Three Fires on the Lake April 30, 2007
There were three groups of young people in the Northwoods last week. Two groups of young ladies were in houses on the east and west side of the Wolf Lake. The young men stayed in the main lodge.
Holly told me an interesting story when she returned. On Friday night each of the groups built a fire on the shore and gathered around and sang. The groups could hear each other sing and see the fires from three points on the lake. They say it was beautiful to see and to hear. The groups sang back and forth to one another. They were joined by the music of crickets and the mystical call of the loons. The lake was dark as ink and smooth as marble.
There were thirty-eight young people in all and they were each eager to report the work of God in their lives. They returned eager to be closer to their families and closer to the Lord.
Listening to them tell what God had done was very touching and imagining their singing to one another gathered around fires on the margin of the lake warmed my heart. The world over and throughout time there are few things as beautiful as a gathering of young people seeking God, worshipping God, and loving God. You hear a lot about troubled young people dressed in bizarre clothing doing terrible things. But last week on the remote lake in the upper peninsula of Michigan about forty young people spent the week cultivating fellowship with God, praying, searching the Scriptures, and building stronger relationships with their families and they closed their week beside an open fire, singing hymns with each other to the Lord back and forth across the lake at night.
It isn’t a scandal so you won’t read about it in the paper, but I thought you might enjoy hearing about it.
Ken Pierpont
Brook Place
Hinsdale, Illinois
April 30, 2007
New Article on the IBLP Site April 25, 2007
Last Sunday night before our staff meeting at Headquarters the young ladies posed for a photo. They would leave on Monday morning for the Northwoods on a Journey to the heart. We wrote an article on the Journey to the Heart you can read on the IBLP web-site.
Here is more on the Journey to the Heart.
The Call of the Loon
Holly is in the Northwoods leading a Journey to the Heart and living for the week on Duck Point. She called to tell me that she had heard the loons. From what she described she must have heard male and female loons.
“It is my fervent hope that a time will never come when storytellers will say, ‘Once upon a time there was a bird called a loon…..’ but that grandparents will always be able to take their grandchildren to northern lakes and listen together to that most haunting of boreal wilderness sounds, the call of the loon.” (Judith McIntyre)
A Treat April 24, 2007
Here is a treat I discovered on the ‘net. You will enjoy it. Click here and spend a half hour with the first guy I have ever known who had earned a Masters degree in Storytelling.
You might want to read about Tommy Oaks here.
Questions to Open the Heart of Your Child
I love my children deeply but there are times when I feel an emotional or spiritual distance like they are drifting a little out of reach. Sometimes one or both of us are distracted or busy. The distance may be the result of my own selfishness or irritability or hurt that steams from anger. Sometimes we will have a hurtful exchange or they may say, “You don’t understand,” or “You don’t listen.” I have been humbled often to realize that there were important things I just did not know about my children. Those secrets are often used by the enemy of their souls to separate them from myself and their mother and eventually from God.
One of the most powerful ways to “discover” the heart of your son or daughter is to spend time listening to them. I like to plan and “event” that may be a full day or a weekend and include a specific hour or two of intense, focused listening.
I have taken my sons on camping and hiking trips for this purpose. I have spent the day with my daughters walking the lakeshore and having dinner and spending time on a long drive with the radio off talking. It can be as simple as going to breakfast together or going to a quiet café or coffee shop for a couple hours. We agree to turn off our cell phones and give that time to each other. During this event or session, thoughtful questions are a powerful instrument to become an expert at each child.
I try to ask questions, look them in the eyes, ask follow-up questions, hold my tongue, avoid lectures or exhortations, and try to probe down as many layers as I can. All I want to do is discover during this time. I don’t have to act or fix anything. Just careful listening is enough.
Listening your way into the heart of our sons and daughters helps me to identify the custom-made lies that Satan is using to try to destroy each one of them. I can take their answers to my wife and we can take them to the Lord together and plan projects, outings, assignments, and support that will help them. Each child has dreams, goals, and desires. Each child has fears, troubles, guilt, and hurts that they are unlikely to tell you unless you are skilled and diligent at asking questions.
The effect of these outings, sessions, questions, and projects is a growing “bond” between you and them. They know you care about them. You understand them and help them understand themselves. They see that you are devoted to their good and helping them achieve their dreams.
These questions have been floating around for years and I have found them to be very powerful. I think they originated in Mr. Gothard’s office, perhaps directly from his pen with the assistance of the men he was working with at the time. They are not original with me, but I have used them a lot and they are very powerful.
My (Youth Pastor) Son, Kyle called this evening and mentioned that some of the men in his church were meeting this evening and the material below was brought up in the conversation. Sometimes people have trouble finding this because it is buried in the archives, so I re-posted it here where it would be easy to find, at least for a while. If you are intrested in a printed copy of this with come additional material, send me an e-mail and I will send it to you.
ken@kenpierpont.com
Duet. 6:4-9 Mal. 4:6
Set aside time just to ask questions and listen. Don’t teach or answer, just ask more questions and, if you need to, write the answers down. Make a careful study of each of your children. You could make a notebook for each child and record their answers in it.
1. What foods do you like or dislike the most?
(Goal) To break the ice.
2. Who is your best friend? I Cor. 15:33
(Goal) Who is the greatest influence of their peers?
3. Who do you most want to be like when you grow up? (Goal) Whoever it is they are moving toward that type of character.
4. What embarrasses you most in our family relationships?
(Goal) To discover what we are doing or what is going on in the family that causes them to reject themselves.
5. What is the greatest fear in you life?
(Goal) Tells us where Satan is getting into their lives. (Fear is of Satan)
6. What is your favorite activity?
(Goal) To design ways and projects to have special fellowship with your children. To have a better relationship.
7. What is your favorite song? Favorite kind of music? Favorite group?
(Goal) To see if we have a problem with music.
8. What person outside our family relationships has most influenced your life? How have they influenced you? (Goal) To determine who has influence over your children as role-models.
9. What do you like to learn about the most?
(Goal) To give direction for what to train them in.
10. What accomplishment in your life so far gives you the greatest sense of achievement?
(Goal) To discover what I can use to help build their self-worth and then put a spiritual emphasis to it.
11. What irritation in our family bothers you the most?
(Goal) To discover what problems in the family I need to work on and then teach the child how to respond to sources of irritation.
12. What really makes you angry?
(Goal) To find out in what areas are they not yielding their rights and expectations to God; and then help them work on those areas. Phil. 2:3-11
13. What do you want to do when you grow up?
(Goal) To discover what they are moving toward. To help them develop a sense of destiny.
14. What has been the biggest disappointment in your life so far?
(Goal) To know what is hurting them at times; and then to explain God’s purposes for disappointments.
15. If you had the power to change anything about the way you look, would you use that power; if so what would you change?
(Goal) Find out where they are rejecting themselves.
16. What do you appreciate the most about each member of our family?
(Goal) Focus on positive qualities in family. (Later) Encourage them to go tell that member of the family.
17. What biographies have meant the most to you? (Goal) To see if they are getting life stories from Godly people.
18. What do you like to do the most as a family?
(Goal) How can we have family fellowship that this child will enjoy. Then plan an activity.
19. Encourage them to be honest. If you could change anything about me, what would you change?
(Goal) To discover where I am damaging my relationship with them.
20. When you get to the end of your life, what do you want to look back on and say that you accomplished for God? (Goal) Discover if they have a purpose in life.
The next steps are the most important:
Pray with your wife about some of the things you learned during your session. This question times will bind your heart together with your son or daughter.
Spend a little time during the week to discuss some goals or to spend time talking about one of the questions.
Develop projects or thoughtful responses and goals based on what their answers were.
Two Green Gumdrops April 23, 2007
It is a beautiful morning. The air is fragrant with spring and this is the time of day when the birds sing in the huge white pines north of the house. I need an excuse to go out. Instead of brewing my own coffee, I jump in the car and drive the back way along Salt Creek to get a cup from McDonalds. One of the children has used my car. I try to keep it impeccably neat. It’s not at all new, but it runs well, gets good mileage, and it is clean. Turning to back out I notice two green gumdrops on the back seat. They make me pray:
“Lord, how am I going to teach my children not to eat gumdrops? Their teeth are going to decay away. Lord, I try to keep my car neat. It’s a good testimony that way. I want my children to learn orderliness and cleanliness. They are character qualities. Without character qualities they won’t do well in life. Lord, how do I teach them to clean up after themselves? It seems like I’ve told them these things a thousand times. Lord, I’m worried about these things. Will my children have teeth when they are my age? Will they live in squalor?”
But on my way for coffee I look at these two green gumdrops on the seat beside me. I am tempted to toss them out the window so my car will be clean but for some odd reason I can’t. I want to hold on to them. I think maybe it was little Hope who left them there.
Driving along the creek toward my morning coffee I suppose Hope will be our last child. It won’t be long and there will be no green gumdrops in the back seat. There will be no little chattering girl in the back seat. I will still turn my worries for her into prayers, but they will be about weightier matters than tooth decay and personal tidiness.
Those two green gumdrops on the seat beside me soften my heart. I pray again; “Lord, please help me to have a heart full of patient love for Hope and for Lois and for the other children. Remind me that our days together are numbered. Help me to have the sweet long-suffering of Jesus on my face and in my heart during the few short hours each day that I get to be with them. When years from now they remember my face, Jesus, please help them remember it with a smile of loving approval and not with a scowl of impatience. May the aroma of patient love permeate our home like the fresh fragrance of spring and give me a song every morning like the birds in the pines at dawn. Oh, and Lord, thank you for letting me find those two little green gumdrops in the back seat this morning. Amen.”
Ken Pierpont
Brook Place
Hinsdale, Illinois
April 23, 2007
Gifts for the Father April 21, 2007
Wherever I go I keep an eye open for bookstores. Downtown Traverse City, Michigan has a unique book shop. The city is at the southern end of Grand Traverse Bay, at the south east base of the Leelanau Peninsula. One day in May a few years ago we were there for a few days on an outing with students. We had climbed the dunes and hiked the trials to enjoy breathtaking vistas of vast Lake Michigan. It was a perfect weekend, sunny and warm. The world was coming to life again with the vigor of spring. The young people had spent the winter mostly confined to a downtown hotel in Flint. Most of them had never laid eyes on the stunning blue vast freshwater sea of Lake Michigan.
We guided them to some of our favorite West Coast of Michigan places. Our group stayed in neat log cabins on the grounds of Lake Ann Camp. We explored Glen Arbor, Glen Haven, the village they call Fishtown, and the vineyards of The Leelanau Peninsula. I drove them to Empire and we hiked out to Empire Bluff, high over Lake Michigan and stood looking down on the Empire Light and the Manitou Islands. They drank it in. They spent a few hours running up and down the dunes.
On the way home we would eat and do a little window-shopping in Traverse City. The students scattered and I went straight to the bookstore for coffee and some relaxed browsing. Wesley was along and he was with me in the bookstore. He came up to me while I was musing among the books and said; “Could I have eleven cents?”
I wanted to ask “What for?” but thought better of it.
“Sure buddy,” I said and handed him some change. He thanked me and skipped away.
Wesley knew that I was fascinated by loons. One evening while speaking at a camp in northern Michigan, the loons would call on what seemed like a schedule just as I would close my evening chapel like vesper chimes ringing every evening at precisely nine pm. I spoke often of loons and pointed them out on the rare occasions we were in sight of them. A few years ago the family spent a week in the Upper Peninsula on a remote lake where we walked out under the stars on every clear evening to watch for the great phenomenon of the Aurora Borealis (the northern lights) and listened to the call of the loons.
When we left the store he handed me a tiny bag and said, “This is for you.” Then he closely watched my face. I opened the bag. In it was a little bookmark with a picture of a loon on it. Wesley knew I loved loons. When he saw it, he wanted to buy it for me. He is a giver. More than anyone else in the family he is determined to give gifts at birthdays and at Christmas and when he sees something he knows someone would like. It is clearly a part of Wesley’s God-given original equipment. The problem is that Wesley has no income.
Sometimes he hires himself out to his mom or dad or brothers or sisters to make money. He collects cans, scrounges in the couch and cars for stray change, borrows, begs or saves pennies. When he was little he would often give a crudely wrapped gift of something that belonged to him and present it ceremoniously on a special occasion. If he can’t work it out any other way sometimes he asks me for money so he can buy me gift.
Has it ever occurred to you that the only way for you to give anything to your generous Father in Heaven is to take the gifts that he has generously given to you and give them back to Him? Even when you work or craft something with your hands and on your own initiative you are really only giving something back to him from what he has given to you. The Apostle Paul understood this. He said; “What do we have that we did not receive?” (1 Cor. 4:7)
Even though the gift Wesley gave me was purchased with money that I gave him, I cherish my loon bookmark and have fond thoughts and warm memories of a little boy with a giving heart handing me his gift and then searching my eyes for approval.
Ken Pierpont
Brook Place
Hinsdale, Illinois
April 21, 2007
Blogging the Men’s Conference 4 April 14, 2007
Indianapolis, Indiana
Saturday Morning
Today our Holly is 23 years old! The whole family is here for the Dad’s Conference so we were able to have our annual birthday breakfast together. (more…)
Blogging the Men’s Conference 3 April 13, 2007
Indianapolis, Indiana
Friday Evening
Friday was set aside as a “Day of Delighting in the Lord.” Before dinner we had communion. The afternoon was filled with teaching, testimonies, confession, tears, and singing. After a day of fasting dinner was roast beef with mashed potatoes and gravy… very, very good. (Hats of to Chef Grose and his staff). (more…)
Blogging the Dad’s Conference 2
Indianapolis Training Center
Friday Session:
Last night (Thursday) our family sang; “One Little Lost Lamb,” and Mr. Gothard interviewed myself and three of the children to encourage the dad’s who had assembled for the meeting. Mr. Gothard then spoke on things a father can do to bond with his sons and daughters. He gave all the men some books and a beautiful printed resource on how to write meaningful letters to each of your children.
(more…)
Ken's new book - Sunset On Summer, now available for order, $13.95 each.