My latest article is in Lifeway’s Living With Teenagers Magazine (the Using Purpose to Motivate Your Teens article):

Living with Teenagers is a monthly magazine written by parents for parents and is devoted to helping them develop a growing relationship with their teens that guides them toward responsible Christian adulthood. Each issue focuses on answers to real-life questions from a Christian perspective and strives to offer parents the kind of solid information and practical advice that encourages and equips them to fulfill their biblical role as the primary spiritual developers of their children.

Features:

Information on youth trends

Parenting issues including single parent concerns and blended family challenges

Responses from experts to questions from readers

Health and wellness column that focuses on ways parents can keep their families fit

You can buy it here.

“Let me not forget the heinousness of sin lies not so much in the nature of the sin committed, as in the greatness of the Person sinned against.” —Puritan prayer

George Orwell wrote an incredible story of a man who was faced with a major moral dilemma—to kill an elephant or not. “To Shoot an Elephant” was first published in the literary magazine New Writing in the autumn of 1936.

The story doesn’t sound quite that drastic or horrible a situation, but this foreign policeman struggles with the task placed upon him. He knows he shouldn’t do it. He can’t do it. But the elephant is destroying the market of this foreign country that hates the policeman, yet he is tasked to be in. These people are ones who do everything they can to humiliate him.

And now he has been given a task by his superiors, who he does not agree with. Orders to shoot the elephant. Everyone expects him to do it. One of the most telling parts comes when he says:

“And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.”

So there he stood, rifle in hand, sights set on the elephant he knew he should not shoot.

Read the rest here.