 Since the kids were old enough to understand, we've had a Christmas ritual in our house. We get up in the morning, after the kids have knocked on our door several dozen times asking if it was time to start, and head for the living room. On the way down, mom puts a breakfast pizza in the oven--some crazy person invented breakfast pizza and the kids thank them for it. After gathering at the tree, we get out our Bible and we read the birth account. It's important to emphasize to the kids that this isn't a story, it's a historical event. After several years of doing this, the kids understand this and view the Bible as a historical book. To do this, throughout the year, I make sure to show them archeological finds that make the news and corroborate what's in the Bible. You can do this also, many apologetics podcasts focus a few episodes on these news items, especially Issues Etc.
After the nativity account, we say a prayer for our blessings and for the cross and to help us live for Him the coming year. From here, we pop in the movie The Nativity Story, (<--account! lol) which we keep in the background as we open presents and eat gooey pizza. Usually, after the presents are opened, we sit back and finish the movie. It's a simple little ritual, but one that immerses the kids in the importance of Jesus' birth. Do you have a Christmas ritual? You might think about starting one. Update on the next APP. I've been bad and have worked very little on it. I have much of it worked out on my storyboard, but as a mailman, I've had very little time to work on it these past two months. Have you ever delivered mail at 8:30 at night in the pitch dark? It's so much fun, I highly don't recommend it. I have drawn a lot of other realistic stuff for out art gallery (which I've neglected), that you can see on my regular art website www.carlosbenson.com, but come January, I will rev up again on the APP and get going. I want to finish it by March, but that's not looking good at this point. Oh, and one more thing, I hired some professional voice-over actors to do the narration and Gabe's part! I found them at fiverr.com. I was surprised how inexpensive it was. I will add them to the A4K APP when I do the first update, hopefully in January. Merry Christmas!!
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This is something that all parents should be doing…building an apologetics library. But books can get pricey so here are few things that I do to build my library without breaking the bank.
Anyway, that’s two quick, common sense tips to get you started if you’ve never bought an apologetics book and don’t know where to start. Happy hunting and carry on!  Wow, you came back for another blog post, you must be bored. Thanks. Last month Dr. Frank Turek was here in Missouri, a little over an hour away at a college and we went to the one night event. This was on a Wednesday. On that Friday, we drove to St.Charles (3 ½ hrs away) for the Exist Conference by Reasons to Believe. This time we took our kids and spent the night in St. Charles to be able to attend several sessions and I got to meet Dr. Hugh Ross and Dr. Fuz Rana.
So why am I telling you this? Conferences. Think: conferences. I didn’t. I’d been studying apologetics for a long time, and it never even crossed my mind to look out for conferences in my area. What’s wrong with me? Anyway, what a great way to show your kids that there are really smart people out there that answer religious questions for a living. You can show them apologetics in action. You can assure them that even if you don’t know an answer to a question, there’s a large community of theologians, teachers and apologists that can help. Your kids don’t have to live with unanswered questions which will fester and could become a problem. They’ll know that they can turn to these Christians for answers. Earlier this year, we also went to our first reThink Conference with the kids. It’s the conference put on by Stand to Reason geared towards students. We made it a mini vacation, drove to Dallas, stayed three nights and had a great time. Kids loved it, they took notes, picked the sessions they were interested in, met two of my apologetics mentors, Greg Koukl and J. Warnar Wallace, and basically stunned us with their interest. Ha! While driving home, they asked when the next one was scheduled. We’re going back next year and taking their cousin and maybe some friends. Like J. Warnar Wallace always says; put it on your calendar. Make a day trip out of it or a weekend getaway. If you can, get a hotel with a pool so the kids can relax after all the training during the day. Your kids will love it and look forward to the next one. Here are just a few links. Get your calendar out and see if any of these are coming to your area. rethink Dallas Reasons to Believe Frank Turek J. Warnar Wallace SES Conference A quick APP update: I’m working on the new APP, doing the writing and research, but I’ve been distracted by all the hours I’m working and trying to “market” the current APP. If I haven’t mentioned it, I hate the marketing stuff. Blech! I’ve written a few apologists asking for feedback, but I stopped that after the first week. Only one responded and I just felt… yuck… “Dear so and so, could you look at my APP? Purty please?” LOL. No more of that. I’ll just keep making APPs and working on the website. I’ve run a couple of Facebook ads. It’s a cheap way to target a specific audience. Let me know if you’ve seen this pop up as you’re browsing Facebook. Speaking of the website, (was I?) I’m working on pdf pages that kids and parents can download and put in your binder. As each APP comes out, I’ll have some downloads to go along with material covered in it, I’m a little behind on that. Also, my daughter has asked if we could do an apologetics podcast for kids. One thing at a time. That’s it. Carry on! Hey, thanks for stopping by and taking a look at the site. This is a Christian apologetics website for kids and parents who are just starting out.
One day I thought, man, I’ve been listening to apologetics for so many years now and I’ve done very little with it. I’m a mailman who has many hours to listen to podcasts, audio books, and I even turn text into mp3s. I’ve logged hundreds of hours of listening and learning. I love the stuff. If you read my bio, you know I have a couple of certificates in apologetics also (more about those in a future post). If I had the dinero, I’d probably try to get my Masters in Apologetics, or theology—I feel there’s a gap in my Christian knowledge which my own learning will never fill. I digress. I was also listening to this guy on a podcast who kept pestering me to do something, anything. Stop sleeping, start working for the Kingdom. Sleep is for the weak! I won’t give his name, but his organization starts with “Cold” and ends in “anity.” Another guy was saying “bloom where you’re planted, bloom where you’re planted!” The pressure was getting to me. But what could I do? I figured, I could draw a little and I already had one APP under my belt (a silly story I made for my kids) so I decided to make an app! An apologetics app for kids. I went to the APP store to see what others had done and to my surprise, there were none! I nearly fell out of my chair. As of today, my APP is still the only one that pops up if you type “apologetics for kids” in the Apple store search. Needless to say, that got me going. And eventually, after a few billion hours (oh the hours), I finally finished it. This is the first, in what I hope, is a series of simple apologetic apps for kids and their parents. The APP is an attempt to make kids aware, first, that there is this thing called apologetics and second, that there are really smart people out there that can answer their questions. I think that if a kid knows that there are answers to their questions early on in their life, they’re not nagged by those questions into their teen years and eventually out of the church. I also wanted the APP to scare parents a little with some shocking stats and quotes about the possibility of their child going astray. I’ll do that on the website as well. My plan is to go slowly. Here it is in bullet points, because I like bullet points.
About the blog, I will try to keep it short. Just quick thoughts or news on the APPs and apologetics tips for parents and even kids. Since the website is for kids as well, I will not be going into topics that I don’t feel is my place to instruct them on, I’ll leave those to the parents. You probably know what I mean. That’s it, thanks for reading. |
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December 2018
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