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I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. —Philippians 3:14 We live in a beautiful beach town, Dana Point, on the coast of Southern California. We never tire of the view. On most days when we are near the water, we see Catalina Island, twenty-six miles offshore. There are a few days when it is foggy and you can’t see it, but it is forever etched in our minds. People board boats from the harbor in our town to visit this magical island every day of the year. Some people take a fifteen-minute helicopter flight. A few brave souls paddleboard to the island, but very few ever try to swim there. In 1952, Florence Chadwick decided to swim from Catalina Island to the shores of Southern California. She had already swum the English Channel, so in her mind, this would be easier. She jumped in the water one cold day in winter. No problem for Florence Chadwick. But as she swam hour after hour with a boat following her to make sure she was all right, fog settled in and she began to wonder how much farther she had to go. At last she motioned for the boat to pick her up. As it turned out, Florence was only a half mile from reaching her goal. She wasn’t too exhausted or cold. The fog had simply obscured her vision from her target. So she quit. On the day of our wedding, we had a goal: to draw closer to each other and closer to God. Too many times, though, the weight of home responsibilities, work pressures, kid worries, and all the rest fog our vision for closeness. Spiritually speaking, everyone has foggy days. But God is there to say to us in His quiet, persistent voice, “Don’t quit. Persevere. Do all you can to keep your eyes focused on the prize.” The writer of Hebrews gave us a formula for perseverance: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart” (12:1-3). The way not to grow weary and lose heart in your marriage is to keep your eye on the goal. Stay focused on Jesus, our goal, our sustainer, our Savior. FAITH CONVERSATIONS: • Has there been a time when fog surrounded our marriage? • What areas of our lives do we need to persevere in right now? • How can I help you do that? A STEP CLOSER: GOALS FOR OUR MARRIAGE Together come up with three goals for your marriage relationship to work on in the next month and list them below. Then think of three action steps that would help you accomplish those goals. Now circle what you can work on this week. 1. 2. 3. (Excerpted from Closer: 52 Devotionals to Draw Couples Together by Jim and Cathy Burns; Bethany House, 2009.)The post Couples Devotional: Don’t Lose Sight of the Goal first appeared on HomeWord.

Families are in need of more calm and less stress! The breathless pace we’re living in is tearing families apart. Still, there is something that can be done about the stress you and your family experiences. A lot of stress can be removed if you make the tough choices necessary to gain control over your schedule. Here are five choices you can make to help eliminate the stress in your life. 1. Create a Calm Environment at Home. Make your home a safe, calm haven from the madness going on in the outside world. Try not to overreact to circumstances of home life. Sure, many issues need to be addressed, but when you get angry or frustrated, overreactions are common and family stress levels rise. Look to cool down before you respond to such situations. 2. Refresh Your Spirit. Make time for God everyday. Reading a daily devotional each day is a great way to refresh your spirit in the presence of God. Encourage your family to do the same. Consider a regular family devotional time. 3. Renew Your Body. To eliminate stress, we need to be people who reflect balance in our physical lives. Everyone in your family needs plenty of rest, exercise, and a healthy diet. 4. Strengthen Family Relationships. Our families provide us with relational connections that will sustain us through both good times and bad. Strained or broken family relationships are naturally accompanied by stress. To eliminate stress, take the lead with your family to make sure your relationships become and stay healthy. 5. Roll with the Punches. No family is exempt from difficulties in life. Some are brief “moments” while others are “seasons.” How we respond to the hard times is a determining factor of whether or not stress will wreak havoc with our family. Stay flexible when the tough times happen and your family will still be standing when those times have passed. In the end, your family’s stress levels have a lot to do with your own choices. You can choose to let busyness, over-commitment, and hard times take their toll on your family, or you can proactively make choices to lower the stress your family experiences. Begin today by making choices to ruthlessly eliminate stress in your home!The post Five Tips to Eliminate Stress in Your Home first appeared on HomeWord.

Some parents attempt to hide their true emotions when things are going bad, but this may be doing more harm than good. One study found kids can spot when their parents are under stress. According to researchers at Washington State University in a study published in the Journal of Family Psychology, parents often signal their suppressed emotions to their children, which can be harmful to the youngsters. During the study, children picked up on their parent’s emotions and changed their behavior to match the parent. Another study from King’s College in London published in the American Journal of Psychology found that anxiety is not only genetically passed on from parents to kids but also through exposure to parents’ anxious tendencies. Researchers found that anxiety could be transmitted from parent to child by observing the parents’ fears or worries in their actions or overhearing their conversations. Kids would then adopt those same worries. Parents also passed along their anxiety by unnecessarily shielding their kids from something they feared. On the flip side, parents were also found to perpetuate their children’s existing anxieties by altering their parenting choices to allow their kids to avoid facing anxiety-producing experiences. What Can Parents Do? • Make the decision to meet your personal anxieties head-on and develop healthy strategies for coping with them. Evaluate your anxiety levels, and identify your primary anxieties. Do you have appropriate strategies for coping with your anxieties? If not, why not? Your goal should be to make your home as emotionally stable and anxiety-free as possible for your children. • Consider the ways that your anxieties manifest themselves at home and in family life. What examples are you providing your kids regarding how to deal with anxieties in life? How can you improve your role modeling? • Evaluate the extent to which you see your own anxieties being passed along to your children. If you find that your kids have similar anxieties, be proactive in teaching and practicing coping skills together. • Try not to enable your children’s anxieties by helping them to avoid situations or experiences that trigger them. For example, if your child fears visiting a dentist, delaying dental care should not be a viable option. In the long run, it’s far better to help your kids face their anxieties, resolve them whenever possible, or teach healthy coping skills for those that cannot be resolved.The post Parent Research: Parents Pass Their Anxieties to Kids first appeared on HomeWord.

Life, marriage, and ministry can take its toll on a couple’s intimacy. It’s not difficult to become spiritually isolated from one another. Cathy and I have struggled with this in the past. In recent years, we’ve taken some intentional steps to move back towards spiritual intimacy and better communication. One of the key steps we’ve put into practice is what we call our “weekly meeting.” A successful meeting could take 5-10 minutes or much longer. Here’s the outline that we follow for our meeting time… 1. Review your recent quiet-times and devotional life. Share with each other what you’ve been doing in regard to your personal times with the Lord and what you’ve been learning and experiencing. 2. Share your greatest joy of the week. Sometimes life gets so hectic—with your spouse and family going in what seems like a million different directions—that you may not have had the opportunity to share your greatest joy with your spouse. This meeting provides a time where your spouse can catch up with the joys you have experienced.  3. Share your greatest struggle of the week. Here’s the flip side of the coin, if you will. Still, sharing your struggles with your spouse is equally important as sharing your joys. Hang in there though, because sometimes, as I have learned, the greatest struggle your spouse has experienced can be you. 4. Share an affirmation of your spouse. I believe strongly that affirming your spouse (and receiving affirmation) is tremendously important in developing spiritual intimacy with one another!  5. Share a wish or a hope for yourself or your family. This helps you to focus on your spouse’s needs and desires. Often, I’ve found that I can be part of the process that allows Cathy to realize her wish or hope.  6. Share physical goals for yourself. Cathy and I try not to neglect the physical issues when it comes to having a balanced life. Sharing our physical goals with one another helps provide an avenue of accountability.  7. Pray Together. Once you’ve shared on all of the above topics, you’ll be ready to pray – and you’ll have some very specific issues to pray about.The post Outline of a Weekly Meeting for Couples first appeared on HomeWord.

Ah, it’s spring again! Time to throw open the windows, take down the shutters, put away your winter wardrobe, and do a little spring cleaning. There’s something about spring that just makes you want to shake out the rugs and sweep out the garage. Spiritually, we sometimes need a little spring cleaning as well — a readjustment that guarantees that our priorities are right. To start, I challenge you to honestly answer the questions below to see if there’s work to be done in your life. I love the story of the first grader who had noticed that her father had been bringing home more and more work from the office each night. When she asked her mother why, her mother explained, “Daddy has so much work to do that he can’t get it all done at the office.” “Well then,” the girl innocently wondered, “why don’t they put him in a slower group?” You know, maybe that’s not such a bad idea. As the pace of life gets more hectic and unhealthy, perhaps the solution is to join a “slower group.” Often we live at a breathless pace that creates stress, fractures family relationships, and squeezes God out of our daily lives. If you work hard and play hard, you’ll probably crash hard. Now may be the time to take one giant step backward. Take a few moments to evaluate your spiritual, emotional, financial, and relational priorities. Perhaps like me, your life is ready for some spring cleaning of the heart. Clean Sweep Checklist Think through the following questions. Your answers will quickly reveal if some priorities need to be readjusted. • When was the last time you made a new friend? • How often do you and your spouse go out on a date? • Do you get enough sleep at night? • Do you have credit problems or carry too much debt? • Are your children showing signs of stress? • When was the last time you really laughed out loud? • When was the last time you took time out to do something fun with your whole family? • Has your faith become mechanical and detached from life? • Is your job strengthening or strangling you? • Have you eaten your vegetables today? Really?The post Spring Cleaning first appeared on HomeWord.