Don't Give up Too Soon

Not long ago I heard Franklin Graham tell the story of a little girl who received one of the Christmas shoe box gifts from Samaritan’s Purse. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this ministry, Samaritan’s Purse delivers gifts packed in shoe boxes to orphans all over the world. Those who wish to participate fill a shoe box with items for one child and then indicate whether the gift is for a girl or boy and the age of the child for whom the gift is intended. Before delivering the boxes, volunteers pray over them and ask that God will put the right box into the hands of the right child.

The particular little girl who was the object of Franklin Graham’s story was an orphan in Eastern Europe. Although most children are thrilled to receive their boxes, when the volunteer handed her a Christmas shoe box gift, she declined to take it. “I don’t want this box,” she said. “The only thing I want is parents.”

The volunteer talked with her for a while and told her that she did not have any parents for her, but she wanted her to take the box anyway. It took some time, with the little girl remaining adamant that she did not want the box, before the volunteer was finally able to convince her to take it.

When the child opened her box, she found an assortment of age-appropriate gifts in which she showed little interest, but when she reached the very bottom, she found a picture of a smiling middle-aged American couple along with their names and address and an invitation to the child who received the box to write them a letter. The little girl and her benefactors began a correspondence that ended a few months later when they adopted her.

What are the chances of finding two parents in the bottom of a shoe box?  Practically speaking, not good.  Fortunately for us, however, God is not practical. He is able to take a shoe box prepared by a loving Christian couple and send it to a little girl whose life appears to be hopeless. While that box is making its way through numerous stops and transfers, He makes certain that it stays right on course and that those future parents are resting safely in the bottom.

I wonder how many gift boxes from God we have declined during the course of our lives. The problem is that we have preconceived ideas, not only about how things should work out but how they should be worked out.  It takes a lot of faith to look for two loving parents in the bottom of a shoe box, but sometimes that is exactly what we have to be willing to do in order to receive God’s blessings.

As Christians we believe that God is able to do anything, and we believe that He loves and cares for us. When the going gets really rough, however, we too often give up because it seems to our carnal minds that the miracle we need is just too big—even for God.

The next time you receive a shoe box gift from God, I hope that you will open it. Even if it doesn’t seem to contain the answer you were seeking, unpack it carefully. You may be surprised to find that the thing you wanted most is tucked safely at the bottom.

For books by Joyce visit her website http://www.frontier2000.net/.

God's Button Box

When my youngest son, Judah, was five or six years old, he went shopping for my Christmas gift in my button box. This was done without my knowledge, but he had seen a particular button there that he thought would make a perfect Christmas gift for Mom.

The highly prized button was made of clear plastic and was about a quarter of an inch across. Shaped like a diamond, right down to its facets and pointed end, it was one of a kind in a box full of ordinary shirt buttons.

When Judah had secured his “diamond,” he found a piece of wrapping paper which he crushed around it so that the finished gift looked like a crumpled wad of Christmas wrapping. He then put his gift under the tree with all the others and waited for Christmas Eve.

When I opened Judah’s gift that year, he was beaming. As soon as the button appeared, he shouted, “I gave you a diamond!”

I told him how gorgeous his gift was and how glad I was to receive it. I knew that whatever I did, I could not redeposit it into the button box. After a little thought I went to my closet and took out my favorite sweat shirt—the one I wore every time it was clean—and sewed the button to it a couple of inches below the left shoulder seam. I then showed the shirt to Judah and told him how wonderful it would be to have that beautiful diamond on my shirt every day.

In the months ahead that small plastic button was the source of much joy for both of us. When I was working with Judah in our homeschool, he would often reach out and gently lay his hand over it, knowing that it was special to me. For my part, every time I saw that button, my heart filled with happiness knowing that it represented a special love connection between the two of us.

Judah is now twenty-seven years old, but even now as I retell this incident my heart overflows with joy. Maybe it’s just a Mom thing, but I don’t think so. I learned a valuable lesson from that gift given to me so many years ago with so much love.

I often think of that gift in terms of how we give to God. There is nothing that we can give Him that is not already his. The Bible says in one place that He owns all of the animals, and in another that He owns the cattle on a thousand hills. He talks about the treasures buried in the earth that man does not even know exist. He says in the book of Isaiah, “Heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool….My hand has made both earth and skies, and they are mine.”

Most of the time when we give to God we do so by going to His button box and taking what already belongs to Him. God honors those gifts, and they are important because through that kind of giving we are able to help others in need. We tend to forget, however, that what God wants most is our obedience and our faithfulness. He wants us to show kindness to others and to share our faith. He wants us to love Him and spend time in His presence. When we give these gifts, we draw close to Him and share a special love connection with Him that only comes from having a personal relationship.

So, what can you give to the God who owns everything? You can give yourself; it is the only thing that you have the power to give. Fortunately, it is the gift that He wants most.

For more on Joyce Swann, like her Facebook page at

 http://www.facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup

What is America Teaching Her Daughters?

I do not believe in a double standard; I am a firm believer that boys should be held to just as strict a standard as girls. Nevertheless, when a girl becomes pregnant out of wedlock, she is the one who pays the highest price. In almost all cases she is the one who supports and raises the child; she is the one who may find it necessary to delay higher education, perhaps permanently; she is the one whose reputation suffers.

A few months ago when I arrived at my office and brought up my AOL homepage to begin my day’s work, I saw an article about Linnese Ortega, a young woman whose name appears on a Facebook “Smut List.” Although I was very busy, I clicked on the article to see why this pretty teen was upset enough to appear on the Today show to protest having been included on the list. According to the article, the “Smut List” is a list circulating around seven school districts in Greenwich, Conn. and New York’s Westchester County of 100 high school girls who were rated based on their level of sexual activity. I had naively expected Miss Ortega to say that she had been misrepresented as someone who is promiscuous when, in fact, she is not. I was wrong.

Before I go on, I want to make my own position clear. I think that it is both wrong and cruel for anyone to ridicule another person for any reason. If I were the parent of one of the teens involved in posting those names, I would administer a stiff punishment and have several long talks with the offending teen about the damage that such antics can cause. I would also make it crystal clear that nothing like that had better ever happen again. However, I believe that this incident is symptomatic of a much deeper problem.

The article describes Linnese Ortega as a teenage Mom of two who can’t figure out why she is on the list when “she isn’t even in high school anymore.” Linnese said that her sixteen year old sister also made the list and that she feels “bad” for her.

I genuinely feel sorry for the girls on the list as well as for the teens who targeted them, but the entire incident demonstrates a terrible lack of teaching for all concerned. Our society has become so skewed that we have lost sight of the fact that parents are the ones responsible for instilling values in their children that keep them from living a lifestyle that will cause them to be included on such a list and from being so insensitive that they would participate in the compilation of such a list.

The article, which was written by Emily Tan, argued that this is yet another form of cyber-bullying and that criminal charges should be filed against any teens who were involved in posting the names of the girls who appeared on the list. I think that Ms. Tan has rocks in her head, and I think that she is an excellent example of just how lost we have become as a society.

America is teaching her daughters that it is perfectly alright to have extra-marital sex. Therefore, when a young woman is faced with the consequences of her bad choices, she believes that no one has the right to criticize her. On the other hand, America is also teaching her daughters that treating other girls badly makes the perpetrator very “cool.” In fact, we constantly see ads for television shows such as Bad Girls that, apparently, glorify this kind of conduct.

It is the parents’ responsibility to teach their daughters that no sex outside of marriage is permissible. It is also their responsibility to teach their daughters that when a girl makes a bad choice and disobeys God’s laws it is our responsibility to treat her with love and compassion.

If parents would concentrate on really instilling these two beliefs in their daughters, we would have far fewer illegitimate births, far fewer venereal diseases, and far fewer young women who are humiliated at a time when they need to be extended Christian love and Grace.

For books and updates by Joyce like her on Facebook at
 http://www.facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup

What is America Teaching her Sons?

Most Americans do not worry much about their sons. As long as they stay out of jail and leave home before they become too much of a financial burden, American sons are normally given a free pass to do pretty much as they please.

Last night I saw a few minutes of HGTV’s Selling LA, a show featuring multimillion dollar residences in the Los Angeles area and the people who purchase them. The real estate agent was concerned with finding pricey bachelor pads that that will appeal to wealthy young men who want “party houses” where they can entertain when they are in town.

The real estate agent commented that these young men have no interest in marrying; their lives revolve around partying and everything that goes with it. One young man confirmed her assessment by saying that he wanted a balcony with a view so spectacular that when he took a woman to that balcony, he would not need to talk to her. The view would seduce her.  Using this as her criteria, the agent set off in pursuit of the ideal pad.

Finding those bachelor pads was not difficult for the agent. She has ties to a builder who produces nothing else. The properties he featured on last night’s episode range in price from 2.9 million to 6.9 million dollars and are totally unsuitable for families. It is a hard to believe that these types of residences are so much in demand that the builder is actually mass producing them, and he is not worried that he will not find customers to purchase them.

I shook my head and thought, “How sad.” I guess the shaking cleared my head more than I had anticipated because, at that point, I realized that this mindset is not restricted to wealthy young men (or more correctly, young men with wealthy parents).  America’s sons have embraced the notion that partying and seducing women are the only pursuits of any importance.

Among the middle class and the poor the pursuit of alcohol, drugs and sex is no less than it is among the rich. Anyone who has taught in a college or university knows that most of the students are much more concerned with partying than they are with academics. Likewise, young men in the workplace cannot wait for Friday so that they can begin their weekend binges of debauchery. I submit that this is what is wrong with American society.

We used to have a “double standard” that conceded that women should be held to a higher moral standard than men. The thinking was that women should not have sex before marriage and that after marriage they should remain faithful to their husbands. On the other hand, men were “different” and could not be expected to remain pure before marriage or faithful afterwards.

Many people, including me, did not agree with the double standard. However, those of us who did not agree, could not agree about what we did not agree with. I always asserted that men can and should adhere to the same moral standards as women and that both should derive those standards from the teachings of the Bible. Most people, however, believed that men should continue to exercise immorality both before and after marriage and that women should follow suit.

In that argument I lost; they won, and the result has been disastrous. Our society is now filled with single moms who can barely provide for their children and, consequently, spend a great deal of time looking for a man who will move in with them and pay some of the bills. This search takes them night after night into the clubs where they can find single men. The children are neglected, but they do learn early on that partying is the most important thing in life.

America is never going to heal until we return to Biblical principles. When sex is saved for marriage, young men do want to get married. They marry young and concentrate on careers because they have wives and children for whom they are responsible. They are content to live in a more modest house because their priority is a yard where the kids can play and they can set up a barbecue grill.

When extra-marital sex is not an option, people tend to stay married because they never have that affair that is so often instrumental in breaking up a family. Instead of concentrating on illicit lovers, married couples concentrate on their spouses and try to find ways to make them happy.

America must teach her sons that God has never accepted a double standard. He expects purity and faithfulness from both men and women. Until we have men who are willing to live by God’s laws and provide an example to others, our nation will not be healed. We had better start teaching our sons that God’s rules are, in the end, the only ones worth embracing.

For books and updates by Joyce Swann, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net or like her facebook page at http://facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup

I’d Rather Eat a Squirrel

Recently a little boy told his mother that he would rather eat a squirrel than read a book! Last night I was surprised to discover that a lot of adults would rather eat a squirrel than pray in public.

Our pastor asked the congregation why the Sunday night prayer service is so poorly attended that he is able to hold it in his office rather than the sanctuary. A number of theories were put forth, but no one seemed to have a real answer to his question. Then a man said something that caused most of the congregation to nod in agreement, “Prayer is the most personal communication there is. It’s very hard to do something so intimate in front of a lot of other people.”

I knew immediately that this man had spoken for most of the people there. It isn’t really the television, or the sports, or the apathy that is keeping them away from the prayer services. They are staying away because they do not want to expose the most intimate aspects of their lives to people they hardly know.

After considering this matter, I think that the real problem is that most people do not know the difference between personal prayer and corporate prayer. Personal prayer is, absolutely, the most intimate form of communication. God knows everything about us. He knows everything that we have done and everything that we have thought. We, therefore, use our private prayer time to confess our sins and ask for forgiveness. We hold back nothing because there is nothing He does not already know. Because of the level of intimacy that we share with Him, nothing is either too insignificant, or too terrible to lay at His feet.

Corporate prayer is an entirely different matter. Normally, when people gather together to pray, they are praying about something specific. I have attended prayer meetings held prior to elections; I have attended prayer meetings for our city and our neighborhoods; I have attended prayer meetings for my church. The list is endless, but in every case these gatherings for public prayer had a focus. While it is never “wrong” to pray for something personal in this kind of meeting, that is not the purpose, and no one expects the meeting to turn into a sort of “true confessions” session.

On several occasions I have been asked ahead of time to pray at these kinds of meetings. In these cases it is my practice to spend time preparing by asking God what I am supposed to pray for during the meeting. I do not write out a prayer, but I do seek God to find out what he wants my particular focus to be. I once spent several hours during the week praying about a five-minute prayer that I was to offer on Sunday. When I was satisfied that I knew the direction my prayer was to take, I went to church with three specific points that I covered in my five minutes.

Prayer is spontaneous, but I believe that corporate prayer should have focus. If you are in a meeting and feel that God is directing you to pray for something that you had not thought of earlier, by all means do it, but don’t just show up and start talking out loud to God. As in most things, corporate prayer benefits from good preparation.

When I prepare, I ask God to show me what the people who will be in attendance need, and I ask him to give me a prayer that will help and bless them. Every group is different and corporate prayer gives us an opportunity to pray for the specific needs of those attending that particular meeting. Perhaps God wants the focus to be prayer for our marriages, or our children, or our nation. We do not know the specific concerns of the other people in attendance, but He does. This gives us an opportunity to pray for people without knowing the details of their lives. After all, God is the only one who needs to know all the details.

If you are a person who has a difficult time praying in public, I hope that you will rethink corporate prayer. It is very different from personal prayer because it is not about you. If you will make other people the focus and ask God to guide your prayer so that their needs will bemet, you will discover that praying in public is not so hard after all.

For more updates from Joyce Swann, like her on Facebook at http://facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup
                                                                          
                    

Where Do you Want to be?

Most of us have something that we want to do. For some of us it is a professional goal that we want to achieve. For others it is a hobby that we would like to turn into our full-time employment. For a few of us it is dropping out of the “rat race” and moving to the country where we can grow our own vegetables and live a simpler life.

Whatever we envision for our futures, we usually have the ability to make that thing happen—or at least some version of that thing happen. The problem is that life is filled with detours, and when we find ourselves on a winding, unpaved road, rather than continuing on, we often turn around and go back to where we started.

Moses is a wonderful example of a man whose life was filled with detours. Even before he was born God had decided that he was going to lead the children of Israel out of slavery. However, it took eighty years and several detours to prepare Moses for that work.

Shortly before Moses’ birth Pharaoh ordered that all of the Hebrew male children be thrown into the Nile River as soon as they were born. Moses mother hid him at home for three months, but when she could no longer hide him, she made him a little ark from papyrus reeds waterproofed with tar and set him on the Nile River. This was the same river where all the other baby boys his age had perished, but Moses’ mother trusted that God had a plan for her son.

When Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the river to bathe, she spied the little ark among the reeds and told her maids to bring it to her.  Opening it, she found the baby inside, and her heart was touched—so much so that she adopted him.

Moses’ second detour began when he was forty years old. The Bible makes it clear that from the beginning Moses knew that he was a Hebrew and that he had frequent contact with his fellow Hebrews. One day when he was visiting his brethren, he killed an Egyptian who was mistreating a Hebrew. To avoid execution, he ran away into the land of Midian where he spent the next forty years tending sheep and learning desert survival.

When Moses was eighty years old, he encountered his third detour. God told him to return to Egypt and deliver the Hebrews from their bondage. Why Moses? Why did it take so long? Apparently there were plenty of Hebrew men in Egypt—the Bible says that approximately 600,000 men left in the Exodus. If God wanted Moses to lead the Hebrews, wouldn’t it have been simpler to allow him to live among his own brethren and then, while he was still young, to call him to deliver his people? If for some reason God wanted Moses to be raised in Pharaoh’s palace, wouldn’t it have been simpler to have him deliver the Hebrews at age forty when he took it upon himself to protect his Hebrew brother from the Egyptian’s abuse?

The truth is that each detour in Moses’ life signaled another time of preparation for the work that God had for him. Because he was raised in the palace, he was not intimidated by the Pharaoh or his advisers and soothsayers. Because he had spent forty years in the harsh conditions of the desert, he knew how to live in the wilderness. Because he had tended sheep, he knew how to be a shepherd who guarded the flock—whether they consisted of the white, woolly, four-legged variety or the stubborn complaining two legged kind known as the children of Israel.

Clearly, Moses knew at an early age that he was supposed to deliver the Hebrews from bondage, but he certainly had to take the round-about way of doing it! God was preparing him for a monumental task, and each detour played a key role in that preparation.

The next time you find yourself on a winding unpaved road, learn all that you can from the experience. Detours are not much fun, but they are necessary. They are God’s way of preparing you to succeed when you finally get to where you want to be.

For books by Joyce Swann visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net/.

                                                   

Be Careful What you Pray For

In 2007 one of my daughters and her husband bought a big, beautiful home in El Paso’s upper valley.  With its one-half acre lot and aged brick driveway, the house was an impressive sight. Upon moving in, my daughter and son-in-law immediately updated every room with travertine floors, granite counter tops, and stainless appliances. Life looked sweet.

A few months later, however, they began to notice an inordinate number of bees around the doors and windows. My son-in-law investigated and discovered that a colony of bees had built a hive in an attic recess that was nearly inaccessible to humans. He determined that this was a job for a professional exterminator, and they immediately called one.

The exterminator treated the area, assured them that they bees were history, collected his one-hundred twenty dollars, and left. My daughter was greatly relieved to discover that the bees had, indeed, disappeared—for a while. Within a few weeks, however, the bees had returned in greater force than before. Again, the exterminator was called, the fee was paid and the problem appeared to be eradicated. But, no, within a few weeks the bees were back in even greater numbers.

My daughter, who has two young children and was very concerned about the situation, and began to pray that God would help them get rid of the bees. She was, of course, expecting that one morning she would wake up and the bees would have mysteriously disappeared.

Instead, she awoke one morning to the sound of gnawing in the attic above the ceiling in her bedroom. It did not sound like a small animal gnawing; it sounded like dozens of creatures gnawing. Horrified, Victoria leaped out of bed. The gnawing continued for days, and then she began to see tiny mice squeeze through places around the baseboards that were so small that no one would believe that anything could get through them. She set out traps and D-Con and still they came. She and her husband were just about at their wits end when the gnawing stopped and the mice disappeared as suddenly as they had come.

It seems that when bees build a hive, the honey attracts other bees. Because they had built it in a spot that could not be accessed by humans, either from the inside or the outside of the home, no amount of exterminating the bees was going to provide a permanent solution. As soon as the bees were dead, new bees arrived to take their places. Poison could be injected into the area where the hive had been built, but there was no way to remove the honey and wax that they had left behind. Actually, there was one way; a colony of mice could devour every last drop of the honey and wax that had been left behind, and they could lick every surface “clean” so that no trace of the sticky sweet substance remained.

I think this incident is a great reminder that God’s ways are not our ways. When we pray for help, we usually expect an easy, pain-free solution to our problem. Sometimes, however, when God begins to move, we are confronted with what seems to be an even worse problem. As we deal with life’s curve balls, we need to remember that God’s solutions are not always as pleasant as we would like for them to be, but His solutions are permanent. He has an answer to every problem that results in removing all the residue that would continue to plague us if it were not dealt with. 

Yes, hearing the gnawing and seeing the mice pop through places that they didn’t even know there were places, was horrifying, but the solution was permanent. My daughter and her family lived in that home for several more years before moving to Dallas, and they never again saw another bee or another mouse.

Although I knew that they had a bee problem, Victoria did not share the mouse problem with me until it had been resolved. The day that she related their harrowing experience, she began by saying, “Mom, be careful what you pray for.”

F0r updates by Joyce Swann, like her Facebook page at

 http://facebook.com/frontier2000mediagroup.

                                                           

Why Would Anybody Want to be an American?

A few months ago I heard about an East Indian man who was asked why he had chosen to live in America. He replied, “I wanted to live in a country where the poor people are fat.” I cannot imagine any American-born citizen ever giving this response because it is so removed from our way of thinking. However, I believe that we can gain some very good insights about the advantages of American citizenship by listening to those who have just been awarded the privilege.

Over the last couple of years we have heard some of our best-known politicians and religious leaders apologize for America. They have proclaimed that we are to blame for most of the world’s ills. Whether it is AIDS in Africa or the consumption of too many natural resources, America is to blame. We are told that we are a greedy, selfish, spoiled, pampered and altogether bad people who owe the world an apology; they then add insult to injury by offering an apology on our behalf. I, for one, am tired of being vilified by these men who have received so much from what is undeniably the greatest country on earth.

I was very interested, therefore, this past Monday on July 4 when I saw that CNN was interviewing some of America’s newest citizens who had only that day been sworn in at ceremonies held in cities all over the United States.  I was surprised to discover that an inordinate number of them held doctorate degrees and could have made a good living almost anywhere in the world. They had not chosen America because they were “poor immigrants” who hoped for an opportunity to leave poverty and squalor behind. They had chosen America for reasons far beyond the dream of becoming rich.

One man from Iraq said that after he had been in this country for only a few weeks he saw someone walking his dog. The dog was wearing socks, and the Iraqi asked the dog’s owner why he had put socks on his dog. The owner replied that the sidewalk was hot and the socks would keep the dog’s feet from being uncomfortable.

The Iraqi was astonished. He said that he could not imagine living in a country where people wanted even their animals to be comfortable. He finished by saying, “People would rather be a dog in America than a human in Iraq.”

A Nigerian man who has his PhD said that he had wanted to become an American citizen because in his country people do not even have clean water. He said that he wished Americans would travel to other countries and see the way the rest of the world lives so that “we would appreciate what God has given to this country.”

Yes, God has blessed America far beyond anything that anyone could have dreamed of 235 years ago.  As a result, we owe Him a great deal. Because we have been given much, much is required of us, and most of the time we have done pretty well as a nation in responding to problems in the rest of the world. We are, by far, the leader in sending missionaries to other parts of the world. We have given trillions of dollars in foreign aid, and we are the first to send relief in times of natural disasters. We are a giving, generous people.

God has blessed us, and we, in turn, have blessed others. I hope that anyone who has ever felt guilty because America has so much will remember from whence those blessings came. We must always acknowledge that God is the author of our story, and we must always live our lives to honor Him and to show others the same kindness and generosity that He continues to show us.

People who have lived without clean water, sufficient food and a just system of government know exactly why they chose to come to America. You never have to ask the guy who would rather be a dog in this country than a human in the country from which he came, “Why would anyone want to be an American?

For books and materials by Joyce, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net/

                                                                 

                                                                                                  

Perimeters

I homeschooled all ten of my children from first grade through master’s degrees. It was a massive undertaking that dominated my life from September 1975 until May 2000.During that time, one of my biggest challenges was dealing with the pre-schoolers that were a part of our life for so many years.

I learned pretty early on that if I were going to be successful in my homeschool, I would have to figure out a way to control the pre-schoolers—even when they were out of sight. I did that by establishing perimeters for them that kept them occupied with activities that were safe for them and allowed me to concentrate on school. Ironically, those perimeters proved to be liberating, both for my children and for me. Because my pre-schoolers knew exactly what they were and were not allowed to do while we were in school, there was never any question about whether certain activities were acceptable.

I believe that one of the biggest problems among Christians is that we fail to establish perimeters for ourselves in terms of what we will and will not allow ourselves to do. At this time of year we tend to think more about liberty and freedom than we might normally, but we think of it in terms of being able to do what we want to do. We have freedom of speech, freedom of choice, freedom to worship, freedom, freedom, freedom. What we seldom consider is that unless we are careful, all of this “freedom” can result in our finding ourselves in bondage to sin.

Sometimes we find ourselves in the position of making a decision about something that has been a part of our lives for a long time. In those cases, people tend to say that they are “trying” to stop doing such and such a thing. Nonsense! You don’t try to stop; you just stop.

 This point was brought home to me when my oldest son was about five years old. An acquaintance of ours, who was a chain smoker, frequently asked our children to pray for her so that she would stop smoking. One day when she repeated this request Christopher replied, “No, I won’t! I’ve prayed and prayed for you. If you want to stop smoking, stop putting those cigarettes in your mouth!”

The woman was angry and insulted, and I was stunned. However, I did not scold him. I realized that he was right. She wanted God to take away her desire to smoke, but she did not want to exert any effort. The truth is that if she had been willing to “stop putting those cigarettes in her mouth,” the desire would have eventually left and she would have been free. However, as long as she waited for the day when she would wake up and not want a cigarette, she was never going to stop smoking.

Many years ago I set up some perimeters for my Christian life that have held me in good stead. I made a promise to myself that there were certain things that I was never going to do. They were not negotiable, so I never had to decide whether I would do these things at a time when I might be tempted. My list is a fairly long one, but it has been extremely liberating.

I suggest that each of us make a list of things that we believe are unacceptable and decide once and for all that we are never going to do them—or never going to do them again. The list might include drinking, smoking, extra-marital sex, drug use, etc. The list will differ slightly among individuals, but it should include anything that might keep us from living a fully committed life. After all, making a decision at a time when we are not tempted can keep us from succumbing to temptation at a time when our defenses are down. Making a decision for Christ is not a one-time thing. It involves making the right decisions and then continuing to act on those decisions whenever temptation arises.

For books by Joyce Swann, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net/.