Let’s chat about some great devotional books our family has enjoyed. I LOVE character study books. I have seen my children grow in their faith and understanding of how the scriptures apply to their lives on a real and meaningful basis through the books and stories we have read over the years.

This is one of my favorite topics and I am passionate about intentionally providing excellent devotional books for the children. I wrote about some of our choices for the younger ages in an earlier WFMW post. This evening I went through my shelves and realized I have several books that are especially appealing to boys. That said, I must note that with five children (two of whom are girls) it is imperative that our reading is accessible to both the male and female listeners. These books have been enjoyed by the girls and boys alike in our family.

Now I share them with you.

Devotional Books for Boys

The Power of One by Ron Luce. The edition I have is a gift book. Amazon links to a new one that is being published in July.

This is a powerful book full of personal stories of teens who face real instances of peer pressure. Very inspiring. I am definitely going to look for additional books by Ron Luce. Luce is the President and Founder of Teen Mania Ministries, a Christian youth organization that reaches millions of young people worldwide.

Tiger and Tom (and other stories for boys) by J. E. White. I found this little treasure at a curriculum sale one year. The stories were originally gathered from church papers in the 1870’s and many of them powerfully illustrate the consequences of sinful life choices.

What do I do now, Lord by Chris Jones. This book was in a big box of library cast offs. Always looking to connect with my active boys, I immediately grabbed this when I saw the sub title: Devotions for Boys. Each of the individual stories feature a young boy facing real-life problems — fears, friends, bullies, getting along with parents - and end with a scripture and prayer. I read this to Joshua (age 14) years ago and recently picked it up to read to Daniel (age 11). It’s perfect for the pre-teen (or younger) boy.

Her Mother’s Bible & Hedge Fence The Golden Text Series by Isabella Alden. This is another collection that was written in the 1800’s. In each story a young boy reads a portion of scripture that has been highlighted by his grandmother. God teaches him what the verse means and how it should be applied to his life. It was moving to see how his understanding of scripture grew through out the book. A classic.

Building of the Rock five book devotional series. Joel Beeke and Diana Kleyn have taken a selection of real life incidents and fictional narratives and developed them into a series of devotional books for children aged 7-12. We devoured all five of these books and were eager for more. The stories include a mixture of historical adventure, childhood experiences, remarkable instances of conversion and dramatic, rescues from danger. There is a question and scripture reference at the end of each story.

How God Used a Thunderstorm
How God Stopped the Pirates
How God Used a Snowdrift
How God Used a Drought and an Umbrella
How God Sent a Dog to Save a Family

There you have it, just a few of our favorites. If you have a devotional book that your family loves, please leave a comment. Amazon is just a few clicks away and I am always eager to build our faith/life lessons library.

Stop by Rocks in My Dryer for other Works for Me Wednesday posts.

Kathy
Project 366 - Day 141

I love movies! I love the thrill of being lost in a fantastic story, putting up my feet, digging into a big bowl of popcorn and being swept away into another time or place.

As a Christian family, we try to be discerning and wise in our movie viewing (not an easy thing these days). Here are some resources we use in previewing and monitoring our movie choice:

Plugged In - run by Focus on the Family, this is a Christian review site. Profanity, sexual content, violence, and religious themes are all clearly outlined.

Screen It - another “spoiler” type review website. Unlike Plugged In, this is not a Christian based site. It is geared toward parents, however, and does an excellent job of detailing the specific content of the movie. There is a separate section where the author rates the movie (on a 1 to 10 scale). Although he is not filtering through a Biblical world view, I often find the movie critique to be insightful.

If the children are going to watch a movie they have to pay a “chip.” Daniel and David encourage Sarah to pay as often as possible. They even occasionally let her actually select the movie. That’s big brothers for you.

IMDB (International Movie Database) - the mother of all movie websites. It has every movie, actor, director, etc every made in it’s database. This is the place to research movies, cross reference composers, or just plain track down the answer to that illusive question.

“Who was that guy who played in that movie with the other girl? You know, the one where she kisses him at the end?”

If you can figure out even one little piece of the puzzle - the name of the movie, one of the actors, even the year in which it was made - you can unravel the mystery and connect the movie dots. This has brought much peace in our household. Tim has resigned himself to my OCD need to place actors into proper movie context.

“Tim,” I’ll say in the middle of a movie. “Do you recognize that character? Yes, the cashier. Do you think he’s the same guy who played the teacher in the comedy we saw last week?”

Poor guy. He doesn’t even pause. After all, the “movie itch” isn’t going to go away. I must know.

“Why don’t you go check IMDB and see. I can wait.” Of course, that’s code for ‘I’ll be playing my computer game while you get online. Call me when you’ve figured it out.’

For movie trivia, you can’t get any better than IMDB. You can also find trailers and links to other external reviews.

Yahoo Movie Listings - I keep this site bookmarked because it links automatically to my zip code and will list all the theaters in my area, complete with showing times, movie info and maps.

Coming Soon Trailers - proceed with caution. This site collects the newest trailers as they are released. We don’t have a tv and rarely go to the theater, so if we do see a movie preview, it’s usually online. I ignore all the “junk” or questionable movies, and enjoy the fun ones. Although they do include children’s films as they are released, this is definitely not a site for kids to visit unsupervised.

These buddies stick together.

ClearPlay - a dvd player that offers filtering options. We purchased ours at Target last year but they have since stopped carrying them. Basically you purchase a subscription to the filters (which are accessed online), load them on to a USB stick and then plug the stick into the dvd player. The ClearPlay DVD player recognizes the filter and applies them to your copy of the movie. Profanity, violence and inappropriate sexual scenes are either edited or skipped. Recently we had some trouble with the audio portion of our player (purchased in November 2007), ClearPlay paid for our shipping and is mailing us a new DVD player free of charge.

If you have a movie resource that your family recommends, please leave a comment. I’d love to hear about it.

Visit Rocks in My Dryer for other Works For Me Wednesday tips.

Keep your eyes open for Fireproof, the newest movie produced by the makers of Facing the Giants, coming out in the fall of 2008. Check out the trailer! Looks powerful.

Kathy

This evening, while I was ignoring the dirty dishes and waiting for the seventh load of laundry to finish, I stumbled across a list of books that are being made into movies. Now, I know that I spend more time reading blogs and homeschooling books than actual novels, but this is a LONG list and I don’t recognize even half of them. Surely I’m not THAT out of touch with the literary pulse of our society.

As a comparative literature major, that is a wee bit embarrassing. Well, it would be if I wasn’t so busy with the aforementioned laundry and dirty dishes. And if I were a little more confident in the caliber of books being published these days.

Mom, I’m not sure about these books.

Look it over and tell me if these are books you have read and loved (or hated). I should also mention, I am in no way recommending these books (or the potential movies). If they are wildly inappropriate, I apologize! As I said earlier, I have not read (or even heard) of most of these titles.

Uglies
A Great and Terrible Beauty
Inkheart
The A-List
I’d Tell You I Love You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You
Teen Idol
Maximum Ride
Airborn
The Clique
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 — August 2008
City of Ember
A Yellow Raft In Blue Water
Wolf Brother
Lovely Bones
On the Road
Where the Wild Things Are
The Looking Glass Wars
The Time Traveler’s Wife
Valiant
The Historian
City of Beasts
Avatar
My Sister’s Keeper
The Ruins
Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging
Marley and Me
The Tale of Despereaux - December 2008
The Other Boleyn Girl — already out in the theaters
The Kite Runner — already completed
Love in the Time of Cholera — out in theaters
The Lightning Thief
Emily the Strange (comic)
The Giver
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Flipped
Stargirl
Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
Maestro
Narnia: Prince Caspian — May 2008
The Hobbit
Memory Keeper’s Daughter - on Lifetime TV
The Life Before Her Eyes - September 2008
Then She Found Me - May 2008
Nim’s Island - out in theaters

I am still surprised at the length of this collection. The real question, however, is not:

Have you read these books? But…

What book would YOU see made into a movie?

I love the Jane Austen flicks - wonderful! Joshua is crazy about the Lord of the Ring trilogy. We have several movie literary adaptations in our DVD library. After looking at this extensive list, I’ve started thinking about what other books just cry out to be made into movies. Three that came to mind while blogging late at night:

Prince of Foxes - this historical romance would be an amazing period piece with the right (dashing) cast
Ender’s Game - sci-fi author, Orson Scott Card, has been working for years on the movie version
Nearly anything by juvenile author Gordon Korman - love his kids books as they are clever, hysterical but clean and not filled with over the top obnoxious children.

David appreciates movies with sword fighting.

Leave a comment and tell me what titles I’ve overlooked. Oh, and did I mention we’re on a Budget (with a capital B) and don’t get to the movies much these days? Probably cheaper to just read the books from the library.

Kathy

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

Over the last several years, Kathy and I have made a concerted effort to find and buy a whole passel (maybe a passel and a half) of interesting board games for our family. At Christmas time, I research which games have won awards and (more importantly) are on sale, and then I buy a whole box-load from my favorite online retailer. This year they were all labeled, “To Rudolph”, since they are considered to be presents to the whole family. Joshua chortled whenever another “Rudolph” gift was discovered, as a pattern began to emerge.

A rare moment when I seemed to be winning.

(I’ve written to my favorite game store, asking them to offer a discount for my readers; if they do, I’ll be sure to post the details of the discount and a link to games I recommend.)

The knights and districts of Saga

Tonight I gathered my two oldest boys and we played a quick game of Saga, in which players compete to capture and retain six kingdom districts. There are only a few simple rules, and it is easy to pick up the basics of the game, but it has unexpected depth in playing strategy. Kingdom districts change hands as the players marshal increasingly large armies of knights, looking ahead three and even four turns to outwit opponents. The game ends when one player manages to get all his knights in play (either attacking or defending), leaving his opponents shaking their heads in consternation.

Several knights and the Castle province

I’ve played the game three times so far, and lost every time — but I really enjoy its deceptive simplicity. Tonight Joshua timed it beautifully, snatching the critical forest-land district from my control as he played his last knight, leaving me with my forces in disarray and an abysmal score. I haven’t been defeated that badly in a game in a long time … it was an exhilarating experience.