Jamie Janosz

Do you remember when you used to have to get up off of the couch to change the channel on your television? If you do, you're old like me. I was telling my college students the other day about how the new formats of media are actually changing the way we act and think. Consider the things that young people now have never experienced. Can you add to my list? 1) Physically turning the knob on a television to get a new station. In addition, we often had to adjust the rabbit ear antennas on the top of the set and sometimes still dealt with a scrolling picture. 2) Waiting for a movie to be released on television. I remember watching The Wizard of Oz once a year. Once a movie was shown in the theater, we often did not see it for years. VCRs changed our ability to see old movies. 3) Watching home movies on reel-to-reel projectors or, better yet, slides. I have a slide that shows my family watching slides. This was a big family event - to set up a screen and gather around a slid...

Once a year, our small Baptist church would host a revival. When I was ten years old, the featured evangelists were Cowboy Ken and Aunt Marge. The husband and wife came dressed in full cowboy get-up – Cowboy Ken wore the requisite ten-gallon hat, western belt, plaid shirt and jeans. His wife, Aunt Marge, was a busty woman in a western fringed dress that would sway when she sang. They could swing a lasso and preach with enthusiasm. But what really drew us kids back night after night was their offer of a special prize: a Ten Commandments charm bracelet. Cowboy Ken told us that if we memorized each of the night’s seven passages of Scripture, and were able to recite them before the church at the end of the revival, we would earn the glittering gold bracelet. I was determined to win that prize. So I began to memorize Scripture. Night after night I worked on my passage. And, night after night, we listened to Cowboy Ken preach the gospel. My best friend and I liked to sit close enough ...

Today, my daughter wanted me to help her put henna tattos on her hands. I gave her the kit for Christmas because it reminded me of our last summer. At a street fest , Sabrina and I had both gotten henna tattoos. The scrolling flowers and leaves were stained onto our hands and lasted an impressive two weeks. Mixing the powder with eucalyptus was fairly easy. We had to let the pasty brown mixture sit for 45 minutes, then I carefully squirted it onto her hands in flowing lines. The design sat and hardened, turning a deeper brown and then black. Little by little the powder cracked and fell off leaving behind a brown stain. The henna left its mark. Henna tattoos are a nice picture of our job as parents. Day in and day out, through conversations and laughter, through tears and sometimes arguments, we are impressing our beliefs and our faith on our kids. We might not even realize, sometimes, that it is sticking. They may shrug off our views and opinions as old-fashioned or uninformed...