PURCHASE THIS BOOK

Seven Words to Change Your Family...
While there’s still time

There’s no pain like family pain. Everyone knows it. If life is not working at home, it not working at all—no matter how successful other areas of our lives might seem. Family life is where our greatest joys and sorrows are experienced.

After 20 years of helping people with their deepest needs, I can testify that the most urgent counsel has been needed for change inside the walls of our homes. Perhaps you can identify:

1. Is your marriage hurting? Maybe the hopes of your wedding day have faded into more work and less wow than you ever dreamed.
   
   
2. Are you concerned for your children? Maybe they are very young but already strong and willful. As you think about the future, you know that some things will need to change if your children are going to grow up to respect your authority and more importantly, the Lord’s.
   
   
3. Has your family fractured beyond repair? Maybe someone you love has made an awful choice that has detonated an atomic explosion in your family. Is your family in pieces and you have no idea what to do or where to begin?
   
   
4. Is the problem outside your home but still in your extended family? Perhaps with your in-laws, or one of your parents, or a sibling? Maybe some words have been spoken that should have remained unsaid. Or worse, a crack in the family has grown into a communication canyon and you have no clear idea how to get a message of love across the gap.
   
   
5. Is your need less dramatic and more dripping? Is it less like a tornado and more like a leaky faucet?

The purpose of Seven Words to Change Your Family is to bring significant change in the exact situations described here.

It was a year of milestones for our family in 2006. This coming weekend, my parents celebrate their 50th anniversary. Fifty years of a “wow” marriage. Their children and grandchildren rise up to call them blessed. It’s the prayer of Kathy and my heart that our model would be the same as we build faithfully on the truths that they have so lovingly entrusted to us.

On our homefront, our second son Landon graduated from high school and started college this year. He’s ready to launch into a whole new life. He’s close enough for the comforts of home, yet feeling the tug of establishing his life beyond our nest. What’s a parent’s responsibility to do at this point except be available for a word of wisdom and pray a lot? His older brother, Luke made that transition a couple years ago and now we look forward to a wedding next June as he walks down the aisle with the girl we have been praying he’d choose for years. PTL! And so I wouldn’t preach to you the EZ-1-2-3 steps of parenting, the Lord gave us our daughter. We’ve had to learn (and are learning) a completely different pattern of parenting with dream-girl Abby.

We’re all in process: doing the best we can to live out the truths God has entrusted to us in His Word—making mistakes, forgiving, learning, growing as we go. Just because I wrote a book on family life, don’t think that I think we’ve got this thing figured out. Family life is an art, not science. It needs a lot of creativity and wisdom at every turn. And it keeps coming back to these seven words, no matter how old or mature or wise we get.

The seven words comprise the backbone of this book:
Part 1: Three Healing Words: forgiveness, blessing, honor
Part 2: Three Building Words: truth, church, commitment
Part 3: One Transforming Word: love.

The great thing about applying God’s Word in our families is that you can start today—wherever you are. Someone is probably could use a healing, or building, or transforming word from you.