Every marriage provides some unique challenges!
From Leadership Magazine
Melanie at Mel's Coffee Break has posted a review of my book Roaring Lions, Cracking Rocks and Other Gem's From Proverbs. She also interviewed me for the post. In addition to the review Melanie if offering a give-away of the book. Please link over there and leave a comment to get included in the give-away. Thanks Melanie!
Note: link to Marriage Mondays at Julie's blog.
Do you ever go through the full-body scanners at airports? According to Dr. Douglas, M.D., you shouldn’t. Dr. Douglas cites a report by the The Inter-Agency Committee on Radiation Safety that such machines are not safe, and "that pregnant women and children should not be forced through them. The report -- which wasn't meant to be made public -- also said governments should have to justify their use of these radiation machines." (the quote is Dr. Douglas’ summation of the report).The book Why Johnny Can’t Come Home is almost impossible to put down once you start reading it. It is not a pleasant book. It is not a fun book. In fact, there are places in the book that will tear at your heart. You’ll get sad, you’ll get angry, but you will also get informed. Why Johnny Can’t Come Home is the story of a little boy taken forcibly from his home, his family, his community, his wonderful life. It is the story of a mother’s love that would leave no stones unturned in the search for her son. It is a story that is repeated 100,000 times every year. Yes, the streets of our cities, of even some of our small towns, have been turned into war zones for children.
If you already know that, why do you need to read the book? For three reasons. One, if anything like this tragedy ever befalls you or someone you love, you will have some idea of how to respond to the situation. Noreen Gosch, Johnny’s mother, learned that you can not just wait for the system to begin working. She called the police immediately after learning of her son’s disappearance. But in Nebraska, where the kidnaping occurred, there was a three day waiting period before a missing person was considered kidnaped or in some kind of danger. Until then, Johnny was classed as a runaway. The sad thing about this is it is within the first few hours that leads are the hottest. Didn’t matter. The family, Johnny, had to wait for 72 hours for an official process of investigation to begin. By that time, Johnny had been transferred out of the area. Thanks to Mrs. Gosch, that law has since been changed. But Noreen Gosch explains some of the actions she took and that any parent of a missing child should take in a similar tragedy.
Two, Why Johnny Can’t Come Home is the story of heroism such as I have rarely read about. Noreen Gosch is a brave, brave woman. A hero. Johnny, is a brave young man. Noreen worked for 14 long years before she got to see her son again, and then for only one and a half hours. Johnny had escaped his captors some years before but was on the run. He feared for his life and the life of his mother. You will be inspired by this story of a mother’s love, and your heart will leap for Mrs. Gosch when you read about her opening the door and seeing her son standing there.
Three, in the last chapter Noreen writes about dealing with the grief one experiences at the loss of a child. A person might experience this grief if a child dies, runs away or is kidnaped, but some of the principles of grief will be the same for any of the experiences. This chapter on grief is one of the best I have read. Topics deal with feelings, family and friendship issues, anger, helplessness, guilt and revenge, learning to cope with the holidays, dealing with insurance issues, and being patient with the criminal justice system. This chapter alone is worth the price of the book.
Finally, I recommend this book because the more of us who are aware of the war being waged against children in America, with some 100,000 stranger abductions a year, the better chance we have of changing criminal-friendly laws, securing longer prison terms for kidnapers, and saving our children. As a father, this book shocked me. As an American citizen it disappointed me. We are the greatest nation on earth, but according to the kidnaping and child abuse statistics, we have one of the least secure environments in which to raise children. It is a wonderful thing that we can go around the world and free people from the oppressive systems they live under. But who is going to come over here and free the children of America from the war being waged against them by the lowest, most despicable elements of this society? The casualty rate for children each year is over 100,000.
Go ahead. Get the book by Noreen Gosch and read it. It is called, Why Johnny Can’t Come Home. If nothing else, the children of America need for you to read it. Warren Baldwin
You can also read Why Johnny Can't Come Home #1
(Note: Another book on this topic to read is The Franklin Cover-Up by John W. DeCamp, a former congressman).
Occasionally I read a book that changes the way I view the world. There are only so many books that can provide that kind of paradigm shift. A book providing such a shift is, Why Johnny Can’t Come Home. It is not a cute child’s story nor a fable, as the title might imply. It is about a little boy who was forcibly kidnaped from his home and community and taken captive in a dark underworld of sin and degradation. I won’t supply all the details here of what twelve-year old Johnny Gosch had to endure. All I’ll say is that it involved drugs, physical abuse and mental abuse. What Johnny endured would break a lot of people. In fact, many children who are forced to experience what Johnny did do die ... from the abuse itself, overdosing on drugs, commiting suicide. Or they die in their minds - they lose control of their minds.
But Johnny endured. The book gives a couple of clues as to why he did. One reason is because he knew his family loved him. His dad went on the morning paper route with him ... except for the morning when he was kidnaped. He knew his mother loved him dearly. That love gave him strength to WANT to live against all odds and one day return home.
The second clue as to Johnny’s survival was his mother’s efforts to secure the boys release. Mrs. Gosch, Noreen, staged a single-woman national campaign to get Johnny back from his abductors. She went on TV and put posters up all over. One day, the TV was on where Johnny was being held captive. Johnny saw his mother on the Leeza Gibbons show pleading for her son’s safe return. Johnny knew his mother had not given up on him!
It would be 14 years before Mrs. Gosch ever saw her son again. He left when he was twelve and didn’t come home until he was twenty-six, and even that was not for long. At 2:30 in the morning Noreen heard a knock at the door. She was terrified, but peeked out. There was Johnny. She let him in. They hugged. And Johnny told part of his story. Only part of the story ... how can you recount the happenings of fourteen years at one sitting? And Johnny only told part of the story because some of his story was so ugly and painful. Johnny left after about an hour and a half. He was in hiding. Johnny had escaped his abductors some years before and was on the run. Yes, he was an adult now and could make his own decisions. He could have gone to the police, as some of the other children Johnny knew did. But Johnny was afraid. His captors said if he ever got away, if he ever told, they would come after him. Johnny was afraid for himself and his mother.
Johnny’s story is tragic, but not unique. About 100,000 children in America every year experience Johnny’s ordeal. Many never survive to make it to freedom. Many die. Many become drug addicts as a way of escaping reality. Many lose their minds. And many become child abusers themselves.
It took ten years in Viet Nam for us to lose 60,000 men. We call that a war. It takes only one year for us to lose 100,000 children to the war on the streets. But we don’t call that a war, even though it is. In fact, we don’t call it much of anything. We don’t call much attention to it at all. But Noreen Gosch does in her book Why Johnny Can’t Come Home. Noreen calls attention to the undeclared war against our children. I recommend you read Why Johnny Can’t Come Home. Next week I’ll give you three reasons why. Until then, remember Jesus' statement, "Let the little children come to me." Jesus came for children. Let’s not give up the fight for our children. They need us to stand up for them.
Warren Baldwin
Note: Read part two of Why Johnny Can't Come Home
In the beginning man had a heart for God and a heart for his wife. Man communed personally with God. But God knew something was missing for the man, Adam. All the animals of the field had a mate and a companion. While Adam had God to commune with, he had no other human being with whom he could share his heart and body.
So God made Eve and Adam was happy! Any time a man breaks out in a poem you know he has been deeply touched! Looking at Eve’s beautiful form for the first time Adam extolled, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman’ for she was taken out of man." (Genesis 2:23). Adam knew that Eve was for him and he was exultant! She would complement his heart, his mind and his body. All of his mental and sexual energy would be satisfied by the beautiful woman standing before him. Eve was Adam’s wife and he was happy.
What happened to this wonderful first marriage? Adam became discontented with God and ate of the fruit that was forbidden to him. Not being contented with God led to not being contented with his wife. We don’t know that Adam ever stepped out on Eve or was abusive to her in anyway, but we do know that after the Fall the innocence of both the husband and the wife was shattered. The focus of Adam and Eve was shifted from the other to self. Instead of being other-conscious and basking in the beauty of his wife Adam became self-conscious and covered up his body. When Adam took his focus off serving God it followed that he took his focus off serving his wife and he focused on serving himself.
Men, if we ever become discontented with our wives, it is probably because we have first experienced a discontentment with God. We aren’t in prayer, we aren’t in Bible study, we aren’t actively thanking God for all his blessings in our lives. One of God’s blessings to a man is his wife. She is God’s blessing to meet our companionship and sexual needs. If a man becomes critical of his wife and starts looking at and bonding with other women (or pictures!), he is not thanking God for the gift of his bride! He is withdrawing from God and from God’s gift to him.
Develop a heart for God and a heart for your wife will follow.
Question: What are some ways you have felt discontented with your wife? How does this discontentment with her demonstrate an even deeper discontentment with God?
Suggestion: Offer a prayer of thanks to God for his greatest gift of companionship to you: your bride. Thank him for the gift of conversation, friendship, sexual fulfillment and spiritual encouragement you enjoy with her. Even if all these blessings are not as fulfilling as you would like, thank God anyway, because you wouldn’t have them to any degree without her!
Meditate: "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman’ for she was taken out of man." (Genesis 2:23)
Warren Baldwin
Note: You are invited to link to Marriage Mondays.
The idea for the post below comes from a series of classes on Youth Ministry I attended recently at Harding University. Dr. Dan Stockstill was the presenter. Some of the following material is his with my own added in. To see all of Dr. Stockstill’s notes, click here.
The challenge for teens today is that they don’t know how to grow up. There is no definition. It is subjective. It is not discussed in detail in scripture. It is an assumption.
When does a teen become an adult? How do they know when they are an adult? I think I first felt like an adult when I was in college and my family went on a vacation to North Carolina. I could have gone but elected to stay home and work on a summer college course I was taking. Feeling in charge of my decision-making had as much to do with not going on the vacation as actually needing to work on my class. I could have studied at the beach in NC! (Note: looking back, I wish I had allowed myself to feel like a kid a little longer and gone on the trip!)
Through history the passage from youth to adulthood has ranged from being able to run a farm (for the male) or bearing kids and managing a home (for the female) to being able to get a job and afford to buy your own house to getting a good education. What is the model operative for young people today? What rite of passage is there that allows them to know when they have passed from youth to adulthood?
Since there is not an objective definition or standard, a young person can declare themselves to be an adult pretty much when they want to be. For some that will be after high school. For some it will be during or after college. But in our culture today, adulthood seems to be reached when one can engage in independent decision making, be responsible, manage their finances and maintain healthy relationships.
How do we help them? By extending family and church support until they can make decisions and act in ways that are congruent with what we understand to be adulthood.
I think this discussion has two important implications for families and churches as we teach and mentor our kids to adulthood. One, we need to think consciously about how we can prepare our kids to make decisions, manage resources, and handle problems.
I remember as a kid asking my dad about how to handle certain challenging situations (often on some little project my brothers and I were working on). He would say, "What do you think?" At first I would say, "I don’t know." Then he would say, "Suppose I wasn’t here, what would you do then?" (I soon learned saying, "I don’t know" wasn’t helping me). Then I would have to think hard and fast and come up with an answer. Sometimes he would then say, "Ok, try that and see how it works, then we’ll talk about it." He explained that he used this approach because he wanted us to learn how to think through situations.
Analyzing problems, devising solutions, testing our ideas, evaluating the results, and adjusting our approach is a critically important process for a young person to learn as he matures. If he doesn’t learn this, he will always be dependent upon others for their direction for his life. And, if he makes poor choices, based on his own decisions or another’s input, he will not know how to learn from his mistakes, rebound, and make better choices in the future. He may well wallow in a self-defeating lifestyle, blaming other people and his circumstances, never realizing he has the necessary tools to make better choices. Sadly, if people always made every decision for him (including his parents), he has the resources to make better decisions, but they were never developed.
Two, while parents are primarily responsible for the training of the children, churches are certainly involved in the process as well. Many times church youth programs are designed to provide fun and entertainment for you; do they provided opportunities for genuine growth and maturity? Do we teach kids to think about the Bible, moral situations, and ethical dilemmas? Is the atmosphere in the youth program open enough that youth feel comfortable asking any questions about faith, doubt, the Bible, or moral behavior, knowing that their concerns will be taken seriously and handled with respect?
Dan mentions that a youth program that serves only the interest of the immediate group may be building a community, but not necessarily a Christ-oriented one. A program that focuses on itelf "promotes narcissistic values. The end result of narcissism is self loathing. They end up hating what they should love." How many youth have we seen that spent all their teem years in the youth group, graduate high school, leave home, and never look at church, worship, Bible study or prayer again?
Two things churches can do to help our youth. Engage their minds with serious study and honest questions. Two, turn their focus outward. Youth are interested in ecology, world hunger, human trafficking and war. Does the Bible address any of these issues? Are there any Christian-based programs that address them? Dealing with such issues and ministry efforts expands the interest of the youth group beyond themselves and gives them a greater purpose. When they graduate high school they will (hopefully) have some sense of God’s call and ministry upon their lives, and will stay involved in the life of the church.
Serving and saving our youth is one of the most important callings for families and churches. I’m open to any suggestions you might make here as to how we can do that more faithfully.
Warren Baldwin
(Note: I’ll have more of Dan’s notes and my discussion later, perhaps next Friday. Meanwhile, you can read his notes at Ministry to Youth on my other blog).
(Note: I've tried numerous times to make these pictures line up right. Can't do it. Sorry).
Kristin waiting for her chance to putt.
Competitors, but friends also. (They were comparing who had the biggest hands)
The coach with his winning team.
Individual medal winners, Blake, Maggie, Kristin
The girls received their pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Warren Baldwin
For another article on supporting our kids in their athletic events, read See You At The Ballpark.
A college professors told us about the rigors of his routine as a Ph.D. student. He was in the library early in the morning, staying all day. After supper he either returned to the library or studied at home for hours. This routine continued for several years.
One of the students in our class asked him, "Did you have a family then?" "Yes," the professor replied. "How and when did you get to spend any time with them?" The professor smiled and said, "It’s not quantity time that counts, it’s quality time."
Quantity versus quality time is a tension for all families. There is a difference between the two. Quantity time refers to the minutes and hours we spend in each other’s presence. Quality time refers to the significance and importance of that time together.
Think of the time you spend in a car on a ten-hour drive together. That is quantity of time. Hour after hour drags on to the drone of the engine and the thump-thump-thump of the tires. The conversation can sometimes be as exciting. "Are we there yet? Are we getting close? How much farther? I’m tired. Can we get out for awhile? I have to use the bathroom."
That is definitely quantity time, and few people would argue that it is quality. But is that true? Who is to say that enduring a ten-hour odyssey together isn’t quality? Mom and dad are together with the kids. The kids argue. Mom and dad intervene. Some read. Some dose. All get antsy. But all are still together. In our hurried, scattered lives, there is some significance to simply being together.
Who knows what quality may be bred in the midst of the quantity? As everyone else sleeps, one of the kids may ask, "Dad, what should I do the next time Billy picks on me at school?" Or, "Mom, does Jesus really know who we are?" As one who has made numerous ten-hour, fifteen-hour, even twenty-hour car trips with my wife and children, I can attest that the emergence of the quality almost always happens in the hum-drum of the quantity.
Both quantity and quality of time is important. Quantity is important because it is the incubator of opportunity for meaningful conversation and events to occur. The eight hours working together boxing fund raising items in our garage prepared Cheryl and me to relax and reflect on what we appreciated about each other. The four hours of chasing a diapered kid around the house nurtured the moment when he or she threw their arms your neck and squealed, "I love you mommy, I love you daddy." The threads of quantity and quality intertwine. Unravel them, and you lose both quantity and quality.
I question if you can ever have much quality time without quantity. Quantity prepares and incubates the birth of the meaningful. Can you ever order quality time? Can you structure it? Just imagine this conversation: "Okay! Everyone sit down and be quiet! We are going to have quality time together! Did you hear me? Be quiet! In 30 seconds our quality time begins, and we are going to have great bonding and fun together, do you hear me!?! Ready, set, go!"
Quality time, that moment when emotions mesh, when thoughts are one, when hearts beat in sync, can not be ordered or programed. It happens after people have immersed themselves in each others lives. You can tell your child, "Come kiss me," and the child will. But nothing can replace the euphoria of having that same child plant a kiss on your check of their own free will after you have crawled around on the floor with them for 45 minutes.
Don’t trade quantity of time with the people who are precious to your life, because wrapped in that same package are the seeds of quality for which everyone so desperately hungers.
Warren Baldwin
Note: To read more about claiming quality time your loved ones, link to Reclaiming Family on the blog Finding Joy. You will enjoy this very good article. (And thanks for the idea to publish this article, Rachel) wb
Some men are threatened by the success of their wives. Their own insecurity does not allow them to encourage or promote their wife’s growth, development or success in any area.
A woman who was extremely obese said she felt so ashamed of her appearance she would debase herself at every opportunity. She did that by continuing to eat things that were injurious to her heath and weight. She would consume an entire pie at one setting, and then snack on chips and pop. The poor nutrition and excessive weight made her feel tired and sick all the time.
When she got sick and tired of being sick and tired she sought help. Through counseling and coaching by a nutritionist and exercise expert, this woman lost all of her excess weight and could wear a size 6 dress. She was a beautiful young woman.
Everyone this woman knew praised her success: her friends, her exercise coach, her peers in the weight loss program. Everyone praised her except her husband. Her striking appearance and her new-found confidence threatened him. When she was large he felt in control. No one else would be attracted to her, he reasoned, so he was secure as the husband and "king" of the household. But now she was attractive, and he knew she would draw the glances of other men. He was afraid he wasn’t enough of a man to keep his wife’s attention, and he would lose her.
The woman grew and matured but the man remained emotionally stunted. He ridiculed her. He tried to lower her self esteem and return her to eating dangerous foods. He bought her pies and chips and encouraged her to overeat again. Eventually the cowardly and abusive treatment of the husband led to the breakup of the marriage.
It didn’t have to happen. This foolish man didn’t realize that his wife would have gladly shared her shapeliness and beauty with him. She felt gratitude that he had loved her even when she felt unlovable; she could have loved him more intensely now with her new level of self esteem. But the husband couldn’t accept her love because he didn’t grow with her.
Men with low self esteem hinder and work against the growth of their wives. That is foolish and deadly. God has given us the role as leader to encourage the development of ourselves and everyone in our family. We should be our wives’ biggest cheerleaders as they seek ways to improve themselves. As we promote their growth, we grow with them. As we grow together, the health and joy of our marriage blossoms in exciting ways. There is nothing to fear.
Question: How do you actively promote your wife’s success? How do you encourage her?
Suggestion: Think of something your wife has done that you can recognize and praise. Think of the positive effects this can have on your marriage as opposed to ignoring or criticizing her work.
Meditate: "An anxious heart weighs a man (or woman) down, but a kind word cheers him (or her) up." (Proverbs 12:25). What kind words can you share to encourage your wife?
Warren Baldwin
Note: Link over to Marriage Mondays.
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