Every builder will tell you that the most important component in a stable building is the foundation. How strong is your home’s foundation? Have you chosen to build on the ROCK? Is Jesus the center of your home? It is only as we ground our homes through faith in Him that we may be assured that our foundation is rock-solid.

Michigan Camp Meeting 2022: Knowing the Time

<p>Every builder will tell you that the most important component in a stable building is the foundation. How strong is your home’s foundation? Have you chosen to build on the ROCK? Is Jesus the center of your home? It is only as we ground our homes through faith in Him that we may be assured that our foundation is rock-solid.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Building Homes of Hope and Wholeness

Gus Moretta

Reyna Moretta

01 A Firm Foundation

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2022 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

I pray that you would be with Gus and Rena as they present this topic.

We want to have our families and ourselves building on that rock.

And so we just thank you so much for what you're going to do here today.

It's such a privilege to work in family ministry.

My husband and I, he's, because of technical difficulties, he went to get the other computer.

We have been working in family ministries for just 3 years.

But in 3 years, the Lord has blessed, because we know that the time is short.

And not just because the time is short, but we'll tell you a little bit of our story during the session.

And we have had Pastor Roy and Lori Snamen come to our church, And though our church speaks Spanish, we did the interpretation simultaneously.

So when we were done with those seminars, we were exhausted.

I believe 2 couples that went really were blessed, and their marriage is thriving.

The other thing that we did, by the grace of God, is that Gail and our Hispanic coordinator and ourselves, we pushed for our first marriage retreat, Hispanic marriage retreat in Campo Sabo.

So whoever goes to the marriage retreat, the English 1, it's been such a blessing.

But we always had to go to hotels or other places.

And this time we were able to enjoy at beautiful Campo Sabo.

We're going to open our Bibles, if you brought your Bible, in Matthew 7, 24 to 25.

When my husband comes, we'll present the family.

And when you're ready, let's all read it.

Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house.

Yet it did not fall, because It had its foundation on the rock.

The parables of the wise man tells us about a man building a house on the rock.

And it's interesting because I remember in my family, many years had passed, And we thought, oh, praise the Lord, nothing has happened in our home.

But sometimes we say that those storms might come.

And sometimes we say if we have to be sure that they will come, because all homes are tested.

So that means that we must make Jesus the center of our homes to be able to withstand wind and strife and difficulties in our lives.

I like to see how many Bibles we have here.

We're going to ask you to divide this group in 4.

We're all going to read a chapter of 1 of the books in the Bible.

It will take about just 5 minutes or 3 minutes, depending on the chapter you are reading.

So we appreciate if you look in your Bibles in the Book of Ruth, And we're going to give the group in the back, we're going to give them chapter 1.

You are going to have chapter 2, chapter 3, and chapter 4 in the back.

Please gather and together read this book because We're going to learn several things that apply to our lives and our families.

If you can just get together and somebody can read or share the reading.

We see in some of these, we want you to keep in mind some of these needs that are in the families that they're experiencing because we're going to go back to that point and we're going to touch base on how our families can meet some of those needs.

Now we're going to go and just review some of these needs that you might have picked up on some, some of you might have missed.

And some of these things are current today.

Daughter-in-law, mother-in-law relationship, child provision, hunting and searching and provisioning of food.

Chapter 3, we have depending on 1 another for help.

And chapter 4, we have marriage wedding needs, grand parenting issues and relationships and birth of children.

So these are some of the needs that our families face today and that we're gonna come back to to touch on later.

We can see here a list of needs, and we can see how our church can meet these needs with ministries.

Can we see our churches that suffer from lack of food, immigration?

We live in Grand Rapids, and we have a lot of refugees there.

I don't know how much devastation you have had in your town, but in our town, We have had a lot of death because of the pandemic that just happened.

People also are going through that grief and loss.

There's a program that we could also provide.

Also, there are seminars for relationship that we can also have in our churches.

So we see this book and we see it now under different glasses.

We're like, oh, there's so much need here.

This is something that we can provide through our church and also something that we can grow ourselves.

Because when we have, when we go through grief or something like this, it helps us to provide help to others.

There's something that's going to be important in a foundation of a home and it's super important and it's a word called commitment.

Tom Mejeur

Brenda Mejeur

02 Relationships and Marriage

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for the opportunity to be here today to be at Camp Aiding.

And I pray that you'll be with us today as we look at how to build good relationships in all areas, that your spirit will be here to speak through us and help each person hear what they need to hear.

Our first slide shows an Important verse and I'm a teacher and I'm going to have all of us read this together Ephesians 4 2 & 3 everyone read with me be completely humble and gentle be patient bearing with 1 another in love Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.

There are 5 characteristics listed in that verse.

And I am interested in that adverb completely.

Gentle, patient, bearing with each other.

And every effort to keep unity and peace.

You know, dear, that makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

Wouldn't you just love to be with people who are humble, gentle, patient, bearing when you make a mistake, forbearing, and keeping the unity.

Yes, and like we were saying, whether single or married, these are relationship tools that you can use in all your relationships.

Now we're gonna go into people that are single and we're gonna look a little bit at some of the pressures that are put upon them to get married.

I have to be honest, have I ever said, I wonder if I could get that person to meet this person.

There is a little bit of temptation sometimes to put pressure.

So on your paper, list any ways that society pressures young people to get married.

If you can think of any on your paper, write them down.

What does society do to pressure young people to get married?

While you're writing that down, just listen.

Our pastor, Pastor O'Dan, says that he comes from a Hispanic background and he was almost 40 years old before he got married.

And he says you cannot believe the pressure that was placed upon him.

So what are some of the things that society does?

And along with that, what about us as a church family?

Do we pressure people to get married in our church?

What about if this couple, in your mind, they're the perfect couple.

By you writing it down, it makes you think a little bit about are we doing this without realizing it?

Because then we're pressuring them to make a hasty decision that may be actually much worse than remaining single.

I think it was your grandmother or someone that said it's better to be single than to wish you were?

So this can be a problem in our churches, in our families.

Something we wanted to have you just think about a little bit.

We're gonna actually talk about that a little bit more later.

Okay, what are some of those pressures, Tom?

Some of those pressures are social media and just the messages and posts.

People put pressure on themselves by just what they read.

Number 3 movies music entertainment Glorify relationships and so on and so forth.

That's just in society, but we talked about that a little earlier, is the church puts pressure on the family.

When you have family events, do you do anything for singles?

Or do you say, When we say family events, let's say church family events, and let's include everyone.

We have a dear, dear friend that's in his 70s, he's single, and he will come over.

There are some weeks where he may eat supper at our house twice.

Sometimes he'll come after church on Sabbath.

And then he helps us with the garden or mowing the lawn.

And we've helped him with things as well.

We've done that with multiple people over the years, singles over the years.

I just want to say, do you ever invite a group of singles over here?

You may be married, but do you ever invite them over for Sabbath dinner?

Just make sure that you say, everyone's invited whenever you do that.

You know, my dad, my mom passed away about 5 or 7 years ago, and my dad says, nobody invites me over to their house, because I'm a male.

Maybe if I was a female widow, they'd get invited, but as a male, nobody, maybe once, but not on a consistent.

So sometimes just inviting a group over is really a cool way to just have a good time.

And then not asking, have you met anybody yet?

You know that couple that we had at the Strongtower Radio last night or whatever?

I've thought of saying, when are you guys going to get married?

It's not our job to continue to look in their future, is it?

And then once again, and we talked about inviting them over for Sabbath meals, activities, a group of them is especially fun.

And we support the singles ministries in your church.

Loribeth Salciccioli

Jonathan Salciccioli

03 Parenting

Father in heaven, thank you again for this time that we can spend with you.

Lord, I pray that you will be with Jonathan and Lori Beth as they present.

Some here may be not parents, but we all have influence on children in our lives.

And so I just ask that you will speak through them and that we can gain something that would be a blessing.

So thank you so much, and we love you in Jesus name.

So this is a photo of when we were new parents.

I would say Brooke is probably about 6 months old.

So these are our children, Brandon and Brooke.

So we thought our children were going to be here with us today to introduce to you, but they wanted to go to J2 and not miss Capture the Flag.

So we by no means have all the answers of parenting, but it's our privilege today to share with you the materials in this training manual and share some of our personal journey in parenting.

So you'll see we're very open and candid.

We haven't figured it out exactly, but we're hoping to share some good nuggets of information and just point us to the Bible for our foundation as we parent in our homes.

Okay, so today the scripture principle, this is gonna be the foundation of what we're gonna be talking about, comes from Deuteronomy 6, verses 5 through 9.

It says, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.

Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you get up tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads Write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates So that's gonna be our scripture principle for our time together today Okay, so here's a picture How many in here raise your hand like a good bonfire?

So what does it take to build a good fire?

Are we going to start with fresh green wood that's nice and damp?

And so when our family likes to build, this is our little backyard fire pit that we've honestly bought to burn up our, the branches that fall from our sycamore tree, which seems endless.

So in our little fire pit, we start by, the kids will pick up, if you're familiar with a sycamore tree and how it sheds its bark, The kids will usually gather up some of that, some little twigs.

So we're not starting the fire from ashes.

No, we're starting with kindling, small kindling, and adding larger logs as we go along.

And let me ask you this, can we start a fire in the middle of a hurricane very easily?

Can we start a fire in the middle of the pouring rain?

So to get started today, we're going to talk about, just like building a fire, we need the proper materials and the proper conditions to get a good fire going.

And we also have to apply these as we look at building a spiritual fire in our children's hearts.

So, like she was saying, we want that fire to be in our children's hearts.

And if we go back to the scripture verse, we talked about we want them to ultimately love God with all their hearts and with all their soul and minds and to love their neighbor as ourselves.

So that's where we're trying to, that's the big picture.

So when she was talking about the fire, she was saying we need certain conditions and we need certain materials.

We'll read it for you so that you can see.

Yes, there are 3 very important aspects that can't be overlooked.

So what we're saying here is we want to have a relationship with the Lord.

We want to be spending time with Him in the Word, praying.

Second is our actions must match your words.

They really want to make sure, and we've all, none of us are perfect, so as parents we know that, but as much as we can we want to make sure what we're saying, that we're actually living it out to the best that we can.

And our attitude toward God, the Bible, and the church.

We have to be careful with the words we say and how that impacts our kids.

An example would be when we're driving home from church, Are we, you know, what are we saying?

Are we trying to find the positive or are we saying negative things that could quench that fire from them?

Okay, so it says being the type of parent that God has called you to be means that first, you must be the type of person God has called you to be.

If you guys will participate, we'll go that route.

It's a national survey of the state of families in America.

This was in 2012, so a little dated here.

But parents reportedly believe that raising children today is more complicated than it used to be.

So do you agree that there are things that today's parents must contend with that previous generations didn't?

Or just go ahead and shout it out because you're not going to know who I'm pointing to go ahead internet Video games.

General disrespect to seniors and authority figures, very good.

School shootings, too much consuming our time.

Okay, I'm just going to repeat it for the recording.

Access to too information and not being able to decipher truth from what's not true.

Choices in school that the parents are not involved in.

So he mentions the difference in expectations now as in previous generations.

So now not expecting to be productive until you're old enough to run heavy machinery or something, opposed to gathering eggs on the farm or being useful around the house.

Bob Benson

Elsena Benson

04 Sexuality

Father in heaven, we just thank you so much for another opportunity to hear your words spoken to us.

And you know you're speaking through human vessels, but I just pray that You will use them to minister to our hearts and to our needs.

And we wanna thank you for your presence and your spirit here, and we love you.

So today we knew we were talking about a hot subject, but we didn't know that Mother Nature agreed and cooked up 100 degree real field temperatures outside to kind of go along with this very warm discussion that we'll have.

But also we're part of the Guild and she has like a family life support team.

And so when we were looking at the 5 different topics we're gonna talk about, when it came to this topic, it wasn't like, who could yell as loud as you say, I'll take that 1 on sexuality.

It was more like a- Gail said, you guys can handle it.

I mean, I and my wife, on the other hand, blood pressure's probably a little elevated at the moment.

It was part of the building homes of hope and wholeness.

And sexuality is a really important part of it.

It's kind of fascinating because I don't see that book here, His Needs Her Needs.

It kind of gives the top 5 from his 30 years of counseling.

So when you're thinking about sex, you know, for a guy, it means it's a significant part of sexuality.

It's kind of interesting that Shanti Feldham, she wrote in her books, and I got a chance to go hear her lecture, she talks about the impact of sexuality on a man's self-esteem as well.

That at the end of the day, you might have gotten kicked by your boss or yelled at by your coworkers or whatever, but at the end of the day, you have a wife who loves you, is committed to you, and somehow, in the midst of the abrasions of life, there is some support, some commitment, some love to be found in that marijuana called marriage.

So it was kind of fascinating that she talked about it.

So how many of you have these books that are working towards your certification?

All right, well, for all of the rest of you, you're welcome to as well, but I didn't have handouts because I was thinking that you guys would have the books.

So If you want the PowerPoints or the notes from this, you can sign up in the back and I'll be happy to email them to you.

So didn't mean to leave you guys out, but we didn't get prepared enough for that and I am sorry for that.

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Series

Building Homes of Hope and Wholeness

01 A Firm Foundation

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

01 A Firm Foundation

38m

02 Relationships and Marriage

59m

03 Parenting

44m

04 Sexuality

57m

05 Aging Gracefully

46m

06 How to Have Effective Family Ministries at the Local Church

54m

Sound Doctrine