More from Matt Perman

Twitter summaries from What's Best Next

- The best way to be productive is to put others first. This is both what the gospel teaches us and the most exciting life.

- We are to be creative, competent, and audacious in doing good for the world. Productivity practices exist to help us do that.

- You don't have to run to the hills to serve God. You can serve Him in the things you do every day, when done in faith.

- The core principle of productivity is to put first things first. There are four steps to doing this: define, architect, reduce, and execute.

- Slack work is a form of vandalism. Proverbs 18:9  [LOVE THIS]

- Don't just be generous with the results of your work; be generous in your work.

From "What's Best Next" by Matt Perman

Reading through What's Best Next: How the gospel transforms how you get things done. Some of the best quotes are when he quotes others:

Aimless, unproductive Christians contradict the creative, purposeful, powerful, merciful God we love. - John Piper, Desiring God

Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest. - Proverbs 6:6-8

Wilberforce sat at his desk on that foggy Sunday morning in 1787thinking about his conversion and his calling. Had God saved him only to rescue him from hell? He could not accept that. If Christianity was true and meaningful, it must not only save but serve. - Charles Colson, preface to Wilberforce's A Practical View of Christianity

God calls us to be abundant in doing good, but you don't have to run to the hills and leave the world to do this good. - Matt Perman

No man has the right to be idle...[W]here is it in such a world as this that health, and leisure, and affluence may not find some ignorance to instruct, some wrong to redress, some want to supply, some misery to alleviate? - William Wilberforce

Worth quoting again...

"Education is a life. That life is sustained on ideas. Ideas are of spiritual origin, and God has made us so that we get them chiefly as we convey them to one another, whether by word of mouth, written page, Scripture word, musical symphony; but we must sustain a child's inner life with ideas as we sustain his body with food." - From A Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason

From "A Philosophy of Education" by Charlotte Mason

"Mind appeals to mind and thought begets thought and that is how we become educated. For this reason we owe it to every child to put him in communication with great minds that he may get at great thoughts; with the minds, that is, of those who have left us great works; and the only vital method of education appears to be that children should read worthy books, many worthy books."

My favorite homeschooling mom talking about my favorite homeschooling author... Cindy and Charlotte!

The Mason Jar, Ep 1: An Introduction to Charlotte Mason | Circe Institute

Lessons in Reading

From School Education by Charlotte Mason:

1. Never waste time on valueless books.
2. Have respect for the books themselves.
3. Try to cultivate taste by noticing the best passages in any book that is being read.
4. Time is too short to read much; there is a necessity, therefore, for judicious selection.
5. The best literature can only be appreciated by those who have fitted themselves for it.
6. It is more important to read well than to read much.
7. The gain of reading some of the most beautiful literature while we are young is that we shall them have beautiful thoughts and images to carry with us through life.
8. To get at the full significance of a book it is necessary to dig for it.

Teenage Lesson in Economics

TJ (14) asks:

"Mom, can I go to the theater to see the Avengers movie next Friday with the guys?"

"Sure."

"Will you pay for my ticket?"

"No."

"What? What will you pay for?"

"Umm.... I pay the taxes that go to the library so they can purchase the Avengers when it comes out on DVD, I pay the gas to drive the car to the library so you can check it out, and I pay the electric bill so you can watch the DVD on a TV that works."

His face kind-of looked like this: