“Universities around the country, including Arizona State University, are starting to reject and remove from the marketplace of ideas the notion that Christian groups should be allowed to stay Christian,” Carden says. In this case, he notes, ASU is requiring the Christian Legal Society chapter to “open its membership and its leadership to everyone, regardless of their religious preference or their sexual orientation.”

According to Carden, the school is forcing an autonomous religious group to dilute its identity. “You don’t tell a vegetarian club that they have to allow meat-eaters or hunters as part of their group. You don’t tell the communist club that they have to allow capitalists to be leaders and officers of their group,” he points out. “So here in the university setting, only the Christian group is being told they can’t require their members and officers to adhere to a set of beliefs.”

Brown, Jim. Ariz. State Forcing Group to ‘Dilute’ Its Christian Identity, Says Lawsuit
November 29, 2004. Agape Press

Comment: How far down the road of double-standard is this nation going to go?

STORY USED AS ILLUSTRATION

I was in a hurry to paint my new shed before winter. In the basement, I found a 7-year-old gallon of paint that matched the house. The pigment had separated from the solvents, so it needed significant stirring. To accelerate the process, I constructed a makeshift paint stirrer out of heavy-gauge rod and inserted it into an old ¼-in. Black & Decker drill (without variable speed).

Squeezing the trigger on and off, I found things were progressing smoothly until the trigger-locking mechanism locked the drill on. By the time I got things shut down, brown paint had splattered over everything in the workshop, including my 4-year-old son, who had climbed up on a stool to watch Dad.

found in: Reader’s Digest - Handyman Plus! May 2006 eletter

Comment: Mixing Law and Gospel can leave quite a mess; if parents don’t understand the difference, what they teach their children can be a splattered mess of truth and fiction.

PORTIONS OF AN ARTICLE

Though preschoolers are too young to grasp many of the abstract concepts that go hand-in-hand with spiritual life, they have other skills that will serve them well on the road to spirituality: They have no problem believing in things they can’t see, and they live almost entirely in the moment.

…This is the perfect age to begin nurturing your child’s spiritual side… [G]iving your child a foundation in faith will also give her something to fall back on in trying times later in life. “As recent events have shown us,” says Neifert (Marianne Neifert, is a pediatrician, mother of five, and the author of Dr. Mom’s Prescription for Preschoolers: Seven Essentials for the Formative Years), “in times of crisis, people turn to their faith. It’s a way to ground ourselves, and a way to interpret events that we don’t understand.”

What you can do to nurture your child’s spirituality: Clarify your own beliefs. Whether or not you practice an organized religion, you’ll need to decide what you believe in order to foster spirituality in your child… If you and your partner have different religions it’s wise to decide how you’ll approach spirituality with your child now, before she’s old enough to get confused by your differing opinions.

…Use daily events to teach spirituality. Big ideas don’t always require big actions. You can demonstrate that spirituality is a part of everyday life by incorporating it into ordinary actions and words. When you open the curtains in the morning, you can say, “Look at this glorious day Mother Nature made.” At bedtime, you can sign off with, “God bless you, sweetie pie.”

…Practice silence. Once a day or once a week, take a minute to sit quietly with your child, encouraging her to be silent and listen to her inner voice. Your moment of silence needn’t be introduced as some lofty practice of meditation, but simply as a calming break in a noisy day. Whether your child uses this time to commune with the divine or simply to rest and recharge, it’ll help put her in touch with the “big” picture.

…Follow your child’s lead. Let your child ask the questions, and give her plenty of opportunities to discuss her own notions of issues such as who God is, what heaven looks like, or what happens to people after they die. Try not to dictate the answers to big questions. If she asks you where God lives, begin your answer by asking her what she thinks. Or ask her to draw a picture and tell you about it. Spirituality is a two-way street: If you listen carefully to your preschooler, you might discover something you never thought of before.

How to raise a spiritual child
December, 2004. MSN Family – Raising Kids

Comment: There are good points here, and not so good. I agree that you want to start young with your child. A time of silence is good practice for church on Sunday. Better yet, is a time of devotion -- to hear God's word and practice sitting still. Some parents give up bringing their children to church because their children aren't used to sitting still. This can be overcome by practicing at home. God wants us to bring the little children to him, and not allow a little squirminess undermine instilling in them the importance of listening to God... and taking out time to worship God.

LUTHER QUOTE ON EDUCATION

Above all, the foremost reading for everybody, both in the universities and in the schools, should be Holy Scriptures – and for the younger boys, the Gospels. And would to God that every town had a girls’ school as well, where the girls would be taught the gospel for an hour every day either in German or in Latin… Is it not right that every Christian man know the entire gospel by the age of nine or ten? Does he not derive his name and his life from the gospel? A spinner or a seamstress teaches her daughter her craft in her early years. But today even the great, learned prelates and the very bishops do not know the gospel.

Luther, Martin. To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. LW 44, 205-206

Comment: I'm sure the reformer would be quite disappointed on how far the Bible has been removed from education. But thankfully we have Christian Day Schools where we have the right to teach our children God's Word, and properly prepare them not only for this life, but for eternity.

QUOTE

When Jesus said that with the increase of wickedness the love of most will grow cold (Matthew 24:12), we must ask ourselves, “How this can happen?” It happens when the story of our creation becomes supplanted with a Godless notion of evolution…

It happens when a society actually accepts celebrating a Christmas without Christ. It happens when the birth of God-made-man is void of the reason why God became man. It happens when we begin to talk about God as One who would never send people to a place like hell. It happens when the cross is emptied of its significance and, at best, the open tomb is just another hiding spot for an Easter egg.

The solution to the problem is the most difficult of all. It requires a blind trust (i.e., Spirit-induced faith) in the things God has revealed in His Word. That means we must learn that Word. It must become so much a part of our life it is the sieve by which we filter all other things in life.

Fleischmann, Robert. Stopping Erosion, p. 13
January/February 2006. Clearly Caring, Vol. 26, No. 1