Family Worship Part 2

Frequency of Family Worship and Morning-and-Evening Patterns

Last week, we talked about the importance of family worship. Today, we're going to be talking about what family worship should actually look like. Any questions about last week, the importance of family worship?

Let's go ahead and first talk about frequency. When should family worship happen? First of all, daily, like I said, and then, well, there's one through two ways. It says, it's good to praise the Lord and make music to your name when it's high.

We're not proclaiming your love in the morning, we're just talking about morning and evening. We start off with daily bread, and I'll say, a lot of what we're going to go over today is going to be my thoughts on the matter.

These are a lot more tentative than things I was saying last week about daily family worship. But anyway, yeah, I do think, I do. We talked about, give us this day our daily bread. What were, in the Bible, meals seen to be both morning and evening?

1 Kings 17 says, the ravens brought them bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening. They drank from the crook. And so, yeah, Christians are to pray before meals, if that's something that they want to do, to sanctify food.

Then, it makes sense that as families gather once in the morning, once in the evening for food, these things should happen. So this is a, you know, we're talking about several chains of statements here that are somewhat tentative each, but I do think it has significant weight.

1 Timothy 4, 4 -5 says,. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received, if it is given, for it is made holy by the Word of God the Father. And that's talking about food, but not only is food made holy, it is made holy by the Word of God in prayer.

Yeah, this is something that the morning should be sanctified with prayer, so it should be eaten. So that's one thing. You look at what the Bible says about food and praying for your daily bread, and that's one application.

There are several times that the Bible seems to recommend praying three times a day. Daniel 6 -10 says,. When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had lived, in his upper chamber of the court of Jerusalem.

He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God as he had done previously. Psalm 55 -17 says,. Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint to him, and he hears my voice.

Yet the family is dispersed throughout the day. Obviously, two of those are going to be ones that you would be together for to enjoy. So that would be, once again, morning and evening. Additionally, the pattern of Old Testament worship.

1 Chronicles 16, 41 -41 says,. And he left Zadok the priest and his brothers the priests before the tabernacle of the Lord in the high place that was at Gibeon to offer burnt offerings to the Lord in the altar of burnt offering regularly morning and evening to do all that is written in the law of the Lord, he commanded Israel.

1 Chronicles 20 -23 says,. And in a day when they would stand every morning, they came praising the Lord, and likewise in the evening. Talking about the priests. Ezra 3 -3 says,. They set the altar in its place, for fear was on them, as the peoples of lands, and they offered burnt offerings on it to the Lord for burnt offerings morning and evening.

So there's just consistency in Old Testament worship, with God being worshipped daily morning and evening. And yeah, it seems odd that they use the Old Testament as the pattern for our worship, and that's a different covenant.

Consider how often the New Testament makes analogies to Old Testament worship in order to explain how we ought to be worshipping God. Just one example, 1 Corinthians 9 -13 says,. Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in sacrificial offerings, arguing for the support of the pastors?

So very frequently we see patterns of how Old Testament worship worked in indicating how New Testament worship should work, not in the acts of worship itself, but some of the principles behind the worship.

And God being worshipped daily morning and evening seems to be one of those. So 1 Corinthians 1 -2 says, May my prayer be set before you like incense. May the lifting up of my hands be like the evening sacrifice.

So David says that his prayer should be like the incense, and we read the Bible several times that the incense represents the prayers of the saints. And why is it lit morning and evening? Because we ought to be praying to God morning and evening.

So when in the morning and when in the evening? Well, if you're trying to do this with your family, as soon as the last person wakes up and before the first person goes to sleep. So this is, I know different families have different situations where people are working on schedules.

I grew up in a family where my dad was, you know, working just really on shifts because he's an air traffic controller, so sometimes he'd be all night, sometimes he'd be all day. And I wouldn't see him because of my good time schedule.

I wouldn't see him for three days at a time or something. So families have different situations, but this is a priority. You figure out how to make something work in order to lead your family to worship.

Of course, you can't all the time. You have to be a lot of business trips at home for weeks or something like that. But yeah, you can delegate. All right, any questions about frequency? I've already thrown out the caveat that I can only stay with minimals.

This is the law of my career. But any thoughts on frequency?

You don't have an express, you know, explicit command, but I think you do a good job there with the sense of it. If you put it together, and also the New Testament, of course, rules over the old. But I would agree with you that the sense of it is at least more in the evening.

And then the New Testament seems to allude strongly to that. So I think you handle it correctly. It's not absolute. Here's the command. But the totality of Scripture is supported. I agree.

Yeah, and it's similar to what I mentioned last week. Because the whole thing of family worship is something where we don't have explicit proof. It's all implications of Acts and Scripture. Why would someone resist a daily family worship?

Why would they resist one evening? What is the relationship between these things? Is it really that it's too aggressive of something to be saddled with? Or is it rather that it's a curse and we're not going to see it for our pleasures?

Do you have a look in your heart for why you would resist considering some of these implications of family worship? What should it include? Okay, so our Confession says the reading of Scripture talks about worship, including the reading of Scripture, preaching, hearing the Word of God, teaching and punishing one another in psalms and in the spirit of psalms, singing with grace in the hearts of the Lord, as also the administration of baptism in the Lord's Supper, are all parts of religious worship of God, to be performed in obedience to Him, understanding of faith, reverence, and godly fear.

Moreover, solemn humiliation with baptism in the hands of the dead, upon special occasions, ought to be used in a holy and religious manner. So this is our Confession summary of what the Bible includes as being acts of worship.

Now, of those, which ones are regular? The regular ones, you need to know how to conclude these special times in the next day when you're fasting, the regular ones are prayer, reading the Word, the teaching, singing in the Lord's Supper, and then the latter one is a church ordinance, that's not something that families have to get together, or the churches have to do together.

So that is just the regular things, reading, praying, and singing. Or, I've heard it more cleverly, but it has proclamation, petitions, and grace. So you have three pieces there. Now, occasionally, you may be able to include a special holy time in the next day, a special holy time of fasting, but a general family worship would just be those three things, reading, praying, and singing.

And it's very simple, right? You can read, pray, and sing. Not many things, too much. So with all three of these elements in mind, let's consider what the Bible would look like. Once again, we don't have a lot of explicit direction on the details of what this looks like, but we are to consider totality of the Word, where our Confession 1st chapter says, There are some circumstances concerning the worship of God in government and the church,.

Common to human actions and societies,.

Which are to be ordered by the like nature and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the Word, which are always to be observed. So there's a lot of things that I don't explicitly say in Scripture about how we are to worship, that it is permissible for us to figure out,.

But we are to be using Christian wisdom, Christian prudence in this society.

Like, for example, I was reading a book I made a portion of, and it said that if we had not known that it were different in other families, I would never have thought that we should decide that we should be kneeling while we were praying.

Now, I don't know why I think that's that important, but this is an example of where, you know, considering what the Bible says about the different postures of prayer in a society. And that was James Alexander, which I mentioned last week, because it's probably the best book I've ever read, but that was one of the parts that was a little, considering the different parts of the Bible, that he ordered, like, which one should you do first?

So no particular, once again, no particular order to describe this in Scripture, but we should see in our two-way communication with God that our speaking to God is a response to Him speaking to us, and to us, I think it's right for us to put the word first.

And then our prayers and singing are a response to that. Now, between singing and prayer, which should come first, when you look at David's psalms, which are both prayers and praises, right, both singing and prayers to God, you know, the most, not the whole thing is the psalm, but some of the most rejoicable parts of that are at the end of the psalms, right?

Each psalm, you know, he praises his petition to God, and he praises God for answering them. So I think it would be right in the General to sing after having prayed. So the order I would describe, let me stop giving you caveats at this point, the order I would describe is reading, prayer, and singing.

Any thoughts so far?

Are you going to cover prayer as you go through, as a segment?

Reading the Bible in Family Worship

All right, so what should be read? The Bible. So first, this means the actual Bible, right? A lot of people, during family worship, they will do something like use a children's Bible, that's just, you know, a one-sentence summary of five chapters of the Bible, or something like that, and they end up tailoring their family worship to a child, which sometimes can be appropriate, but if you are not reading the actual scriptures, you know, you're reading something else that is similar in scripture, but not in scripture, I don't think that's appropriate, because that's not how we worship, that's not how we read the Bible, not something that's a summary of the Bible.

You know, what I experienced as a kid, in my family's devotions, was usually a reading of some kind of devotional material, which I don't remember if it always started out with a reading of God's Word or not, I think sometimes we just read, Jesus took his soul, or something like this, that whole series, that's called, Jesus took his soul, I think, and anyway, it's, you know, like heartwarming, and I don't know if there was, there might have been a scripture reference at the end, or something like that, but it's just these heartwarming stories, or, you know.

Yeah, that's not the Bible, you should be reading the Bible, before you worship. Okay. Alright, secondly, you should read the whole Bible, not necessarily the whole Bible, some portions will be more appropriate than others, on certain occasions, you know, if something's going on, you feel like you need to go somewhere in scripture, go for it.

But, you should not be avoiding, so, yeah, I've come to the suggestion that, so I've actually been reading a lot of books on this topic, and I really come to the suggestion, and in new writing and old writing is, in the morning, read one chapter of the New Testament, and in the evening, read one chapter of the Old Testament.

Now, I don't know why that's such consistent, of recommendation, but it really, it really is, very common, to come across. But I have, that's what I used to do, because I have so many guests, in my home, frequently, what I've decided to do, is instead, is when it's just our family, to read a chapter of the Old Testament, when we have guests, in our home, we need to read, we need, you know, a portion of a chapter of the New Testament.

Because, obviously, we have, you know, various exposure to the Bible, and it seems good to focus on the New Testament, when we have guests around. But, if it were just us, I would be doing what, what's typically recommended, which is a chapter of the New Testament, a morning chapter of the Old Testament.

Yes. Would you go sequentially, and cover, as we do, chronicles, for example, like genealogies, would that be part of worship, or would you skip to the more, common? Engaging. Engaging. Yeah, no, all of it, all of it.

Uh, yeah. First of all, all scriptures, 2 Timothy 3, 16, says, all scriptures, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, 3, and then afterwards 1, 23, 22, 24, therefore I testify to you, this day, now, you as a, leader of a household, would you have love, in your hands, if you decide, skip, scriptures, and I think in the answer would be, yes.

This is what you would, be recurred through your family. I just want to focus on these parts of scripture. Don't avoid anything because it's too difficult. You know, even something difficult and salacious like, this is equal to 23, if you do not read that chapter, you can go through that later.

But these things are not to be seen with her. Now, that's a point that's all important for a family with young children. But they ask questions, and you explain them to her, and then maybe she'll hear your answer.

And mom tried to read. Her oldest was seven, and she had not sent her children when Jesus died, because dad was too scary. So she would just read parables and stuff.

Yeah, I've heard that too. People not talking to their kids about hell, and things like that. You can talk about all sorts of religious trauma that you're having because the church tells you about hell.

I remember that being very important for me as a kid, recognizing the eternal consequences of serving Jesus. Yeah, you wouldn't want to hide in any of those things. And I talked last week about how it can be very valuable to expose kids to some more adult things, because otherwise, where are they going to encounter the sins?

It's going to be in the world. It's a good thing you're going to be first. Ideally, that's possible. So I used to have all the kids reading around after all that's decided. That was important as well.

And I should just read. And also, this is what's most always prescribed. And if you were the one responsible for making sure your hands were covered, it is reasonable for that also to read. Now, obviously, sometimes my voice goes out because I've got sick.

So I'll have to get sick. It is a rude problem to have in general. One of the responsibilities should have that duty. Next, how should you read? The answer is, well, you should learn to read well. It is a substantial task.

A minister's word are called to read the word well. So as a minister to your family, you should be reading the word well. 1 Timothy 4, 13 says, until I come to the fall, I'm going to be devoting myself to the Holy Roman Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.

So this is, we usually think of the reading of the word as reading something, just a good reading. That's not so important. You can hand that off to someone else. Some ministers that would never have a woman teach have a woman come out to read the scriptures, because this is a task that's not important for the ministers to do.

A minister never reads the scriptures as someone else, no matter who you are. But this is something that ministers are called to do in the ministry. And for those who are in the community, I'm glad to talk about this in the conference.

OK. Can I ask, what does well mean in this case? Yeah. So, yeah, in particular, you should consider all these things with each other, without removing or losing the solemnness of the indication that you should be engaging in what you need to be.

And this is something where I think I've improved a good bit. If you've been here for a while and you've listened to me read the past scriptures, I think I've really improved. And in the way that I speak, I tend to speak very fast still.

And I don't know if that will ever change. It just feels a little unnatural for me to speak at pace, a lot of people do. But, you know, try to capture some of the emotion of the worst that are being said.

So that people who are engaged with the religious tradition, they understand it better if they can hear the different meanings of the different sentences. Right? There's all kinds of ways to speak right after you really acknowledge him.

And then all the color of the sentences is lost. It's real hard. It can be hard to follow.

That would imply, I think, that you read ahead. Because if you're going to go through all scripture, especially when you get to genealogy, some of those names are hard. Even after practice, I get tongue-tied.

You have to slow down. Getting the sense of the scripture, too, would imply that you're going to read ahead. You're going to look at that paragraph, whatever you're going to read, and gain the emotion behind it.

Sure.

So I've thought about whether or not you should read ahead. I think a good substitute for that is just being familiar with the words in general. And if you feel like you have to do 30 minutes of prayer for 15 minutes of family worships, I'm not trying to sell people things that are too difficult.

But yes, knowing things ahead of time. Also, as far as pronouncing things, I feel like that's a very modern problem. What you see in older times is that people would only read out loud. So, for example, I could go over to this Ambrose who discovered, or I guess he discovered Ambrose reading silently.

He was very surprised by this. You see it in the Bible. In the 18th century, you could read aloud. And that's how philology over the years has come to an end. So, in the past, the way people read was silent.

It was sounding out each syllable. And that's how you knew who it was. And so I think our problem with names in the Bible is that we read just by grabbing a chunk and trying to process that instead of actually reading syllables.

And if we were reading like people used to read, where we're actually sounding out syllables, the names would be just syllables that we've never heard. There's a smiley over there. When Sarah first became a book, she was reading my Bible, and she was telling me about how she finally made it out of Genesis and into Exodus.

And that's how she was just kind of like, oh, yeah, there's an X in there. It's an I or something, maybe. So, yeah, I know you've seen how that works. That's actually not that hard to do with a lot of hard words.

As opposed to reading how we can read, it's just looking at the word in some kind of dyslexic fashion, guessing it, what the word is. Okay. Yeah, what should be taught? So the preaching, the reading of the word, comes with also teaching the word.

Teaching also is a hard word. So what should be taught? So a summary of the passage should be offered more than the reading. Nehemiah 8 says, they read the book from the law of God clearly, and they gave sense to the people who understood the reading.

It's one of the first examples you have in the Bible of preaching the word, basically, is the Bible being read in the summarized. So also it's appropriate to observe salient points in the text, details of the passage, time-wise.

It's good to allow questions to be interchanged and misunderstandings to be corrected. You may not have a whole specific answer. That's fine. Eventually, perhaps, this is a really legal hold. And that is important.

And not just since it's in your house, you can give it to a family member. Either on your own side, or just you can give it to one of your pastors, and they can give you an answer, and you can bring it back to your family.

So if you don't have a whole answer, it's not something we're doing. But it does speak to the importance of being able to give your house to having businesses, being able to convert,.

And teaching people to prayer. All right. So teaching people to pray.

Prayer in Family Worship and Children Praying

Once again, generally in a household, a whole family may be invited to pray. In my own case, I'm going to have a whole family pray. In the order, all the men and women of the family, so me, Orlin, and then one woman, Sarah, and then me, et cetera.

And so, yeah, there's this question that is brought up, should children pray? And this is something that often backs services, because we recognize that many of our children are unconverted, and will only be converted for a few years.

But yes, children should pray for several reasons. One, you should assume, first of all, that our children are unconverted, that they have, I mean, if you have an infant child, and the mother has some kind of and we should just assume that it's meaningless.

Secondly, how is this going to be learned? Is that going to be taught in family worship? Third, Jesus told us to suffer for children to come to him. Suffer, meaning?

Yeah. Call them to come to him. And if we're telling them, no, stay away from Jesus, you can't talk to him. That's a problem. Prayer is an element of worship. Natural worship, that's a phrase from our question.

That means, what it means is that all the other elements of worship, and then we have to be told by God, in other words,.

For them to be right, for us to use. You know, for example, if I tell the truth, you're always going to tell me to go listen to guys. Other forms of worship, because we've been told it's good. Prayer is an element of natural worship.

In other words, it's just obvious. If there's a creator, you must seek his favor by calling him to him. And so given that it's natural worship, then we are to, then even the unbelievers is called to do this.

When we encourage children to sing to God, we hear the preaching, why not encourage them to pray? This is part of it, because those are the things that are convinced about not having children pray. They're fine with their children singing to God.

You know, if our concern is that older worship isn't accepted by God, then why would you have them sing? Why would you have them give their ears to something else?

Yes? Would the Acts chapter 10 with Cornelius, would that support what you're saying? But his prayers were heard, but he wasn't perverted.

Until Peter preached and the Holy Spirit fell on him. So his prayers were heard in some manner prior to conversion. That seems to support what you're saying. I don't know about that, because it does seem that the giving of that outpouring of the Holy Spirit was distinct from conversion, was distinct from regeneration.

In those early days. So for example... So you think he was regenerated before? Yeah. So for example,.

There are different interpretations of what the disciples of John are asking for when they came to the apostles. They said, you know, we don't know about the baptism of Jesus. We don't know about the baptism of John.

And then they were baptized. Now, some people interpret that as a lot of baptism. The interpretation I prefer, which if you recalibrate on this topic and depend on the impacts of prayer to Jesus' baptism, Hebrews is just talking about the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

The baptism of John is the baptism of Jesus for coming out of the water. Otherwise, Jesus wouldn't have to say the baptism of Jesus because he had the baptism of John, but he had the baptism of Jesus.

So those are actually more baptism than what the disciples of John are seeking to ask is actually about the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the water. Yeah, so there are passages in Scripture to talk about prayers that we can not be accepted.

But, you know, I think we're just saying for every person's decision, you know, you have your child come to worship in every other way when I'm not there. And once again, we should assume even though it is rare for children to be converted in early years, we shouldn't just assume that they aren't.

Yeah, another question. This is another thing I've heard. I've heard people say, yes, children should pray, but they should not pray in the name of Christ since if they're unconverted they don't have things as their mediator.

There's only one mediator to come down to man, and no mediator is needed. And once again, you just said disciples and children can come down. They should. They should come down with their prayers. Great.

What should prayers be about in family worship? Well, Lord's Prayer is our model. So all the things of the Lord's Prayer however, are initiated by the passage of the Spirit and the discernment of the passage.

So there's, you know, not the passage about serving the Lord and the prayer that you need to be discerned and served, but the passage about the return of Christ, the prayer of the return of Christ. These are the things to pray for.

Secondly, you can pray for the dead, especially in a household to pray for the whole family for their dead, blessed by God, and in the past. And as Jesus told us, I guess this day our daily prayer obviously needs to be related to the family.

We need to pray for them. Okay, so any thoughts? About what a prayer should look like? Do you have each one of your kids pray, I mean, whatever they, so it's their own prayer or whatever they, or do you limit them or anything, or, you know?

Yeah, well, I wish I had a problem. Usually it's getting them to speak at all. But, no, so, one thing you can do is for the concerns of the family, which there's lots of and we'll write them down in index cards and one of the kids will distribute the index cards to the kids so they know what they're supposed to pray for.

Because they'll look at the same thing every time, you know, and it just sort of randomizes it. I think that can be some of the emphasis, I saw the emphasis to do this. Or, let's say, I saw that they had the hardest group doing this.

That was a good, I thought that was a good idea. Yes, that's how, that's how, you know, we end up signing the letter. Good evening, good morning. We have each other. All right, if I can actually shine that light on.

Singing Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs

Singing. All right, so, what should we sing? The Bible says, Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Bishops, by my king, addressing one another, Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Singing, making melody to the Lord with your heart.

Colossians 3 .16 says, love the word of Christ, love him richly, teaching, admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms to him, spiritual psalms, with thankfulness and in your hearts to God. Great, so, should we sing hymns, or should we sing psalms?

How should we sing? Once again, the answer is, well, this is an opportunity, a lot of people, when we sing, once a week, in church, you will be singing about twice daily. It's an opportunity for you to really grow in your ability to praise him.

Just first of all, your voice is a muscle. The person who exercises once a week has a serious disadvantage compared to the person who's exercising seven times a week. Not that I would necessarily recommend seven times a week, but, but, sing it with your voice.

If you're, if you're singing regularly, your voice is going to sound much better than the one who is singing irregularly. It's just a simple biological reality. Now, beyond just doing it and improving that way, it is a, you have an opportunity also to try to improve in other ways, too.

You can learn new hands. You could learn an instrument, if you wanted to. You know, it's just your family, you know, it's not a big deal if you're messing up everything, right? And improving small things in small, small ways.

You can learn to sing parts. So, we've done that. We've learned one part at a time. You know, you can find MIDI files where you just play. You know how in our panel it has all the notes in each syllable there, typically four notes, right?

And each one of those soprano, alto, tenor, and bass represent a different part. And so, you can play a song with just, you know, you can find a MIDI file or something where you play the song with just the bass and learn the bass or just the tenor and learn the tenor.

And once you do that enough times, you can sing that while the other person is singing the other one. And that's just memorizing it. You can also try to follow along among the notes itself as you listen to one of these MIDI files and then you can just increase your ability to actually guess at where the notes are jumping to.

So, I'm not very musically trained. I typically don't play piano. I have few voice lessons and school classes involved in musical theater. But, I've improved my ability to do music over the years just a little bit here and there and forward.

And it's not something that I'm reaching anybody to improve. And maybe you've heard me say this before, but everything else that we do a lot can talk about improving the Bible reading, talk about improving prayer life, a lot of areas of the Christian body can talk about improving, but you rarely hear people talk about improving singing.

Rather, you usually hear a lot of excuses about, we wouldn't want to hear you sing, or, you know, just a lot of excuses for losing the Bible in church. So, I'm 33, 33, and I'm singing a new song but it's still playing on the strings with loud shouts, loud shouts, which should be, which should be loud and sustained.

And, after, if you feel like your voice is adding more cacophony and harmony, you know, you can learn through media practice. This is something that can be practiced. And, like I said, if you're practicing twice a day just by, you know, just by reading the portion, that's a great opportunity.

Any thoughts on any of the three programs? We're reading additional materials, so a lot of times people will incorporate other things that I mentioned about my thoughts before. But, I think it's important to keep the worship of God distinct from anything that's not the worship of the Feminist Prescribed Scripture.

So, in as much as something that's not the Bible that you would want to incorporate into teaching is, and unless it is designed to all men and not going to work. So, for example, we teach to the kids Catechism, we teach them that while we're all gathering, rather than as part of the Feminist Worship itself.

Feminist Worship begins when we start reading, and that's the distinct part of worship. So, and other suggestions for Catechism, I would recommend doing Catechism with your church, Baptist Catechism, Baptist Catechism, if you were following that.

There are songs that you can use to memorize, that's how we memorize some. And a lot of people choose to go with children's Catechisms, so there's like the Macomillo for little ones, or Catechism for boys and girls.

A lot of people want to get to the kids and understand more. You know, if you wanted them initially as they were teenagers to know more full doctrine, I think you can have them start memorizing immediately, even if they don't understand it.

And you can explain parts of it to them, right? They don't know what it means to explain to them what it means. I don't think they actually learn less because they're using a deeper Catechism. I think that it's an opportunity to memorize things that will become more meaningful to them in the future, and it's an opportunity to teach them these pieces here.

And also, I think that a lot of families end up thinking fairly, and it's good to deal with things for your own situation, but thinking a little too narrowly about their own situation. They think, you know, I'm a small kid, so it should be about the small kid.

Well, you also, typically, you know, you have a wife, you have multiple adults in the household, you're just self. Family worship, for everyone, it's not just for the kid. A lot of people think about family worship once they have a kid, and they're like, oh, I don't have a family.

But like I said last week, family worship is probably poorly named. It depends on the household worship, and if you were part of the household, these things would get divided between you as well. Not if I would have different tax parity.

Children's tax parity would be a little less additional. I occasionally get told that I should write a book on parenting because I want someone to have an expert. Me having a lot of kids does not make me an expert.

But I have thought that if I ever wrote a book parenting, I would call it scalable parenting, which is a computer science joke when you talk about having operations that scale or whatever. It's a science software that can handle any amount of requests.

I think that's generally how you should think parenting. God's pattern for parents over the course of history, people not having birth control, this is a great job. Kids at young age and kids at old age.