Relationships are the most rewarding experiences this side of heaven. But any relationship can present challenges. And when they do, the best approach for restoring peace and harmony is boundaries.

God himself demonstrated why and how to create boundaries. He gave Adam and Eve just one: Don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:17). It communicated four important ideas about relationships:

Boundaries define and protect freedom. God’s boundary protected Adam and Eve for their own good.

Topics: Family and Home Tags: family November 8, 2022 by Jim Daly with Paul Batura

Picture this. You’re nine years old, and your mother just died. Your step-dad has abandoned you, so you’ve been taken to live with a family you’ve never met. You’re desperately hoping the man of the house will become the father you never had, but he’s, well, eccentric. Which is why his first assignment for you when you move into the family home is, “You gotta cut the head off a chicken.”

That bizarre scenario actually happened.

Topics: Family and Home Tags: family October 26, 2022 by Jim Daly with Paul Batura

A lot of things in your home are probably fake. And that’s okay. Just don’t let your relationships fall into that category.

Home construction technology has come a long way. In the early 1900s, wood floors made from real trees were standard to home construction. These days, everything from flooring to furniture to back decks are made from composites that only look like real wood. And the fakery doesn’t stop there. We’re surrounded by veneers, synthetics, and man-made stone.

Topics: Family and Home Tags: family October 21, 2022 by Jim Daly with Paul Batura

Some things aren’t worth what they cost in the long run. A humorous metaphor for that is an unlucky baseball fan in San Francisco. He tried to catch a couple foul balls at a baseball game, and it cost him a small fortune.

It all started at the top of the second inning when a foul ball was hit his way. He’d just sat down with $25 worth of food after waiting in line for thirty minutes.

Topics: Family and Home Tags: family October 7, 2022 by Jim Daly with Paul Batura

The best parenting combines authority with love. It gives children boundaries while helping them to feel cared for and nurtured. Sadly, some parents lean heavy on authority and less on love. That approach reduces parenting to a list of demanding rules that is damaging to a child.

My step-dad, Hank, was all authority. His parenting was as simple as “because-I-say-so.” Break one of his rules, and you’d regret it. It was his way of keeping order, but it didn’t sit well with my older sister, Kim.

Topics: Family and Home Tags: family October 3, 2022 by Jim Daly with Paul Batura

Each day seems to bring with it new disturbing videos and reports of individuals and groups behaving badly – from ransacking a supermarket, to brazenly shoplifting from a drugstore, to sucker punching an innocent person on a subway station platform.

Violence is just one symptom of a sick society. Other signs include a disregard or downright hostility toward all things sacred, because of our selfishness, seeing children as burdens rather than blessings, the normalization of aberrant sexual behavior and a general disregard for civility and good manners.

Topics: Family and Home Tags: family September 29, 2022 by Jim Daly with Paul Batura

For decades, sociologists have been telling us how important it is for children to feel loved and cared for. Proof of that concept came in the 1990s after a political revolution in Romania. Over 170,000 abandoned infants, toddlers, and teenagers were housed in a network of government-run institutions known as “child gulags.” The children were provided with food, but very few received loving touch or attention. Most of the children never knew what it was like to love or to be loved.

Topics: Family and Home Tags: family August 26, 2022 by Jim Daly with Paul Batura

The columnist Don Feder recently highlighted a Michigan State University poll that concluded, “1 in 5 adults in the Wolverine State do not want children and therefore are child free.”

Feder pointed out that even using the term “child free” connotates something akin to a disease.

Findings from the Pew Research Center paint an even darker picture when it comes to couples’ desire for children. Over 44% of people between the ages of 18 and 49 who don’t have children said it was “not too or not at all likely” they would ever have children – an increase of 7% since 2018.

Topics: Family and Home Tags: family August 17, 2022 by Jim Daly with Paul Batura