This past week I began my Family ministry class. One of my personal projects for this semester is to write a paraphrase of John Wesley’s written prayers for families. John actually wrote fourteen prayers for each morning and each evening for families to pray together. I use to read them walking to and from doctoral study classes. Finally I decided to try a paraphrase to update the 18th century English in them. I started with Monday evening since that is when the class met. Each week I will follow with a fresh paraphrase. It should be interesting.
Monday Evening
Father of all strength and mercy, in you we live, we move, we owe our very existence. It is because of your tender compassion that you kept us safe this day, gave us comfort and hope for the future you provide. We give you praise Lord; we bow before you and admit we actually own nothing that did not come from you. But what we have received in this life we give you thanks to you God, who daily pours out your gifts upon us.
We heard a solid overview around the role of money and economics by 
The issue began simply enough in a discussion over “service” at my local church in Nashville. While most people in the small group checked off their level of “church” service, one lady (who was active in the local congregation) listened pensively and finally lamented “I just wish someone would tell me that my work as an elementary school teacher was Christian service as well.”
It was bound to happen, the increase in Twitter feeds has sparked a number of blog sites on twitter etiquette… er, is that Twittiquette? Brittany Fitzgerald’s recent article on the Huffington Post is just the most recent example, titled 
So will Twitter just another self indulgent slight of hand? For some perhaps, but I think there are other uses… at least I hope so since I manage several Twitter feeds :0-) First, Twitter may be the fastest way to crowd source a number of exceptional articles online and curate them into regular feeds on a website. I have used Twitter feed widgets on this blog just to manage varying resources on family spirituality, media, neuroeducation and higher education. Now that many quality news sources post leads on stories through twitter you can catch “headlines” even more quickly than before. Of course there is the occasional, “I just got out of bed this morning tweet,” but that only rivals the message board of Facebook on any given day. What you have is a cross between the old telephone “party line” of listening into people’s lives with the more helpful electronic version of the Associated Press or United Press International Wire Services, but with much more focused topics.
