Today is a very important day in my life—my mother’s birthday.

At my blog, I’m in the middle of a series, telling our adoption story. Today, I skipped ahead a few episodes to describe Mother’s response to our adoption news.

I’m thanking God for Mother, who to this day points me toward him through her life and practical advice.

When I came home from running errands yesterday, I found a florist’s delivery on my back porch—rich, red long-stemmed roses. The gift card had no words, only numbers: 6-6-66.

Yesterday, 6-6-09, was the 43rd anniversary of the day I met Johnny Piper in the lounge of Fischer Hall at Wheaton College. God has brought us a long way since then.

When I got the flowers, Johnny was in Raleigh. Remembering the many times he’s told a favorite what-if story, I texted him: “Oh Johnny, they’re beautiful! Why did you?”

He responded: “It’s my duty”—which, of course, is a joke that always gets a laugh. (You can scroll to the bottom of this message to see the story I'm talking about.)

It gets a laugh in America, but some audiences elsewhere might not get the humor, according to a friend who lives in China. When she was hospitalized there a few years ago, a group of her students came to visit and brought gifts. She exclaimed, “How nice! You didn’t need to go to all this trouble.”

As with one cheerful voice, the young people responded, “Of course we did. It’s our duty.”

I leave for China today. It’s my pleasure.

I returned recently from Cameroon, West Africa. This was my second time as part of a team distributing wheelchairs, a joint project of Bethlehem Baptist and Joni and Friends.

We went in the name of Jesus. We know that, though it is a good thing to be lifted up into a wheelchair, it is not enough. We pray that the people we met will trust in Jesus, our Savior and the son of God who “sets on high those who are lowly, and those who mourn are lifted to safety” (Job 5:11).

Desiring God’s International Outreach became a partner in that prayer through the donation of books, most of which were given in gratitude to the Cameroonian volunteers and pastors who worked alongside us. A book is a precious gift to a person with little income, but great hunger for God.

Some received books in English.

Some received French translations.

And children received a copy of my book, Most of All, Jesus Loves You.

International Outreach, I bring you greetings from Cameroon. Children and parents, pastors and church leaders, staff and volunteers at Christian ministries to the disabled send you hearty thanks and blessing.

(More stories and pictures are at the Harvest Project team blog.)

One time there was a little boy. His family moved to a new place. He didn’t know anyone in the houses nearby. That made him feel lonely. So he sat on the front steps and cried out, “Friends! Frie-e-e-ends!” He wanted a friend...

If you were very young and were visiting me, I might tell you the rest of the story. But even if you’re not so young, perhaps you resonate with that little boy’s cry.

All of us—children and adults—want friends who love us, comfort us when we’re sad, forgive us when we mess up, and help us know God better.

It took me a long time to realize that when I’m down, one of my greatest comforts is to read through the gospels, rediscovering the ways that Jesus shows himself to be a friend—the best kind of friend.

I hope my young grandchildren will know this friendship even at their young ages. That’s why I wrote Do You Want a Friend?

We may have lots of friends, but there is only one perfect and lasting friend. Jesus loves us and died to save us from our sins. There is no better friend than Jesus.

If you have two functional legs, imagine life without them.... Imagine life without them.... Imagine that your legs are gone so that you can have life.

That’s the story of my cousin, Mal. He was in a coma, almost dead, and his sons and daughter agreed to the one medication that might save his life, knowing that the loss of fingers or feet was a likely side effect.

Despite weeks of therapy, he did lose both legs below the knee. He says, “You would think that I would be angry and bitter. I can only say, God gave me two months [of therapy] to be prepared for this.” 

Yes. Losing one’s legs is desperately difficult. But how might it change our perspective if losing legs meant keeping life? Maybe we’d say something like Mal does:

Why had God saved my life? The only reason that came to my mind was, He had additional purposes for my life. I promised God that whenever a door opened, I would trust that He wanted me to step through. 

When Mal, on his two prostheses, steps through the door that stands open now, he will be part of the second Harvest Project team delivering wheelchairs to people in Cameroon. His work will be as a wheelchair mechanic, helping to fit chairs to the particular needs of particular people. I am privileged to be part of that team with Mal.

His greater mission, though, will be fulfilled just by living. His presence and ability and faith in his Sovereign God will be a testimony to families, communities, and churches who may have assumed that a disability means worthlessness—maybe even that it would be better to be dead than disabled.

God is using Mal’s life to prove otherwise—“that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3).

I hope you will visit and subscribe to "Let The Nations Be Glad" where I and others from our team will post updates on the Harvest Project, so you’ll be reminded to pray for the team and the people we’ll meet there. You can also read more of Mal’s story and see something of the challenges for a Cameroonian with disabilities.

There are good reasons to dream of a white Christmas.

For one, God created crystal, blinding-white new snow to help us understand the contrast between our sinful old selves and the new persons he has made us into: “though your sins are like scarlet,they shall be as white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18).

For another, the first Christmas was one of the times that angels spoke to humans on God’s behalf. And one kind of snow fun reminds us of those Christmas angels.

May your CHRISTmas celebration be blessed. Have fun and give thanks for the birth of our Savior, whether or not you have snow!

“The little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.” Really? Let’s not forget that the Lord Jesus was also the human newborn baby Jesus, as we’re reminded in one of the best Christmas books ever—The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

Imogene had the baby doll but she wasn’t carrying it in the way she was supposed to, cradled in her arms. She had it slung up over her shoulder, and before she put it in the manger she thumped it twice on the back.

I heard Alice gasp and she poked me. “I don’t think it’s very nice to burp the baby Jesus,” she whispered, “as if he had colic.” Then she poked me again. “Do you suppose he could have had colic?”

I said, “I don’t know why not,” and I didn’t. He could have had colic, or been fussy, or hungry like any other baby. After all, that was the whole point of Jesus—that he didn’t come down on a cloud like something out of “Amazing Comics,” but that he was born and lived...a real person. (73-74)

Luke 2:10

And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.”

We are a people of promise. For centuries, God prepared people for the coming of his Son, our only hope for life. At Christmas we celebrate the fulfillment of the promises God made—that he would give a way to draw near to him.

Advent is what we call the season leading up to Christmas. It begins four Sundays before December 25. The first Advent Sunday this year was November 30. For four weeks, it’s as if we’re re-enacting, remembering, the thousands of years God’s people were anticipating and longing for the coming of God’s salvation, for Jesus.

That’s what the word advent means—coming. Even God’s prophets who foretold the grace that was to come didn’t know “what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating” (1 Peter 1:11). They were waiting, but they didn’t know what God’s salvation would look like.

In fact, God revealed to them that they were not the ones who would see the sufferings and glory of God’s Christ.

They were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. (1 Peter 1:12)

They were serving us. We Christians on this side of Jesus’ birth are a God-blessed, happy people because we know God’s plan. The ancient waiting is over. We have the greatest reason to celebrate.

And yet we are still waiting.

Our spiritual redemption came to us with the baby of Bethlehem. But still, as Romans 8 says, “we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (verse 23).

There is suffering and tragedy still, even for Christians. Someone we love is dying. We may be in pain. Sometimes we have trouble believing God’s promises.

In other words, our redemption is not complete. We are waiting for the redemption of our bodies—waiting for Jesus’ second advent, for him to come again.

So here we stand in the middle. Advent is a season of looking back, thinking how it must have been for those awaiting the promised salvation of God, not knowing what to expect. And at the same time, it is a season of looking ahead, preparing ourselves to meet Jesus at his Second Coming.

Brian Gault was born in Northern Ireland in 1960 with no arms due to the “completely safe” drug prescribed for his mother’s morning sickness. I’ve just finished reading his autobiography, Look, No Hands.

At Bethlehem Baptist's Disability Ministry blog, you can read about some of the impact of the book on me.

Annie Lou Henry
May 23, 1898 - November 9, 1980

Twenty-eight years ago today—five months after we began at Bethlehem—my father’s mother died down in Georgia. For a couple of years she had been having small strokes that kept her more and more confined to her home and then her bed.

During one visit, I sat with her and learned a lesson that helped prepare me for ministry and my own life.

This woman was my grandmother, who had always been part of my life. Though college-educated, she had survived the depression by scratching a living from the Georgia red clay, alongside her husband and children. She outlived her husband (Walter Raleigh Henry, Sr.) by 30 years. She buried one child and raised nine others. She now had so many grandchildren and great-grandchildren that she and God were probably the only ones who knew the number without lengthy calculation.

She had known God’s faithfulness through many kinds of heartbreak and pain and struggle. It was obvious to everyone who knew her that she trusted him for every breath of her life.

One time, one of her daughters told me that Grandmother prayed every day by name for each of her children, their spouses, and their children and grandchildren. Knowing her, I believed that. Aunt Rachel told me that Grandmother had sensed from God an assurance that all of the descendants she knew would be with her in heaven some day. Time will tell whether that is true, but the story is a strong testimony to her faith in God and her closeness to him.

Now this giant in my life—this shrunken 91-year-old giant—lay in bed and wondered if she were really a Christian.  Surely, she thought, if my faith were true and strong, God wouldn’t have let me come to this—too sick and weak to get out of bed. Maybe, she thought, my whole life has been a lie.

I was aghast. How could she say such things? I hardly knew what to say, but I assured her that her life told me a different story. I tried to point her back to the God she had always told me about, the God in her favorite passage of Scripture—the passage all of us grandchildren had memorized whether or not we wanted to, because we heard it so often from Grandmother:

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of  the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.” (John 10:27-30)

Here is the lesson I learned that day. Though Satan is never stronger than Jesus, he may seem stronger when we become weaker. When we are weak and sick and old, we may be the most vulnerable of any other time in our lives. And considering that our enemy is wily as a serpent waiting for an opportune moment to strike, perhaps the saints who have remained the strongest throughout life face the greatest temptation when finally they are weak. 

I write about Grandmother today for 3 reasons:

1. Every one of us is older than we used to be, and as more time passes, we will probably become weaker. We need to be on guard against the sneaky lies of our enemy.
2. We know or will know someone who needs encouragement when life closes in and he or she loses sight of the God who has been known well and trusted deeply until now.
3. As someone we love draws closer to death, we must never give up praying that God preserve faith strong to the end.

And I—now a grandmother myself—urge you to hide this assurance in your heart:

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.”

Today is the 87th birthday of my mother, Pamela Henry.

A couple of years ago, our Bethlehem M.O.M.S asked me to tell them what I learned by being my mother’s daughter. Only God knows all I’ve learned and am still learning from her.

Here’s a recent example. Mother broke her hip in May and hip replacement was the best way to help her toward healing. Within days of the surgery, I was hearing from my siblings that Mother was always one step ahead of what the doctors, nurses, and therapists were going to be asking of her. The day before she was going to be helped and trained to get out of bed and dress herself, she struggled triumphantly through the process herself.

She told me a couple of weeks ago, “I knew I couldn’t just wait and have things done for me. I had to make things happen, so I wouldn’t slip into being an invalid.”

And make things happen she does. When it was my turn to stay with her a month after her hip replacement surgery, she wasn’t allowed yet to drive, so all she really needed from me was that I drive her—to church because she was eager to gather again with God’s people...and to Curves so she could start working out again.

As soon as possible she was off to jail again—as a Gideon Auxiliary member to meet monthly with women prisoners.

Psalm 127 says children are a heritage from the Lord. I say, that to the children, Godly parents are a heritage from the Lord.

As I've mentioned before, I like being read to. If you can relate, I want to make sure you're familiar with Christianaudio.com.

They offer a different free Christian classic audiobook download each month. This month it’s All of Grace by Charles Spurgeon. After October 31, you’ll pay $14.98 for exactly the same download that’s free right now.

They also always have a long list of free downloadable sermons, interviews, lectures, etc.

Now I’m waiting to see what the November free offer will be.

Last Wednesday marked the eightieth anniversary of the death of Lilias Trotter. She died August 27, 1928, forty years and five months after following God’s call to leave her comfortable English home and move to Algeria.

According to the standards of her day, it seemed impossible that she should succeed. She was too old (34!). She was single. She didn’t know Arabic. She had no acquaintances in North Africa, except the two women who traveled with her. She couldn’t pass the physical exam for any mission board because she had a chronically weak heart following a surgery when she was younger.

If God works through the weakness of humans, as Lilias believed, he had it here in full force!

She sailed from England on March 5, 1888, with “a strange glad feeling of utter loosing and being cast upon God.” She had a passion for the God of the impossible.

Once there, she wasn’t satisfied to work only in the city of Algiers. Trotter loved to travel into the desert to find outlying settlements and nomad camps where people needed Jesus. Each journey was risky for women traveling alone with an unfamiliar guide through territories where Europeans were targets for desert bandits, scorpions, disease, and ferocious dogs.

There were no roads through the great, constantly shifting sand dunes, which rose up to 400 feet above the floor. A sandstorm would cover the subtle markings on the way. Even tiny miscalculations could mean missing a destination by miles. Within hours, the air could sear the lungs and the sun burn the traveler. It could take only half a day to reach dehydration.

In her art and writing, even today, we can catch glimpses of this world she loved. Toward the end, she was bedridden, and still she followed her calling. A map of Algeria and Tunisia hung over her bed. In her sleepless hours she prayed intensely.

On the map she wrote these words: “Take heed to the ministry which thou has received in the Lord that thou fulfill it.”

May we take those as our own words and prayer and intention.

Our grandson, Orison, is three years old. Judging by his interests during our Sunday afternoon backyard picnic, I would have said he was aspiring to stardom as an ace batter or as a trumpet player in a marching band (using the wiffle bat as his trumpet).

It would be fine if he achieved either of those goals. But I smiled when I read his mom’s blog this morning and glimpsed much deeper, higher, and broader possibilities: “Mom, I’m going to Kenya.”

That was make-believe, but games reflect a child’s desires and interests. My smile reached deep into my heart when I read Molly’s yearning that God make her ready for whatever he has for Orison in future years.

May we all pray with Molly that God help us to surrender all worldly claims on our children’s lives.

One verse leapt to my memory as we listened to Psalm 69 in the service this weekend: “I have come into deep waters.” It reminded me of a memorable passage from Lilias Trotter, 19th century artist, author, and missionary to Algeria.

“I am come into deep waters” took on a new meaning this morning. It started with perplexing matters concerning the future. Then it dawned that shallow waters were a place where you can neither sink nor swim, but in deep waters it is one or the other: “waters to swim in”—not to float in. Swimming is the intense, most strenuous form of motion—all of you is involved in it—and every inch of you is in abandonment of rest upon the water that bears you up.

“We rest in Thee, and in Thy Name we go.” (A Blossom in the Desert, 146, my italics)

It is an encouragement to me to be reminded by this image that deep water doesn’t drown us if we swim hard while at the same time we abandon ourselves to God who holds us up—“underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deut. 33:27).

I like listening to unabridged books while I do relatively mindless tasks. Recently I remembered a long-ago recommendation from Justin Taylor and I began downloading audiobooks from LibriVox, where they offer “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.”

All the books are read by volunteers. I suspect that means a range in quality, but so far, everything I’ve dipped into has been very well done. I’ve tested a few and listened all the way through to Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton and Jewish Children by Shalom Aleichem.

There are 1,476 listings in the catalog, with more being added as volunteers finish them. I see lots of good “reading” ahead—Dante, Defoe, Descartes, Dickens, Dickinson, Mary Mapes Dodge, Dostoyevsky, Frederick Douglass, and Arthur Conan Doyle, to name a few from just one letter of the alphabet.

Of course, I mustn’t leave this topic without a reminder of the all the free audio resources from my favorite author, available here at Desiring God.

This is a weekend for remembering the ones who died in our nation’s service. For me, the memories are mostly of high school friends who died in Vietnam.

Today, my heart goes out especially to the ones whose memories are fresh and raw, hardly far enough in the past to be called “memory”—friends and family of American military personnel who will not return to them from the Middle East.

Here and there around the cemetery this morning were old men and women, caring for and adorning graves already well-tended. I imagined that they were honoring a friend or family member who died in World War II or in the Korean conflict.

This is a weekend for all Americans to give thanks for what God has given us through the sacrifice of all the men and women who have died for our country. However great the faults of our government and whatever our dissatisfactions, we have much to be grateful for.

If we had had our way, our much-loved granddaughter, Felicity, would have been crawling around in the grass during our Memorial Day picnic this weekend. She would be living and experiencing the privileges of being an American citizen—if we had had our way.

Instead, she has always been and will always be a citizen only of the land of promise, the city whose designer and builder is God (Heb 11:9,10). And though we still weep to hold her and know her, what more could we ask for her? She will never have to struggle over her true allegiance as we do who are citizens of both an earthly nation and the Kingdom of God.

Thank you, Lord, for the ones who have died to protect our freedom here. And thank you even more for your kingdom, which can never be threatened by any enemy.

Hidden treasures, that’s what my boys and I were looking for back in the days when we made our Christmas shopping rounds—first to Savers and Salvation Army Thrift Shops, then to the liquidation store nearby, then if we still hadn’t found all the gifts we wanted to give, we upgraded to Target.

A hidden treasure was what Talitha wanted last week when she and I went shopping for a very special dress to wear on Saturday for her date to the Father-Daughter High Tea at Bethlehem. She found the perfect dress for $9.99 minus the 40% seniors discount (I’m eligible).

That’s our kind of shopping.

The Apostle Paul said, “Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need” (Eph. 4:28). Although we’re not really stealing, just looking for a steal, we like the principle—work so you can earn so you can be generous in Jesus’ name. We could add another piece: In order to have what we need to be generous, we also need to be careful how we spend.

So, I’m thrilled that Hidden Treasures Thrift Store opens this week. During our day-off lunchtime yesterday, John and I peeked in and were impressed at the large, airy, attractive store. Here’s what they say about themselves at their website:

Hidden Treasures is a not-for-profit thrift store that exists to impact our world locally and globally for the glory of Jesus Christ. . . .

We will be selecting international ministries from a Bethlehem Baptist Church-supported network to be recipients of 75% of all our profits. The remaining 25% of profits will be put back in to the ministry of Masterworks.

The grand opening is Thursday to Saturday this week. Lord willing, I’ll be there!

In March, I went to visit Kenya. I kissed my husband goodbye and left him at home. Or so I thought. But when I got to Kenya, I found him all over the place.

At Moffatt Bible College in Kijabe, for example, the librarian gave me a tour. One set of double doors opened to the textbook closet. Most students can’t afford to buy books for their classes, so here they can check out the required texts for the term. In the center of the center shelf was a stack of The Supremacy of God in Preaching.

Later that week, at a workshop in Old Kijabe Town, Peter heard that I was John Piper’s wife. He turned his smile on me and said, “Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. . . . Worship, therefore, is the fuel and goal in missions,” quoting from Let the Nations Be Glad.

Peter is a graduate of Moffatt Bible College and is now the Assistant Pastor at Kijabe Mission Church. I wouldn’t have been surprised by a former student telling me that he appreciated my husband’s book. But I was blown away that a couple of years after Peter completed his missions class, he still could quote word for word from the textbook—that’s impact.

“Did you know your dream has come true? There's a book of Lilias Trotter's art now—A Blossom in the Desert,” I emailed a friend last week. Miriam Rockness, who edited this book, earlier wrote the book that introduced me to Lilias Trotter, A Passion for the Impossible. I was so inspired by her story that I included it in Faithful Women and their Extraordinary God.

We who admire Lilias Trotter have waited a long time actually to see her artwork. Until now, it was hidden away in the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford University and in the archives of the Arab World Ministries.

Lilias Trotter was an upper-class English woman of the Victorian era whose drawings and water colors were admired by John Ruskin, the art authority of the day. He foresaw for her a life of glory and fame if she devoted herself to her art.

Instead, she turned her back on that dream and followed the calling of God to Algeria, arriving in 1888 and dying there 40 years later. As so often happens, she discovered that God wasn’t asking her to give up her talent, but to use it in a different place for different purposes.

Among other things, she often illustrated her journal entries and the letters she sent home with her artwork, a visual treasure of North Africa as it was then. She also wrote several small books of meditations, often springing from her observations of nature and always illustrated with her drawings.

A Blossom in the Desert is filled with Lilias Trotter’s love of God and of the place and people he gave her in Algeria. With the eye of a true artist, she sees God’s fingerprint everywhere she looks.

Oh, the desert is lovely in its restfulness. The great brooding stillness over and through everything is so full of God. One does not wonder that He used to take His people out into the wilderness to teach them.

I find here a passage that remains with me years after first reading it:

“I am come into deep waters” took on new meaning this morning. It started with perplexing matters concerning the future. Then it dawned that shallow waters were a place where you can neither sink nor swim, but in deep waters it is one or the other: “Waters to swim in”—not to float in. Swimming is the intense, most strenuous form of motion—all of you is involved in it—and every inch of you is in abandonment of rest upon the water that bears you up.

Our neighbors can attest that we don’t use dandelion poison. We recycle. One showerhead has a water saver shut-off valve. Beyond that, I don’t give much thought to ecology. I’m scared off by people who tend to treat the earth as god, rather than as God’s handiwork. So I have avoided considering my responsibility as a steward of God’s property.

I had a one-week crash course last month when Talitha and I were guests of Craig and Tracy Sorley, BBC missionaries with Care of Creation Kenya...

Read the rest of the article. 

One my my continual needs for self-control comes from being the oldest of 10 children and then 35+ years of mothering. I feel very comfortable telling people what to do, speaking as if I know what’s best. Others call it bossy. My fight for self-control in this area has two parts—reminding myself who God is and then preaching that to myself.

I fight bossiness by reminding myself that God is God and I’m not. So however convinced I am of the best course for someone else, I might be wrong. (When I forget to remind myself, God graciously does it by proving me wrong.)

I must say, the older I am, the more young people there are who think I might have some wisdom. What comes most naturally is to say, “You ought to...” Instead, I try to force myself—even correcting myself mid-sentence, if necessary—to couch advice in phrases like, “You might think about...” or “If I were in your place, I think I might..." or “What happens if you...?”

The hardest time to bite my tongue, though, is with my husband, not because he needs me to tell him what to do, but because I think he does. In those cases, I remind myself, “He is an adult. He doesn’t need me to tell him how to..." Most often this is with insignificant things like packing the car trunk for vacation. When it’s larger decisions, we talk a lot and pray together. But then if the decision is not what I would have chosen, I try to say to myself, “Who’s to say that I’m right and he’s wrong? If things go badly, even really badly, it’s not the end of the world. If things go well, then God has taught me something new through my husband.”

I’m not all-wise and omniscient. Only God is. It’s a relief not to have to be God.

The pastors’ conference has become a tradition in the Piper family. Back in the days when the conference was small enough to be held in the Bethlehem church building, the sons who were homeschooled loved to hang out there. It didn’t take them long to figure out who the pastors were that enjoyed talking with kids and playing basketball during break. Oh yes, and there were killer snacks.

The big family event during conference is Tuesday evening when the speakers and their wives are invited to dinner at our house before the evening session. We’ve done this since the very first conference, because we wanted to give the speakers one time during the conference when they could visit with each other.

As hostess, I expect to enjoy the conversations going various directions while I move between the kitchen and my place at the table. But the year of the first conference, J. I. Packer was at my end of the table and we realized we enjoy the same kind of mystery novels—mostly by British women. Many visitors enjoy going upstairs to see my husband’s study, but Dr. Packer was the first who asked to see my library. Whenever our paths cross since then, he tosses out the name of another mystery author I should look for.

It would have been hard for children to grasp what a privilege it is to visit at the table with teachers, preachers, pastors, and missionaries, many of them respected around the world.

One year Abraham and Barnabas asked Greg Livingstone which countries he’d visited. Greg told them he’d give them a dollar for every country they named that he hadn’t visited. He was pretty impressed with all the names they knew, including Western Sahara. By the end of the evening, Abraham (middle-school aged) was ready to follow Greg to Afghanistan. He was miffed when Greg told him to stay home a few more years and finish his education. Over the next year or two, the boys received random, miniscule installments of rupees, dirhams, piastres, dinars, etc. Unless they’ve pardoned his debt, I think Greg still owes them. Or maybe the devaluation of the dollar has erased the deficit.

Barnabas remembers one meal seasoned with the two Scottish accents of Iain Murray and Alistair Begg. And there are rumors that C. J. Mahaney shook the house with his foot-stomping laughter.

These days, Talitha is our last child living at home. Like her brothers before her, she begs to skip school during the conference. This year, I will pick her up midday on Wednesday in time to hear her daddy’s presentation about her Opa. But otherwise, she has to maximize the evenings for volunteering and socializing.

Greg Livingstone’s here again this year. Get ready for Tuesday evening, Greg. Make sure Talitha finishes her education before you recruit her. And watch your wallet.

When we knew Alex and Brett Harris would be in town for the DG Pastors’ Conference, we wanted to catch them for an interview. Who better to interview two popular young bloggers than another young person? The guys were glad to sit down with Talitha Piper, 12, and answer her questions.

The message of the 19-year-old twins is, “Do hard things.” That’s also the title of their book, available in April.

They are high school grads, homeschooled all the way, and applying now to colleges for the fall or spring. In the meantime, this year is filled with writing, organizing Rebelution conferences (4 in 2007; 7 in 2008) and answering the emails they receive through their website.

Talitha's Interview with the Harrises

Alex and Brett, the name of your ministry and your website is The Rebelution. Tell me how you got that name.

Rebelution is a combination of the words rebellion and revolution. It kind of gives the idea of rebelling against rebellion. As we wrote articles and developed the ideas, it came to mean a teenage rebellion against low expectations.

Tell us the kinds of things you’re responsible for in a normal week.

Right now, we’re out of high school and are taking a year off before college, because we feel like God has opened a lot of doors for us with our ministry. We have breakfast with our family and then go to our computers. We get tons of emails that we look through and respond to. Then there’s lots of coordinating of the conferences—creating brochures, keeping the website updated, arranging meeting places, recruiting volunteers, and many more time-consuming details.

Up until recently our book was the major thing we were working on. It took up just about every waking moment. We like to say God has a sense of humor, so if you write a book called Do Hard Things, he’s not going to make it easy. We just finished the last minor changes—we think. We finished the book about 27 times.

Besides that, we write for our blog and for some Focus on the Family publications.

Next week, we go home and record Do Hard Things as an audio book so it can be released at the same time as the book.

We try to keep our evenings free for time with our family. We always have family worship in the evening.

What’s a Bible verse that keeps you going in your faith?

There are 2 that have driven what we do with the Rebelution. The first is 1 Timothy 4:12: “Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity."

What’s so neat about that verse that it’s not just saying, “Hey, don’t look down on me because I’m young”; it’s challenging the young person to be an example. That’s the high standard, the calling, that God has for young people.

That’s the theme verse of the Rebelution—rebelling against low expectations is really pursuing God’s standards.

Another verse would be 2 Timothy 2:22: “Flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart."

That also captures the Rebelution, because we’re supposed to rebel against low expectations, and flee youthful lusts, and supposed to do hard things like striving after these godly standards, and we’re supposed to do it along with other people who also care about those things and love God with all their heart. That’s what the Rebelution is about. It’s not just an isolated thing. We’re trying with our website and our conferences to bring young people together who share that passion.

Who are some heroes in your lives?

We have many heroes, both living and dead. In fact, that’s one of the principles of the Rebelution. We tell people that we want them to make friends with dead people. You can sit down with a book all night long and dialog with a person long dead. We have a lot of heroes like that, for example, Francis Schaeffer and Jonathan Edwards. Our living heroes would include our parents and your father, Talitha. He’s shaped us in many ways, so it’s an honor to be interviewed by you. Others would be Randy Alcorn, C. J. Mahaney, Al Mohler, Mark Dever and people that our brother, Josh, has introduced us to through his New Attitudes conferences.

We try to have heroes in different areas, for instance, political heroes like Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. We look for people that embody the person we want to be later in our lives—husbands, fathers.

The title of your book seems to be a slogan for you—Do Hard Things. Where did you get the idea for that slogan?

It’s something we learned from our father. He told us about the Vikings—not the Minnesota Vikings. They raided villages and everyone was afraid of them. They weren’t nice people. One thing that made them unstoppable was the strength they had from rowing those 20-ton ships with their own muscles. Their strength came from doing themselves the hard labor that other seafaring people left to galley slaves. That’s a lesson for us and other young people. If we are willing to do those difficult tasks that other people neglect or ignore, we’ll gain strength from that.

That gave us the idea for “Do hard things.” We realized that’s the way God’s created us to grow. In every area, doing hard things is the way that God’s making us grow.

Give me 2 or 3 sentences that tell me the heart of your book.

Alex: Doing hard things is your best life. It’s not your easiest, but it’s your best life. It’s a life full of adventure, excitement, and fulfilment because it’s what God made you to do for his glory.

Brett: In the book, we quote G.K. Chesterton, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” That’s the goal of our book and our ministry, calling Christian young people to be the generation that finds it difficult, but still tries.

I got a letter recently from someone who hopes to be a writer. She says:

I get so frustrated with myself because even as I am typing, I think, "What am I doing?  I can't write!" I would like to get published some day, but I don't even know how to start.

No 7-step list will guarantee a writer is formed out of a non-writer, but here are some suggestions, things that have been helpful for me.

1. Write!

The cliche answer is probably the best one—if you want to write, write. Don't think about publishing at first. And quit examining yourself and your ability. Don't worry about grammar and spelling at first. Just write. Anything. Journal. Letters. Blog. Keep a writing notebook or computer file. In it, write random paragraphs describing something you've seen or imagined. Jot down ideas or connections that have come to your mind when you're reading your Bible.

All of this is good practice and good source material for you. Sometimes I happen across a random piece of paper where in the past I briefly wrote a thought that I'd now completely forgotten. Without the paper it would have been totally lost. Now it slips into something I'm writing as if it were totally fresh today.

2. Immerse yourself in what you admire.

When you find an author you love to read, read everything you can find by that person. Think of authors whose writing grabs you, then soak yourself in their work. For me, there have been all sorts. It would be hard to pick out just a few, but here's a very random sample: George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Edith Schaeffer, Elisabeth Eliot, P.D. James, Alexander McCall Smith.

A practical and surprisingly helpful way to get a feel for the quality of another author’s writing is to copy down well-turned phrases of theirs that you find as you read. Then, not only are you passively taking in good writing as a reader, you are also practicing putting it out yourself as a writer.

3. Practice improving other people’s writing.

I think editing other people's work has helped my writing a lot. As an exercise, you might take random paragraphs from other writers or yourself and see how much you can cut out and still leave a good paragraph. Shortest is not always best, but long is often weak. See what other ways you might improve the paragraph.

4. Join a writers’ group.

In college, I should have majored in Lit because I love reading. But Lit required a lot of writing. So I majored in Speech, so I could just talk, because I didn't like to write.

When I was in my late 30's, someone at Bethel College asked me to write a very short piece for the alumni magazine about an Alumna of the Year (or something like that), a person in our church. And I was probably 40 before I started thinking I might enjoy writing and began to do it because I liked it.

About that time I joined the Minnesota Christian Writers Guild. At the monthly meetings, even if the speaker is talking about a kind of writing I'm not interested in, somehow it's still good fertilizer and watering to whatever I am interested in.

Look for a writers' organization near you. Whether or not it should be a Christian group depends on what kind of writing you’re doing. As you look for a group, keep in mind there’s some pretty goofy stuff out there (both Christian and non-Christian), stuff that won't advance your thought or writing or your faith very well.

5. Start a writers’ group.

Later I started getting together monthly with a small group of other aspiring writers. Each of us brings something and we take turns reading to each other. Then we encourage each other and make suggestions. That has been really helpful. And you should recognize that comes from me, who doesn't take criticism easily nor want anybody telling me what to do.

Round up your own group of writers or would-be writers. Needing to have something fresh each month is good motivation to keep writing.

6. Participate in events for writers.

Find conferences you want to attend. American Christian Writers, for example or Christian Writers Guild. These are big conferences and will have tracks for beginners. Look around those websites for other helpful info, too. Another good annual conference is Write to Publish, always in Wheaton, though not associated officially with the college.

Same thought here as above about deciding whether to go to Christian conferences or others.

7. Ask yourself what you want to say and who you want to say it to.

Before moving eventually toward publishing, probably most important is getting past the general idea of writing, and getting down to asking yourself, “What do I have to say? What do I want to say? What are my great burdens that won’t let me be content until I deal with them on paper? Who do I want to write this for?”

Over time this sense will grow, perhaps from your random writing notebook. You’ll start to notice what gets most of your word count, or what raises the strongest emotions in you, or what you've been learning as you've written. Writing is one of the best ways (besides talking to yourself!) to know what you really think . You realize how unfinished your thoughts have been when you try to get them out of your head and into something cogent on paper.

Keep learning!

Really, what we're talking about here is continuing education. I was surprised to discover that my education wasn't finished when I finished college. I realize now that I learned to learn in school. And I've gotten my real education since then.

So, if you want to grow in writing, that means you want to continue your education in writing, and that means WRITE!