Daly Focus Blog
When Kim Meeder was growing up, she adored her parents.
She thought her father was a superhero. He didn’t wear a cape, fly, or leap tall buildings, but there wasn’t much else he couldn’t do. Her mother was the most beautiful and loving woman in the world, and Kim wanted to grow up to be just like her.
But when she was just nine years old, Kim lost both of her parents in a horrific tragedy that shattered her heart and left her disillusioned with God.
“What were you thinking?”
If you’re a parent of teenagers, you’ve probably asked that question a few times. I know I have. On more than one occasion, Jean and I have looked at each other and asked the same question about one of our boys: “What is going on in that brain of his?”
Well, according to Dr. Jeramy and Jerusha Clark, our guests on today’s and tomorrow’s broadcasts, there’s an avalanche of change going on.
Do you ever feel like advertisers and commercialism have taken over Christmas? Does it seem like it’s gotten worse in the last 15 to 20 years? Well, if you answered yes, you might be as surprised as I was to hear that Christmas, as we celebrate it today, was almost single-handedly created by commercialism.
As recently as 150 years ago, Christmas wasn’t the most important holiday in our culture. That was Easter. The focus began to shift once department stores got involved.
It’s been said it’s “easier to build a boy than to mend a man.” I agree. So how do we build the next generation of boys into men?
John Wooden was the men’s basketball coach at UCLA for nearly thirty years and is widely recognized as one of the greatest coaches in the history of the game. The dominance of his teams remains unprecedented into the modern era.
Surprisingly, though, his lessons on the court had more to do with being a man than with basketball.
“How did it go?”
It’s a question we’ve been asked many times since Oct. 5 – the day close to 500,000 students across the nation in all 50 states celebrated the fourth annual Bring Your Bible to School Day. Well, I’m proud to give you an update.
But first, let’s remember back to what was happening at the beginning of the month. Many people in the U.S. were worried were worried about family members in Mexico after the country’s two big earthquakes and in Puerto Rico after the catastrophic Hurricane Maria.
It’s been four years since Focus on the Family launched the student-led “Bring Your Bible to School Day,” which has a combined participation of half-a-million students.
You’d think with all the news coverage the event has received, and with all the students who have led events at their schools, that parents, teachers and administrators around the nation would be better attuned to students’ First Amendment rights.
Sadly, that’s still not the case.
For example, just last month it was reported that an Indiana first-grade teacher instructed students to not talk about God or Jesus.
We’re fast approaching the fourth annual Bring Your Bible to School Day, when tens of thousands of public school students across the nation will celebrate on Oct. 5.
I’ll share more about it in the coming weeks, but in case you’re not familiar with Bring Your Bible, let me give you a quick explanation: it’s a student-led event sponsored by Focus on the Family where children and teens from all 50 states will share God’s hope and celebrate religious freedom by bringing their Bibles to school and talking about it with their friends.
Officials say that Ohio’s problem with heroin is reaching epidemic proportions. Ohio has the nation’s highest rate of deadly heroin overdoses, killing at least 23 people in the state each week by some estimates.
And as so often occurs when it comes to drug abuse, children are among those who suffer the most.
About half of all the kids in Ohio’s foster care system are there because one or both of their parents are drug addicts – and some counties report a rate of over 80 percent.
Some parents will understand these comments by Dena Yohe so personally and intimately they’ll feel like they could have written them themselves. Of raising a troubled child, she said:
“We had so much guilt and shame as parents, especially because our children were our ministry. We took our parenting seriously. I chose not to work. I stayed home, so I could focus all of my attention, my effort, and my energy into who our children would become.
The recent images from Charlottesville, VA—marches by torchlight, Nazi salutes, armed militia, angry mobs engaged in violent confrontation—are scary for adults to encounter, let alone children. These are not scenes from a movie but very real events unfolding right before our eyes.
The chaos in Charlottesville was fueled by a particularly insidious and evil form of racism known as white supremacy. It was the same in Charleston, South Carolina when a white supremacist murdered nine people during a church service in 2015, and in Overland Park, Kansas when a KKK sympathizer murdered three people near a Jewish community center in 2014.
Jim Daly is a husband, father and President of Focus on the Family and host of its National Radio Hall of Fame broadcast. His blog, Daly Focus, is full of timely commentary and wisdom designed to help you navigate and understand today’s culture. His latest book is Marriage Done Right.
