The Birth of a Creation Momma

 When I was a young mother, expecting my third child, I heard Josh MacDowell from Campus Crusade Ministries on the radio. He said that everything we teach our children should be based on the character of God because one day, "Mom says so," will not be a good enough reason for them to do something. From that day on, I sought to look at everything in terms of God's view of it, so I could teach my children the truth.

On one of our first dates, my husband asked me if I believed in evolution, and I didn't even understand the question because, even though I had been brought up in church, the idea that there might be an alternative to evolution had never been suggested. He got me thinking about the truth of the Bible and, after he shared a Henry Morris article with me, I was sold. From then on, it was just about getting as much understanding and as many of the details that I could find that explained Creation as the Bible informs us. 

Since then, I have collected a library of creationist literature and DVDs, and have attended hours worth of lectures on the creation/evolution debate. And, while I have spoken and written on many different subjects while raising my children and mentoring other mothers, I have come to the conclusion that teaching the truth of the Bible and specifically as it applies to Creation is the most important thing I can teach. It is the foundation for everything we believe as Christians and if that is compromised, then everything we base our lives on in this world and the next may crumble.

In the process of getting a certificate in Creation Apologetics, I have realized some very important things. First, the Bible is the Christian's foundation, not men's ideas of how the world is organized. Even for the unbeliever, everything that he is basing his ideas on -- laws of logic, morality and uniformity of nature -- is something that only comes about from an intelligent Orderer, not by chance. And, for the many devout Christians out there who believe everything about the Bible is true -- except Creation! -- they need to know the science, the real science, that supports the Bible.

For many years I have been seeking God's direction as to what I should focus my writing and speaking ministry on. While I have been studying the creation/evolution debate for almost thirty years, I have understandably been more involved as a Christian homeschool mom and wife on a daily basis more intensively. However, as the children moved out, my understanding of how important the Cr/Evo issue is has increased. So, at a conference where we were asked to think of a dream that we hoped to realize by the end of our lives, I knew that being a Creation speaker was really where my heart was.

The reason that focusing on the Creation/Evolution debate was so important to me was that I have seen that many people, both Christians and unbelievers, have noticed that, if you don't read Genesis 1-11 as history, you have no cause for human sin, death and suffering and, thus, no need for a Savior. There is also no hope for a better life beyond this one. We are nothing but walking protoplasm. 

Is a belief in a literal 6-day week of Creation necessary for salvation? No. And, for those of us who have grown up with a Christian worldview, we can play fast and loose with the interpretation of the first chapters of Genesis and go tooling along just fine as believers. But, if we teach young believers or unbelievers that a literal Genesis is not necessary, then where does it stop? What is true and what is not? Do we get to throw out the parts we don't like? What happened to "Thy Word is truth?" (John 17:17)

Many Christian parents do not teach their children about Creation because they were not taught about it and don't know how science as presented in museums, documentaries, public schools and nature centers works with the Bible. They are often intimidated by the evolutionary scientific consensus and prefer to leave the subject alone. But, that is very likely to result in the accusation of hypocrisy by their children as they grow up, which would be very accurate. To say we believe the Bible is God's Word -- except for what the scientific community tells us is wrong -- is hypocritical. It is one of the great reasons that young people give for leaving the church.

So, my ministry verse popped out at me as I was reading through the Bible. It's harsh, just what you would expect from a prophet who was commanded to marry a prostitute, but important.  -- Hosea 4:6  

                "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being priest for Me; Because you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children."  

So, that has become my purpose in life: to introduce families to the truth of God's Word and to show them that science -- real science -- supports what God knew all along.           

 

Best Books for Boys

There are all kinds of reasons I have not gotten to this post, not the least of which is, I am not a boy. But, I recently got some input from my brother, John, who is, if anything, more of a book fiend than I am and he gave me some books to contribute to the Best Books for Boys. Some of them I had never heard of!

Unfortunately, some of what I consider to be the Best General Books are what ought to really go under Best Books for Boys and I'm afraid that if I don't put them in this list, boys will think they don't need to read them. So, I'm going to repeat some.

So, here, in no particular order, are 10 of the Best Books for Boys:

1)My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George. A boy runs away from home and is very deliberate and thoughtful about learning how to live off the land.

2) Farley Mowat books. He writes books for children as well as adults about animals that are real, not anthropomorphic. Most famous are Owls in the Family, about a family with two owls for pets and Hatchet, about a boy whose small plane crash lands in Alaska and the pilot is killed. He survives with the hatchet he just received. Farley Mowat's adult book Never Cry Wolf was made into a movie and I imagine it would make a good read for boys.

3) Beverly Cleary books. The best ones for boys are the Henry Huggins books and Ralph, the mouse books. Henry Huggins was the first book that my son read for his own amusement.

4) Mark Twain. I haven't read anything of his I didn't like. Some of it is tongue in cheek and some is quite serious. But, since boys are often the main characters (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper) there is a lot of appeal for the young men in your house.

5) The Call of the Wild. Jack London is great but this one is my favorite.

6) Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and its sequel Catriona.

7) My brother's all-time favorite book as a boy -- Banner in the Sky by James Ramsey Ullman. It's about a boy whose father dies climbing in the Alps and he decides to climb the mountain in memory of his father.

8) Stalky & Co., Rudyard Kipling. I know a lot of Kipling: this one I don't. But, my brother recommends it and that's good enough for me.

9) Another recommendation from my brother is Matt Christopher books. John says they aren't great literature, but they are books about sports and are enjoyable for boys.

10) G. A. Henty was considered one of THE writers for boys and was copied by many other authors. These are historical fiction. There is a certain amount of racism, but the main characters are always admirable young men and women.

The Best Books for Girls

This whole blog series started because a friend asked me what books I recommended for her daughter, who is the fourth of five children and the only girl. They have plenty of boy books in their house but no girl books. My favorite books came from my grandmother, either as gifts or because I found them in her house. Most of these are discoveries from her.

Before we begin, you may ask why I did not include Little House on the Prairie or  Elsie Dinsmore. I did not for two opposite reasons. Little House books are so classic and valuable that they are not restricted to girls (my 13 year old son has been taking them out of the library to listen to.) Elsie books, on the other hand, are contrived and forced. They are fairly well written, but I imagine very few children are as persecuted as she is at the same time coddled the way she is, never having put on her own stockings! The later ones are better, to my mind. So, here are my recommendations.

1 -- The Hundred Dresses -- Eleanor Estes. She is a wonderful writer. I'll talk about her books more in a later post. This book is a shorter one but it discusses the difficulties of a poor Polish girl who lives in a small town where her classmates make fun of her and how the other girls learn to be more thoughtful.

2 -- The Goat in the Rug -- Charles L. Blood and Martin Link. This is a short story that is a one-off of a Navajo woman making a goat's wool rug from start to finish -- from the goat's perspective. I just like it.

3 -- Heidi -- Johanna Spyri. You can't beat it. It's got everything: poor orphan, grumpy grandpa, animals, getting to run free in the mountains, Christian growth, a poor little rich girl, rich city house and miraculous healing of body and relationships. It's at the top of my list of girls' chapter books.

4 -- Little Women -- really, anything by Louisa May Alcott. They are fun, the characters are vivid and relatable, even today, and the goal is to be good, even knowing the characters' flaws. After Little Women, you may want to read:






5 -- Eight Cousins and its sequel, Rose in Bloom. There is also:


6 -- Jack and Jill. All of these are great for homeschoolers because the characters are almost all homeschooled! So was Louisa May Alcott. As a result, you get the usual unusual mix of ages and sexes in the interactions of the characters that is typical of homeschoolers.

7 -- Rumer Godden books. The first one my grandmother gave me at Christmas in San Fransisco when I was eight was The Dolls' House. If you are interested in including a little fun Japanese culture, she wrote Miss Happiness and Miss Flower and its sequel, Little Plum. Home is the Sailor was one that I read to my boys -- twice! -- because it is about a boy doll in a dolls house who promises to find the older brother doll and the father doll that were lost. He does. They are full of what might be called, "nursery fantasy," the notion that dolls have lives we are not aware of. However, they can only influence the children who play with them by wishing -- read, praying.

8 -- Carol Ryrie Brink. She wrote Caddie Woodlawn, a historical novel about Brink's real-life aunt, and Baby Island.

9 -- Frances Hodgson Burnett. Her three amazing children classics are A Little Princess, The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy. All three fall into what I would call the "orphan fantasy" genre. Though they all take place in England, the author is actually from the American South and these books were based on her fantasies as a poor young girl. However, they are beautifully written.

10 -- The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Joan Aiken. She is incredibly prolific but her stories are somewhat farfetched. But, I always like this one. Your children may like to read more of them.

The Best Books for Kids -- Early Chapter Books

Of course, with books, there are all different levels and different areas of interest. I'll be doing four more lists: General easy, General difficult, Books for Girls, Books for Boys.  Here are our General easy chapter books.

1) Winnie-the Pooh! My favorite! Of course, it is classic Pooh, not Disney, and includes Winnie-the Pooh, the House at Pooh Corner, and poetry books (loads of fun!) When We Were Very Young and Now We are Six.

2) Charlotte's Web. This is the #1 bestselling children's paperback worldwide. It's a must. Along with that is E.B. White's other children's books, Stuart Little and The Trumpet of the Swan.

3) Basil of Baker Street. These are the stories the The Great Mouse Detective was based on. They are a mouse community that lives belowstairs from Sherlock Holmes. Basil models himself on Holmes!

4) The Rescuers. More anthropomorphic mouse stories that created Disney spinoffs. It is wonderful how the mice consider it to be their mission in life to support and encourage prisoners, just like St. Valentine in ancient Rome.

5) The Cricket in Times Square. More mice. But, it gives a taste of the inner city in New York along with classical music and the natural history of crickets!

6) William Steig. He writes stories about anthropomorphic animals such as Abel's Island, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble and -- Shrek!

7) The Littles. For everyone who has ever imagined little people running around the house.

8) The Borrowers. More of the above.

9) Little Bear. This should probably go in the easy reader category, but it works here, too. Lovely pictures, simple stories.

10) Time Cat. Lloyd Alexander wrote a bunch of wonderful books, but this one was the first that I ever discovered. It is about a time-traveling cat who takes his master into nine different historical places. I learned so much out of this book. I still read it with my kids.

The Best Books for Kids -- Early Books

A friend recently asked me for a list of girls' books because she has one daughter in houseful of boys. As you may know from my previous articles, I am nuts about books! The best books came from my grandmother, who was an English and Speech teacher. I either found them in her house or she gave them to me. So, I am going to give you my ten favorite books by category, either by author or title.

The first category is Easy, but I'm assuming your kids are pretty good readers.

1) Mother Goose. Can't top this. The kids love the rhythm and rhyme. I saw Mother Goose's grave in Boston at the age of nine and was completely thrilled. I didn't know she was a real person!

2) Grimms' Fairy Tales. Don't get the Disney version. The import is lost if Little Red Riding Hood doesn't get eaten.

3) Ferdinand. I discovered this as a child. I just love the artwork and the "sit just quietly." 

4) James Arnosky. He writes non-fiction about nature and does the watercolor illustrations himself. It is quiet and beautiful.

5) Robert McCloskey. Remember Blueberries for Sal? Make Way for Ducklings? That's him.

6) Thomas the Tank Engine. The early days. It is fun with flawed characters and a message about pleasing God. The later books dropped away from the message to simple entertainment.

7) Llama, Llama, Red Pajama. My daughter loves reading this with her kids. The rhythm, rhyme, and typical conflict (going to bed) are wonderful for developing relationship with your kids.

8) Beatrix Potter. Of course! Greatest adventure stories in the nursery!

9) ABC books, especially Handmade Alphabet. I started teaching my kids reading from a curriculum. By kid number 4, I was teaching them just with ABC books. Handmade Alphabet has no words but has beautiful colored pencil drawings of hands in the International Manual alphabet. My later kids learned the manual alphabet along with the printed alphabet and it helped their decoding tremendously.

10) Dr. Seuss. We couldn't do without him. The first books I remember reading were Green Eggs and Ham and Hop On Pop. Historically, he rejuvenated the phonics method of reading and got us out of the purgatory of Dick and Jane.




























































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The Oldest of Old-Fashioned Lessons -- Read Great Books!

A liberal education, where one is exposed to all manner of views should confirm whatever is right and good. In college, studying Plato confirmed my faith because it lined up in its arguments with the Bible. Studying the Buddhist scriptures confirmed my Christian faith because it seemed very far-fetched that a real man would have been born to a princess with 200 ladies in attendance and a white elephant passing by at the very moment of his birth. Talk about a fairy tale! Books postulating strange sociological experiments, such as Walden II, proved useless me practically and emotionally when I got pregnant during my freshman year of college. But, the Bible comforted me and Christians supported me.

Allan Bloom's concern as expressed in The Closing of the American Mind back in the 1980s was that students were coming to college not to have their minds broadened through the great thought of the millenia but to be confirmed in their own agendas by dismissing those great thoughts out of hand simply because the authors were white and male and, ergo, privileged. I have had discussions with my scary-smart teenage niece who said, in so many words, that because the classic authors came from a privileged class of white men, they should be dismissed as irrelevant to our culture.

Her argument in 2020 is not new. Bloom was running into it forty years ago. But, culture is transient. The 2020s American culture is different from the 1980s culture, which is different from the 1950s, from the 1920s, from the 1880s. But, morality, which is the subject of all great thought through the ages, is universal in every culture. How do I relate to God? How do I relate to my fellow man? What is the nature of good? Is man capable of being good? No matter where or when you live, these questions govern our lives and must be studied if we are to be more than animals. Classic literature, old lessons, address these, no matter who wrote them. Questions of race or sexism are secondary to those issues but progressives would make them primary. Why do you think they would skip over the primary issue -- "how should I behave toward my fellow man?" -- to the secondary issue -- "how should others behave?" Isn't it so that they can continue to do as they please while other people are required to change?

Alan Paton was a white South African who wrote anti-apartheid novels while running a reformatory for black South African youth in the 1960s and 70s. He was addressing how people should treat one another -- an issue of morality -- and, as a white man, his books admitted a need for whites to treat all humans equally.

Ghandi, in a famous speech givin in South African (you can see it in the 1982 film, Ghandi) said, "I am willing to die for what I believe. I am not willing to kill for it." While he was trying to change how society treated each other, the most important issue for him was, "How do I behave toward my fellow men?"

This is all part of the Synthesis that your children will go through as they determine what is important to them and how they will live their lives. And, our job as parents is to be an example that change starts with me, not the other guy. Whether it is Socrates' argument to his disciples against escaping Athens illegally when he had been unjustly condemned to death, or Tolstoy's juxtaposition of a life lived for others as opposed to a life lived for self in Anna Karenina, Shakespeare's argument for mercy in The Merchant of Venice -- because if we live by the law, every letter of the law must be followed -- Jane Austen's observation that the more prideful one is, the more prejudiced one is both for and against his fellow man, or Tolkein's lesson that even the smallest person doing the right thing can change the world, the classics address this question: "What must I do?" It is the greatest of all the Old-Fashioned Lessons. If someone makes the point of their education all about them -- "How should the world treat me?" -- what a small world it would be! "How should I treat others?" causes us to look out instead of in. It broadens our world. How I treat my fellow man is a pertinent question anywhere in the world, on a farm in Wisconsin, in downtown Tokyo or in the Amazon jungle. But, progressives of all stamps are only pertinent in their own environments. Racism against blacks or hispanics disappears if they move to different countries where the majority of people are black or hispanic. Radical feminism is the most prevalent worldwide in countries where women have the most freedom to express themselves. I have not heard of a huge movement of American feminists taking action in Saudi Arabia or Iran for those women's rights. Switzerland, the last country in the western world to grant women the right to vote, was the only country to do so by referendum -- which means that MEN voted for women to have the right to vote. The point being that culture as a focus of education is destined to become irrelevant wherever it is.

Allan Bloom asked his Introduction classes, "What books really count for you?" A few people said, "The Bible," but the students rarely studied it after leaving home. Books don't matter to us, anymore. But, they should. We know what someone means when they call someone, "a Scrooge," or "Eeyore-ish." This is because of a common literary tradition that gives depth of feeling as well as of moral understanding. Allan Bloom says that classic literature gives students models of good and bad and, ". . . a fund of shared experiences and thoughts on which to ground their friendships with one another." (Bloom, Allan; The Closing of the American Mind; Simon and Schuster; New York; c. 1987; p. 344.) We can't communicate with each other on a deeper level if our entertainment is limited to pop culture through TV, movies, pop music, the latest vampire romance, dystopian novels or agenda-steeped social media. All those things are light, shallow, fleeting. Unless your media has passed the test of time, its influence on the world is insignificant. It is the difference between dipping out a puddle with a spoon or dipping out a pool with a bucket.

But, look how much time we spend on all that fluff! It's not as if people haven't been writing or painting or composing fluff over the millenia in dozens of languages. But, only the great lasted, the stuff that truly is life-changing. Even great authors rarely produce uniformly great books. Shakespeare's hack-and-slash lay Titus Andronicus, simply doesn't match up to Hamlet or Julius Caesar. Herman Melville wrote a couple of popular sea adventures, then wrote Moby Dick, which Mark Twain considered to be the only great book of world literature ever produced in America. It was a financial failure, none of his other books were worth much and he died in poverty working as a customs agent. Even Jane Austen's books, which are unusual in that they are all still in print, include Northanger Abbey, a farce on contemporary gothic novels which is a little bewildering to the modern reader.

How many great French books can you name? Les Miserable and The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Spanish? Don Quixote. German? Mostly poets --  Goethe and Schiller -- and philosophers such as Kant and Nietzsche. Russian? A little more there: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov. There is just not a lot of literature that can be called great. So, instead of spending our lives on mountains of trash that add nothing to our lives, we should study great literature, the lives of great people and see what we can learn from them. They will give us a solid foundation.

Old-Fashioned Lessons: The Analog Clock

Telling time. It's one of the first things we start teaching kindergartners. I remember the model clock in my kindergarten class. It had a huge wooden face with big, red plastic hands and big black numbers.

The public schools are not teaching time on an analog clock, anymore. There are so many children who have difficulty with analog clocks that they just skip over it, since we have digital clocks that can do the job. But, analog clocks show so much more than time.

An analog clock shows the passage of time in a way that a digital clock cannot. A child learns to "feel" time when he sees that five minutes is a small amount and a half hour is a large amount of time.

Reading an analog clock requires using both the left and the right brains since it is read globally and spatially, as a child learns to divide it into quarters (right brain), while teaching counting skills in ones, fives and fifteens and math fundamentals in base 10, base 12 and base 60 (left brain).

Reading an analog clock gives a foundation for advanced mathematics. Clock reading makes the angles in geometry more familiar than they would be if they hadn't seen them before. Geography and angle measurements are based on clocks. Every degree in an angle (and on a globe) has 60 minutes. Every minute has 60 seconds. The earth rotates 360 degrees one time in 24 hours. When navigators were learning how to measure the rotation of the earth and degrees of longitude (to find out where they were), they used clocks.

Without an understanding of the analog clock, there are so many other things that a child will not be able to understand. While it is, in fact, more difficult to teach a child to read an analog clock, it will stretch him in ways beyond his kindergarten skills and literally show him a wider world.