It's almost August and the summer has been full! We've enjoyed the longer days and beautiful sunsets, being outside and exploring new places, visits with family and friends, fun camps with our church, as well as the simple things of daily life at home without the added pressure of schoolwork to be done. Now that most of our planned activities are over, we're looking forward to easing back into preparing for a new school year and the normal routines that brings.
Here are some of the things we've been enjoying reading and listening to this summer!
If you've been around for awhile, you know how much we love biographies. We recently started reading Five Mere Christians and are really enjoying it! It's a book of short biographies about five different people and specifically how each of them glorified God in the work that they did. The first part is about Fred Rogers and we loved learning more about his life and work.
On a road trip this summer we listened to several episodes of the Dial In podcast. There are so many encouraging and thought-provoking topics and conversations to listen to. Whether you have a long commute or are at home mopping the floors, it's alays nice to have a good podcast to listen to and we highly recommend this one.
Chris has been listening to several different sermons from Stuart Olyott. So much wisdom to glean from an older saint who's lived a lot more of life than we have. We shared Why There's No Reason to Ever Lose Your Peace in a previous email (still a favorite) and more recently were so encouraged by Our Secret Walk With God.
With kids at different ages, we have more regularly been doing a couple different family worship routines and we typically try to do a book more geared toward younger kids while we're still around the dinner table before we put Thomas, our 4-year-old, to bed. We bought C is for Christian at a conference over the summer and we were surprised to find how much he enjoys it and has been interacting with us over the topics it brings up.
Fighter Verses have been a part of our family's life from the beginning (we were using it to memorize Scripture all the way back when we were dating)! The last couple of years our church has made a little flip book that has the verse(s) to memorize for that week as well as a missionary or church planter to pray. We work on memorizing around the dinner table (lots happens around the dinner table 🍽) and the kids are often memorize those same verses at church so it's continued to be a great way to keep us consistently working on memorizing Scripture.