I've written 9 books... but 8 aren't done yet

Because the Lord has blessed me in so many ways, from time to time people tell me... "you should write a book". Just what I need to make my head bigger than it already is! After being married for 25 years or so, Dolly and I thought, "hey! let's write a book about raising children" What a great idea, or so we thought. Sounds like a great idea until you actually start to write it.

What's the idea of the book? (raising children)
Where do we start (write why we wrote the book)
Write an introduction thanking God and all the family and friends who helped us

now what?....Oh great! Before the day was through we had writers' block already!

Okay, let's write the book to our children, so they would see how and why we did it, others could look in and maybe help them too. Somehow I think we didn't do a good job on the "why" of parenting.

So, we started writing down a list of things that were important to us in the raising of our children. The first chapter would be about "Having a true personal relationship with God through his Son Jesus Christ". Everything in life would start there and the other chapters would follow.... or so we thought.

But after several days of trying to "boil it down", I came to the conclusion that if I had to be honest, our book would have many chapters with blank pages. You see, although God blessed us in many ways, we were not the perfect parents (duh!). And it wouldn't be right to act like we knew it all! Those blank chapters would represent what we didn't do right, what we ourselves still had to learn. We would have chapters in the book, but blank pages, so anyone reading it could fill in the blanks based upon what the Bible said about it, and what they learned by working to apply it.

Time went on and we put the book writing adventure on the side. After Dolly passed away, I told one of my daughter-in-laws that if they wanted to know what my wife was like, to look at their husband, and they would see some of what their husbands' mother was like. And so it goes, we were blessed with 9 children, one is with the Lord and the other 8 are still kickin'. Look at their lives and see in a small way a reflection of what Dolly and I taught them (good and bad).

Our children are the living books of the result of what we thought was the right way to "train up a child".