Progress is being made…

Just to update a little about my book, I am nearly finished with one lesson, and the title has been tweaked slightly. My Mom suggested the title be “Dead Flies make Perfume Stink, and other life lessons for the young.

I have finally decided on a set in stone format for each lesson. I have also refined the goal for this book. This book began with me wanting to get something published and ready to sell in my little book store, but really it’s become much more than that. As I was coming up with the topics, I realized that most of these terms- biblical terms- are lost to society today. Terms such as folly, humility, and repentance are just a jumble of letters to most kids today. I went to my younger siblings and asked them the meaning of each word, and most of them gave me a blank stare. These very important topics, and many more are being bypassed now. People try to get by with telling their kids to “Be good” and “What would Jesus do?”, all the meanwhile, the kids don’t understand the concepts that are being taught in the Bible. Kids are given a watered down version because it’s assumed they can’t understand, when really the problem is that no one is teaching them what they need to know in order to understand.

Many kids today are also not learning the vital lessons of Christianity that will carry them through their teenage and adult years. Lessons on retaliation and why it’s wrong, pride and why it’s hurtful, forgiveness and the example Christ has set. These are the lessons my parents spent hours on end teaching me, but there are kids that aren’t getting that kind of teaching anymore. It’s important that kids learn these things when they are young, so that when they are old they will not depart from it. People today often think they have plenty of time to teach their kids, but the saying “can’t teach an old dog new tricks” has a tad bit of accuracy. It gets harder the older you are. You have developed your life habits, and habits are hard to break. So that, my friends, is the purpose of my book. To teach kids the life lessons they need in order to better equip them to understand the Gospel and to make it through life as a shining example of Jesus Christ.

Dead Flies Make a Good Smell Stink.

Yep. I did just use "Dead Flies" in my title. ;)

But that isn't just the title of this blog post. It is the title of my new project, "Dead Flies Make a Good Smell Stink, and Other Life Lessons For the Young." (Title subject to tweaking). I will be taking a lot of the topics I've written about here, and have taught time and time again to my siblings as I passed on what my parents have taught me, and putting them in book form. I would love it, though, if I could get some suggestions.

1. What kind of things would you want me to include?
2. What age group should I target this at?
3. Would you buy a book buy this title, or does it need to go?

Let me know what you guys think, please!

Edited to include a sample "Lesson"-

Just simply live. . .  can we do that? Can we just simply live? Can we live to be alive, and nothing more? Or could it be that there must always be something to live for?   

Can we simply live? The answer is no. Living is not simple. The Bible says in Galations 2:20 "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me...". The third definition of crucified is to "subue (passion, sin, etc.)". So we must be subdued to live? What kind of living is that? The best kind! It would seem so contradictory, but it's the best freedom you can have. It is the freedom that gives you eternal life by the blood of Jesus Christ. We are able to live almost forever. Our minds cannot even fathom that. If we are able to live forever, how can we just simply live? How can we live eternally and just simply live? 

We have to live for something, and we have to live for it with all that we are. We live for Christ or we live for Satan, we live for Heaven for we live for Hell. 

When I was homeschooled as a young girl, my mother made me do handwriting lessons. Day after day I had to painstakingly scrawl each cursive letter until each curlicue was perfect. I hated each moment of it. There was one perk, however, that I greatly enjoyed. When I got to Friday, the end of the week, my cursive lesson was to write a Bible verse in cursive. That page of the book had a beautifully framed section for me to write my Bible verse in, and the drawings were black and white. Each Friday, as I finished my verse, I was allowed to color the frame that surrounded my hard worked for verse. 

The day came that my mother said I was ready to move on from handwriting, and that I could drop handwriting lessons and use my cursive in every day school. I was appalled at the thought. How could I give up my handwriting lessons when I still had a few Fridays left to be had out of my book? It was the incentive of those Friday lessons, in which I could color to my heart’s content, that kept me going through the rest of the lessons. This same concept applies to our lives. We don’t go through life and live for nothing. We do live for something, and we do not just simply live for it. We live and die for it. The question is who and what are we going to live for. The question is: Will you just simply live?