She Is Beauty
March 04, 2024
Young lady, God knit you together in your mother’s womb. Your hair, your eyes, your skin, all of it in His perfect providence was to be you. You are beautiful. You are precious. You have purpose. You are His creation. Made in His image and redeemed in Christ to become the woman God has created you to be.
Our Society’s Focus
Our culture places an undue emphasis on external beauty. Because of this reality, the definition of beauty will always be in flux and continually changing. Pink hair today, green tomorrow because external beauty is constantly changing, leaving the person chasing the elusive trophy of cultural acceptance frustrated and empty.
The True Focus
God, as the master creator of all the ends of the heavens and earth, intimately created you and “knitted you together in your mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). Your design and creation are not chance nor mistake; more remarkable still, you are, “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14). Each of your features God planned. Your hair, your eyes, your skin, all of it was His desire for you. But God did not stop at your physical beauty.
God gave you purpose, potential, value, and worth beyond physical beauty. He created you, and each day that was made, He planned them before you were born and wrote each one of them in His book before there was yet one of them. Oh, dear daughter, you are not what this world says you are; you are a creation of the Almighty God who loves you, cares for you, and wants good for you. He who has had more thoughts of you and your life than grains of sand on the seashore will never leave or forsake you.
How Do You Unlock This Beauty?
Flip the script! Make the focus internal, not external.
Peter writes, “Don’t be concerned about the outward beauty of fancy hairstyles, expensive jewelry, or beautiful clothes. You should clothe yourselves instead with the beauty that comes from within, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God” (1 Peter 3:3-4 NLT).
When the young lady focuses on the internal beauty of holiness, gentleness, and quiet spirit, she will shine. She will be beautiful because she possesses an unfading inner beauty that only grows more beautiful with time.
Precious daughter, don’t give in to the world’s desires for you. Do not settle for anything less than what God has given in His kind providence to you. This is your beauty; this is your life; pursue it with all you are and discover all that God has made it to be. Go after His will for you with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength; go after all that is true, good, and beautiful, and don’t think twice what this world might think.
Blessings
Making Obedience Routine
February 26, 2024
Dear Parents,
At Coram Deo Academy, our mission is to help you train your children in the way they should go. One of the ways we can accomplish this is to send home ideas and materials with your children that will allow them to grow as they interact with you at home. These tools will aid you and us as we work towards the goal of training their minds to know wisdom and shaping their hearts to worship God.
Let’s get started!
The Bible teaches, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land” (Ephesians 6:1-3). Obedient children who honor their mothers and fathers will succeed at home, school, and in a life lived, Coram Deo.
How can we work together to do this?
Just the other day, as the children entered the building and began to go to their classrooms, I observed an essential detail worth noting. As the children entered their rooms, they started to do a routine as if they were preprogrammed to complete. Of course, my presence only served to distract from what was important: the daily routine!
You see, each day, the children come in, put away their lunch boxes, hang up their coats, and remove their work folders from the cubby, placing them neatly on their assigned desks. But there is more happening here than meets the eye at first glance. The children are automatically obedient to the rules they have already learned about in class. As I stated, it's (the) routine!
Every school day, the children are asked to obey routinely when it comes to listening, getting their math done, and even staying in their seats while eating lunch; it’s the rules! But it is also the routine!
We want the same for them at home.
At home, children can be taught obedience by having fun. Make it a game; make it something that doesn’t seem so involved. Tell your child you will play the obedience game, and then give them fun things to do to be obedient. Soon, this game becomes routine.
You can say:
“Susie, run to the fridge and grab me one pickle out of the pickle jar.”
“Johnny, run to the cabinet and get a snack for Fido.”
“Darla, see how fast you can go and grab me some towels from the cabinet, and then have a contest to see who can fold them the fastest.”
The children will see this as fun and not such a burden; they will begin to obey your requests more and more quickly, and it will become the routine. This is the key to Biblical obedience: we obey because it honors the authorities over us. In this case, the child obeys their parent, and it becomes a blessing to them because in obeying you, they are obeying God.