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Living The Solution – Online Newsletter |
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JUNE 16, 2004 ISSUE |
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Opening Thoughts:
This issue has a distinctively fatherly concern. With
Father’s Day on Sunday, June 20th it’s timely. For all the
Dads – may you be blessed with the constant joy of life and with
loving children. Be a good provider, leader, supporter and follower of
the One who shows us the Way.
Peace and joy,
Tom Gilbert
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IN THIS ISSUE
Feature Article: Fathering Through the Son
In The Spotlight: Fathering Like the Father
Daily Thoughts: Like Father, Like Son
Prayer & Sharing Requests
Quotable: On the Doctrine of Progress
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| FEATURED
ARTICLE |
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Fathering Through the Son
By Tom Gilbert
Why is it so hard to be a dad? What
are the real requirements and true skills to meet them?
Where do we turn for proper training? Often I feel like
singer/songwriter Loudon Wainwright III who laments in
his song Being a Dad: "Being a
Dad can make you feel sad/Like you're the insignificant
other/Yeah right from the start they break your heart/In
the end every kid wants his mother..."
There’s a long history behind us, some serious baggage of unsettled and
unsatisfying fatherhood. It’s a heavy burden that most men would just as
soon not carry, let alone look at.
I don’t think it is mere coincidence that God chooses to reveal part of
his unknowable and infinite self as a Father. There is a great need, a hunger
deep inside each of us, to have a loving and intimate relationship with a father.
Whether your father is living or even known, the desire is real. All too often
it is suppressed to hide the hurt, but this need always lives within us. It is
part of our longing.
Read the entire article here
Discover more thought provoking articles
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| IN THE SPOTLIGHT |
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Fathering
Like the Father
Book by Kenneth Gangel and Jeffrey Gangel
This book (Fathering
Like the Father by Kenneth Gangel and Jeffrey Gangel/Baker Book House
Company) takes an interesting approach. The authors are a father/son team, so
they can speak both from personal experience as well as from the timeless directions
in the Bible.
We all crave the love that comes from real attention
by our dads. To be a good father means sacrificing many of your wishes to fulfill
the proper role of leader, protector, teacher, disciplinarian and loving friend.
Finding the proper balance (and inspiration!) to fill this role is extremely
challenging. Because the Bible has so many examples it can be very instructive.
The Gangel father/son team skillfully uses the stories of various fathers in
the pages of the Bible to illustrate good and bad ways of being a father. It’s
not so much a precise formula as a group of guiding principles drawn from Scripture
combined with their personal experience.
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DAILY THOUGHTS & REFLECTIONS |
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Like Father, Like Son
We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen. We
look at this Son and see God's original purpose in everything created. For
everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible,
rank after rank after rank of angels—everything got started in him and
finds its purpose in him. He was there before any of it came into existence
and holds it all together right up to this moment. (Colossians 1:15-17,
the Message)
Have you ever heard the phrase, “A chip off the
old block”? It is used to refer to someone whose personality and character
so greatly reflects their parent that you feel you know their parent because
of their child. The child acts and behaves just like the parent. In the
case of Christ He even said that He only did what He saw His Father doing
and dealt with people, related with people just as God would. Jesus came
to show us the heart of God towards us.
Did you know that before you were born, even before you entered into an
intimate personal relationship with God, He had created you for a purpose?
You are not an accident. No matter how you came into this world, even if
your parents did not plan you, God did. And He brought you into this world
for a reason. In fact everything that is, other than God, was created by
Him for a purpose and by His will. By His very word it is all held together.
In an instant by His word it could all be gone, but because of His great
love for us and the fact that He has a reason for creating us He continues
to hold creation together.
Everything God created is near and dear to His heart; it
is a reflection of His creative personality. Yes, we are but a small part
of the great cosmic creation and we are created in His image to reflect
His love to Him and others. That is why He takes such a great interest in
us. We were meant to be and are a part of Him.
Live it with Passion
Pete
Get daily inspiration with a Scripture verse and commentary
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Daily Thought
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PRAYER REQUESTS & RESULTS |
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Prayer works. It really does. Let us pray for you at prayer
requests.
Of course, we keep you information confidential.
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My thoughts are shared regularly on the pages of
the www.livingthesolution.com web site, especially on
the Journal pages.
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It is our hope that the content of Living The Solution will
stimulate you to deepen your faith. That is certainly a result for us in both
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Send an email
Quotable: On the Doctrine of Progress
[The] doctrine of [inevitable] progress sustained
our fathers in the carrying of capitalistic democratic culture to
most parts of the globe. Its core was the conviction that, in thus
extending the range of western liberal culture and developing its
assumptions, they were in effect establishing on earth that which
would grow into the kingdom of God. Some put it sharply but un-Biblically: "building
the kingdom"; others, of a more secular turn of mind, echoed
J. A. Symonds' hymn, "These Things Shall Be". That whole
view exists today only as debris, for it has foundered on the rocks,
not so much of human sin, as of the contradictions and complexities
of the very western culture that was the substance of its belief.
— David M. Paton (1913- ), Christian Missions and the Judgment of God [1953]
Quote from the Christian Quotation of the Day
Copyright 2004 Living the Solution, all rights reserved.
Tom Gilbert
Editor/Web-servant
Living The Solution
www.livingthesolution.com
P O Box 25584
Albuquerque, NM 87125-5584
Toll free 1-800-399-2564 ext 105 (US only) or 505-247-3232
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