[Kid Inspiration]

Your Best Life Now - by Joel Osteen
Warner Faith 2004

7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential
Joel Osteen pastors Lakewood Church which was started Mothers Day 1959 by his father John. On October 3, 1999, after the death of his father, Joel became the senior pastor of Lakewood.

This book is right up there with the Purpose Driven Life, and as one of those books that gets read, it seems, by pretty much the entire english speaking Christian world and beyond.

The seven steps probably won’t surprise you, they are well worn lessons that we can overlook in making things too complicated.

Here are the seven steps:

1. Enlarge your vision (what you focus on is what you get)

2. Develop a healthy self image (believe you can do it!)

3. Discover the power of your thoughts and words (your thoughts and words can pave the way to real changes around you)

4. Let go of the past (focus on what you want)

5. Find strength through adversity (trust God to get you there in His own good time)

6. Give! (giving opens up the doors of receiving)

7. Choose to be happy (enthusiasm for opportunity helps create fine results)
Like the Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren, this book presents things very simply and this is part of the reason for its success and effectiveness.

Application for Children’s Ministry:
Keep it Simple.

Don’t use too much ‘Christian-ese’.

Our kids (and adults) need to hear the truth, and they need it simply. I have heard too many people use words that would work on well on an adult who grew in church in the 60’s but are irrelevant to a child’s world today.

The literacy ability of people reading this blog would surprise you, and me for that matter. Rule of thumb: If your 10 year old can’t understand it, write it simpler (is that good grammer?)

Check out this statistic (from Audiblox.com):

In the U.S.A. the $14 million National Adult Literacy Survey of 1993 found that even though most adults in this survey had finished high school, 96% of them could not read, write, and figure well enough to go to college. Even more to the point, 25% were plainly unable to read.

Now this may be a reasonably strange lesson to learn from ‘Your Best Life Now’, but then I am a reasonably strange kinda guy (just ask my wife).