Five Minute Family

Who is Jesus? And, what does He mean to you?

Good morning, Five Minute Families. How are you doing today? Do you have running water? Indoor plumbing? A roof over your head? A meal today? 23 out of every 10,000 Americans have experienced homelessness, and over 11% of Americans are living below the poverty level. What do we do if we find our family is experiencing a financial crisis? In 2 Kings, we read about a widow whose children would be ta...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. Have you ever thought about what you are going to do when you just don’t want to do anything anymore? Now, we are not talking about wanting your life to end. If you are having those thoughts, please seek help immediately. We are talking here about when you just don’t feel like doing the stuff you know you have to do. You stop liking the direction of your work, t...

Good morning, five minute families. How often do we hide our emotions as adults, ignore them, and never acknowledge their roots? How often do we try to get our kids to only show their happiness? We have discussed emotions before on the Five Minute Family at the end of 2023 and beginning of 2024. In those past five minute family devotions, we discussed emotions that are shown in the Bible as well a...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. Have you ever ignored a family member? Now, be honest. You know you have. We all have. When we’re angry. When we’re distracted. When we’re tired. But, to what cost? When your child runs up to hug you and you keep typing out a text or when your spouse points out a beautiful bird outside the window and you keep watching your show, what impact do you think you are...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. What does your family expect from one another? Do you parents expect perfect obedience? Do you kids expect to get what you want when you want it? Does your family expect that everyone will make mistakes but that you will be responded to with God's grace, mercy, and forgiveness, or do you expect the silent treatment and withholding of love and affection when you...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. As we travelled to visit family, Kim and I were listening to a business leadership audio book titled Radical Candor, and while we don’t fully endorse everything in this book, we realized that the concept closely aligns with the key concept we teach here at Clear View Retreat – the concept of intentional intimacy. We want to spend some time today and, perhaps, mo...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. We talk a lot here at Clear View Retreat about family identity. Now, obviously, there's been a lot of research into what is ‘identity’ and the word has been hijacked in so many ways. However, we really need to understand what family identity is, how our family identity impacts our individual identities, and what God has to say about His transformative power in r...

Good morning, five minute families. We all face devastation at some point in our lives. It can be the death of someone we love; it can be the loss of a job; devastation can come in the form of a natural disaster and in so many other ways. What should we do when we or someone in our family faces a season of devastation? Before we discuss five ideas for helping one another, please remember that not...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. It is good to be with you today. How are you and your family doing? Are you intentional in how you treat one another? Are WHO and WHOSE you are still abundantly clear in your home? As a family, we must remember fundamental truths about WHO we are in Christ. We are created in the image of God. After we have made a profession of faith, we are valuable to God as Hi...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. We hope you are having an excellent week. Have you ever evaluated how your family handles mistakes and the cost of correction? How you correct one another matters to the heart of your children and spouse as well as to the family identity you are intentionally creating. A simple example is when our toddlers are learning to speak. Sometimes, we correct the pronunc...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. It is great to be with you today. We are Jim and Kim Nestle with Clear View Retreat. This ministry hosts family camps, marriage retreats, grief retreats, and more in beautiful East Tennessee. Please check out our website at clearviewretreat.org. On these five-minute family moments, we want to bring God’s encouraging word into real life application for families....

Good morning, Five Minute Families. We are Jim and Kim Nestle with Clear View Retreat. Thank you for joining us for a new Five Minute devotional after we have taken a month off for multiple family needs. And, it was those family needs that led us to write this week about the idiom “keeping all the balls in the air.” Some of us have too many tasks and obligations going on, and as such, there is no...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. Does someone in your family seem to behave badly - or, maybe, more on edge - when the house is a mess but they can control themselves better when it is neat and clean? Did you know that this inability to self-regulate due to the messiness around them might be due to an overload of visual stimulation? Some folks call this visual noise. Others call it “visual bomb...

Good morning five minute families. In our Sunday school lesson this week we were discussing the Old Testament families of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Throughout the Bible those names are repeated, even into the New Testament. Let’s explore one of the many lessons that come from those names and their family dynamics. If I was planning a story that highlighted good family dynamics, I would not have wr...

Good morning, five minute families. This past Sunday our pastor preached out of Titus 2. He focused on the fact that we all have a role to play in church. We aren’t characters acting out our parts. We are God’s children each functioning in the way God created in this life. Jim was teasing me after church about my being in the older women (or, as the KJV words it, “aged women” category). Our son’s...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. What does your family do on a Sunday afternoon? On google trending, the most searches on an autumn Sunday afternoon center around professional football teams and their players. Have you ever thought about what you search for as a family? Do you search for acceptance? Do you seek fun? Do you desire peace and quiet? Stop for a moment and ponder that question… What...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. How has life been coming at you lately? Has it been a quiet breeze filled with sunny moments? Or, maybe you are in the midst of the greatest storm of your life where it feels that everything is getting tossed around and the anchor trees lifted? Whatever your circumstances in life, God wants your family to experience His peace that passes all understanding. How c...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. We are happy to be with you today. We are Jim and Kim Nestle with Clear View Retreat. More than twenty years ago, God sparked a vision in our minds for family unity. As the years rolled by, Clear View Retreat was born to help families learn to draw closer to one another within the family unit and within their biblical community. But, since we are not all the sam...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. It’s good to be with you again today. It’s almost fall here where we are, and many sports, especially American football, will be starting back. Some coaches will say, “it isn’t about winning or losing, it is how you play the game.” Now, really competitive folks don’t typically like that saying too much. Everyone loves the feeling of working hard and winning! May...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. What do you do when you as a family are not motivated to do something you know you need to do? Let’s use this following example today. Everybody in the family has experienced frustration with another family member’s device use. Everyone has agreed that each person’s behavior needs to change in some way (some more than others, most likely). Discussions have been...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. We are Jim and Kim Nestle with Clear View Retreat. Many of you have heard us discuss the concept of “intentional intimacy,” which is one of the guiding principles we promote at our retreats. Intentional means being purposeful in our actions. And intimacy is having familiarity or closeness with someone. Here at CVR, we define our key concept ‘intentional intimacy...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. Have you ever felt that those around you are only tolerating you but don’t really love or celebrate you? Do your loved ones or biblical community feel loved by you or simply tolerated by you? Love, acceptance, and tolerance are words that get thrown around and used in a variety of contexts. So today we want to talk about how we can each show someone in our famil...

Good morning Five Minute Families. Has your family ever struggled through the day, the month, the year? Unfortunately, we have all struggled and suffered through life in this fallen world. Is your family prepared for the battles that are all around us? We have discussed, here on the Five Minute Family devotional, on how to prepare our families for times of trouble. Just as the fire drill prepares...

Good morning, Five Minute Families. Has your family ever faced a crisis? A major medical diagnosis? A death in the family? A financial disaster? No matter what family trouble you may be experiencing, you will find that communication in the crisis is vital to your family identity and vitality. You’ve heard us discuss communication skills before. Having good skills already practiced in and among the...