful.

Soon the trail was covered in snow, as we persisted in our hopeless quest for the lake. Various fallen trees and the corpses of earlier hikers littered the path. (Well, OK, I’m exaggerating about the corpses.) The rain settled in happily, and our spirits were low. Suddenly, we noticed what seemed to be a large open field, off to the right. “It’s the lake,” we shouted gleefully.

Eventually the trail wound down to the surface of the lake, which was mostly frozen over. “Go on across,” I urged Faramir, trying to radiate integrity and goodwill.

Quite a bit smarter than you would expect a Ranger of Ithilien to be, my son declined the opportunity. “No, I would not dream of showing you such disrespect by taking the lead. Yours is the place of honor and of command, Oh My Father.” We tussled a bit on the edge of the lake, trying to throw one another in, before a fragile truce was established.

A dark and foreboding lake in Mordor, where the shadows lie.

We sat for a moment at the shore of the lake, drinking in the stark beauty of the scene, still gripped tightly in the claws of winter, despite the warm winds of Spring.

“Ready to go?” I asked.

“Yep. We came to see a lake, and of all the lakes I’ve seen, that’s one of ‘em.” Faramir rose and stomped his boots in the snow.

Some men seek to extract every possible benefit from the Journey of Life, savoring each moment and appreciating the beauty that surrounds them. Of such cloth, my son and I are not made. Ours is a simple existence of tasks and objectives, which we neatly check off so that we can move on to the next one. We climbed this mountain to see a lake, and we saw it. Next objective: get back to the car so we can enjoy our root beer.

Our Checklist

• Get through all five sessions of Passport 2 Purity.
• Climb a mountain and see a lake.
• Eat as many of our snacks as possible before heading home.
• Build some good memories and strengthen our relationship as father and son, and … as friends.

Check, check, check … and check, I think.

On the way home, we passed a group of hopeful hikers, bravely trudging up the hill. “Not much more than another mile,” we assured them heartily, radiating integrity and goodwill.

Tim

Could he by my son? My first born?

How did that happen?
Kathy