Family Relations

     This week I want to talk about how we can be an active parent instead of a reactive parent. When you are raising a child, you don't want to only react to what your child does. The purpose of parenting is to protect and provide for your children so they can be prepared in this world and the next. That is why taking an active part in raising your children is what I believe is a parents responsibility and duty to not only their child but to God.      When you are raising a child they can get annoying, you can get frustrated with them and you may feel at your wits end but the child is acting that way for a reason and it is the parents responsibility to fulfill that need for their own children. For some reason in the world today parents believe that it is someone else's responsibility to raise their children for them and that if they act out or do something that the parents don’t like then it is someone else's fault, for example school teachers. This type o...

             This week I want to talk about work and finances. I know that this is a pretty broad topic, so I want to focus on the impact that these things can have on children. To start off I want to share two different peoples experiences that I am personally close to. Both of them were raised in a loving and caring home. The first was someone that was raised with care and their parents gave them everything they needed and wanted and they wanted for nothing. This person graduated high school and went to college a couple states away from where their parents lived. They were excited to “start their life” but they ran into a problem. They told me that they had never even cooked for themselves before and that their mother always had food ready for them. They didn’t know how to cook or how to clean. They also wanted to be financially independent but they had no idea how to even look for a job. They didn’t know how to budget or how bills worked. They ...

        Alright, so this week I want to talk about communication. I have talked about having better communication in your relationships in previous posts but how do you change the way you communicate with someone? I will be blunt right up front. It is NOT easy. The good news is that you can learn how to communicate with someone so that you both grow closer together. Before we go into how to communicate, let’s go into what communication is. To keep it simple, communication is to share your thoughts and feelings with those around you. Here is a little diagram that I really like. So if you want to share a thought or a feeling you send an encoded message to the other person that they then have to decode to understand what you are trying to get across. The reason that you are sending encoded messages is because we each have a certain way that we communicate. Some of us use more facial expressions while some of us could use inflection of the voice to share what we actual...

       I want to talk about stress and depression this week. I know that it can be touchy for some but I feel that it is something that is really important to cover. Just remember that we are all children of God and that we need to respect those around us whether they are close or across the world. So let's dive right into the nitty gritty. Stress for most is something to avoid at all costs but is that really healthy. Did God create this plan for us to come down to this earth to learn and grow so that we could become more like him or did He create it so that we could come down to earth and just sit back and just go with the flow and take the easiest least stressful path? I don’t know about you guys but I believe full heartedly that God put us here to learn and grow so that we would become more like him. If we just lived life without as much stress as possible, are we truly growing? I don’t think so. Now there are different types and levels of stress. There are leve...

Sexual intimacy is really important in a marriage. It is one of those things that can brake a marriage apart or bring the husband and wife closer together. Talking about sex to your husband or wife can be really hard and uncomfortable but you need to do this. There are things that are fundamentally different between a man and a woman. I want to touch on some of the things that a lot of couples were never taught because parents, for the most part, do not talk about sex to their children. So when teens or even pre-teens don’t get answers from their parents they go out and find out what they want from other sources. Those other sources teach about sex in a very distorted way. You should be your child's main source of information. You should teach them about how men and women are different and use proper names for body parts not made up ones.  Now men and women are different in many aspects. A lot of women believe that their husbands only think about sex and that is all he cares abou...

     So we talked about dating last week so this week I thought we should move on to early marriage. If you are dating in a correct and healthy way it should be a great way to get to know someone and learn if you will click with them and whether or not you would want to marry them. But remember when you marry someone and move in with them it does not matter how much you think you know them, you will learn even more about them after marrying them. For example while you are dating them you will find out what their hobbies are or what their favorite foods are. When you get a bit more serious you will also talk about how you would like to raise your children and your expectations out of your relationship together. Then when you marry them you will have to change how you live. You will have someone else in the bed with you, you will have to get used to someone else's things cluttering up the bathroom, you have to put up with each other's little quirks. I know that these things...