In our post-everything culture, obey has become a four-letter word. Obeying is for wimps. Obeying is for people who didn’t do well enough on their SATs to write their own rules. Only the weak and the...
Even if we’ve never been inside a synagogue or a mosque or a church—even if we have, and vowed never to go back—deep down in our striving hearts, beneath all the ambition and the fear, we suspect that...
America is a young country, young and brash and prone to errors. Like teenagers. For all our inherent goodness, we’ve been cursed with bright, shiny object disease and we don’t want a cure. Not now. N...
We love Christmas presents but not Christ; Easter baskets but not crosses. We want to tell our friends with cancer that we will pray for them (we don’t) and our puddle-eyed children that their goldfis...
When God says hold up, wait, pray, it’s not your time yet, our entire bodies rebel, legs kicking and flailing like some overturned dung beetle certain that if we try hard enough we might be able to ga...
I can’t hear God’s voice for my kids, but I can watch and listen and pray and adjust and try not to screw up whatever He has planned for their lives. And although I can’t make them listen to God, or e...
Did you notice there aren’t any average kids anymore—only Gifted and Disposable?
We fluff them and fold them and nudge them and enhance them and bind them and break them and embellish them beyond measure; then, as we drive them up to the college interviews that they’ve heard since...
Our own egos are so fragile we cannot bear to give our lives to the raising of children only to have them become ordinary people. There, I said it. The worst thing a 21st-century child of interesting...
The attempt to prevent our kids from struggling for fear it might scar their permanent records is, instead, scarring them for life.
