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Entertainment

“What can I do anyways?”

35 screen-alternative ideas

*****

You can’t beat something with nothing (as Eph. 4:28, Matt. 12:30, and Matt. 12:43-45 make clear).

That means it isn’t realistic to expect to go 10 days without your phone if you haven’t made plans for what you’ll do the next time you’re tempted to reach for it. So here are ideas for what you and your family can do with your screen-free moments, minutes, hours, and days.

Plan away

  • Short-term - Using the list below and a brainstorming session with family or friends, create a list of activities for your 10 days of screen-free time.
  • Medium-term - pull out a big piece of craft paper and along with your family create a list of items you’d love to do this summer.
  • Long-term - Spend an hour writing out a list of 50 goals, big or small, for your future. Share and refine it with input from family and friends.

On the homefront

  • Clean one room at a time – you have 10 days, so what if you took on one room a day, and gave it the “clean, organize, and de-clutter” you’ve been meaning to do just about forever?
  • Honey-do list - make your better half happy by fixing something.

Hospitality

  • Host a dinner for friends and do it up with candles. Make meal prep part of the entertainment by learning to make something new. Sushi anyone? How about calzones?
  • Put on a games night, and invite your friends to bring along their favorites. Invite someone you might not normally interact with. Focus on games that allow for conversation (the less intense sort). Search for “board games” on ReformedPerspective.ca for our suggestions.

Reconnect

  • Is your family spread across the continent, or around the world? Pick up the phone and chat away – phone one person a day.
  • Everyone loves a letter – make a package to mail away to grandma and grandpa.

Read something awesome

  • While your local library likely has too much weird stuff to want to take your kids there, you can reserve books to pick up. Before you turn off your computer to start your screen fast, be sure to check out RP’s recommendations for picture books, graphic novels, biographies, and novels for all ages. We have hundreds of nominees for you at Reformedperspective.ca/books. Remember to take a book with you wherever you go to fill in those spare moments when you used to play a phone game.
  • New Testament Bible reading challenge anyone? If you read for a half hour each day, starting at Matthew, you could make it through most of the gospels in 10 days.
  • Listen to a dramatized audiobook like the Chronicles of Narnia.

Interview someone

  • Interview your grandparents or parents or an inspirational someone you’d like to learn from… but first, alone, or together with friends or family, come up with a list of 20 questions to ask them. How did they meet their spouse? Was there an important lesson they learned the hard way? How have they seen God acting in their life? If they could go back in time, what would they tell their 15-year-old self? Etc.
  • Interview your cat, dog, or even your favorite book, and imagine the answers they’d give. Be sure to write it all down, so you can share it with your family!

Start (or share) a hobby

  • Always wanted to learn to crochet, draw, or play the guitar? Get yourself prepped to give it a real go by either finding someone who will teach you, or finding a book or maybe even a video series (maybe that’s one of your exceptions?).
  • Teach your kids, or a friend’s kids, how to sew, whittle, sketch, paint, or hit a baseball.

Get some exercise

  • Go for a long walk each day or head out on a hike with your spouse, family, a friend or two, or take the time alone to talk with God.
  • Try something new. Pickleball anyone? Rock climbing? How about swimming? Or what about a program to help with your achy knees?

Volunteer

  • Babysit for a couple so they can have a nice evening out.
  • Ask your oma if she needs any help around her house or yard.
  • Deliver some Let Kids Be brochures door-to-door for ARPA Canada.

Staycation

  • Become a tourist in your own backyard and check out your local attractions – museums, zoo, historical sites, hiking and biking trails, playgrounds, thrift stores, and more.
  • Build a fire in your backyard, roast marshmallows, make s’mores, stargaze, and swap tall tales.

Reboot your gratitude

  • Start a gratitude journal and journal daily – God has given us so much that we can easily overlook the blessings all around. Give Him glory by taking the time to see it all.
  • Make it a family challenge to come up with 5 (or more, or less – see how hard or easy it is) events, people, or things that made you happy today. Write each one down on a notecard, accompanied by some related artwork, and post them to a hallway wall. For motivation’s sake, come up with a small reward (a Hershey kiss?) for each notecard, and a small penalty (one push-up per) for whatever each participants falls short of.

Click away

  • Create a photo scavenger hunt for your friends – a list of 10 items for teams to search out and find in the great outdoors and take a picture of to prove they found them. Items can be anything, but they should be possible, but hard, to find like a four-leaf clover, or something in nature shaped like a Z, etc.
  • Take pictures for RP's summer photo contest. Find the rules and deadline by clicking here.

An evening inside

  • Read the same book together, out loud with one copy (taking turns, and maybe while doing a puzzle) or quietly with multiple copies. Be interruptible so you and your kids can share your favorite parts.
  • Create your own game together. It can be whatever you like, but two easy and fun possibilities involve variants on Pictionary and charades. The first step is to create a “deck” of 100 things you’ll either draw or act out with every player contributing ideas. You can now divide into teams, or just take turns being the drawer or actor, with everyone else guessing. Mix it up by giving the option of acting or drawing the card. Play a round and get everyone to offer up a new twist on the rules and then vote on your favorite and play again.

Write

  • Write about your experiences doing the screen-fast and think about sharing it with RP!
  • Write a letter to your younger self and share the 10 pieces of advice you’d want him to know.

Falling asleep

  • Fall asleep to a devotional. If you find it hard to get to sleep at night without a screen, try reading a devotional. Prayer, and then a few minutes reading, can help you hand off your concerns to God. If you’re married, take turns doing the reading.
  • Couples can use the undistracted time at the end of the day to be fully present with their spouse – emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Turn off the screens and turn toward each other.

Challenges

  • Everyone loves a competition so create a challenge a day and recruit your family and friends. Examples could include doing 100 of anything (push-ups, squats, etc.) over a day. Or going 24 hours without saying anything negative (do a pushup/squat when you blow it). Track how many times you reach for or pine for your screen using a communal tick – maybe a sheet of paper on the fridge. See how you compare to your friends, and how your first day compares to day 10. Challenge your kids to find 10, 20, or even 100 things in their room (or the house) to throw out or give away.
  • Plan out the next challenge that Reformed Perspective should do.

Pictures by Hannah Penninga.



News

Saturday Selections – June 21, 2025

Pay it flowered

Here's a fun one... and it brightened more than just the recipient's day.

Your marriage doesn't have a communication problem...

Admittedly, that might be a thing for some. But for the rest of us, what our marriage has is a sin problem.

When they want you to wear the rainbow... maybe you should

On June 13, the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team celebrated "Pride Night" and wore baseball caps with their LA logo in rainbow colors. Pitcher Clayton Kershaw wasn't going to just go along with it, and decided he'd point folks to what God has decided the rainbow really stands for. Kershaw used a white sharpie to write "Gen 9:12-17" right next to the logo on his hat which reads:

"God said, 'This is the sign of the covenant which I am making between Me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all successive generations; I set My bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a sign of a covenant between Me and the earth.It shall come about, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow will be seen in the cloud, and I will remember My covenant, which is between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and never again shall the water become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the cloud, then I will look upon it, to remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.'"

Brave and brilliant.

The world's foremost false teacher

When the pope died, there were some Protestants who thought we should not speak ill of the dead. But as others celebrated his life, isn't it all the more important to highlight the terrible damage he did? As Tim Challies writes:

"...Francis dedicated his entire life to laboring within the world’s largest heretical denomination—one that has more than a billion adherents. He was Supreme Pontiff of it for his final 12. He spent 67 of his years in the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), an order created for the specific purpose of countering and eradicating the teachings of Protestantism. During his time as pope, he communicated heretical doctrines to more people than any other human being. No healer, no crusader, no preacher, and no teacher came close."

20 engaging questions to ask kids at church

My wife is always able to chat up our kids' friends when they come over. She always seems to have a ready question to get the conversation going. These questions struck me as good inspiration if ever I have to make noodles and white sauce for a throng of kids on my ownsome.

U2's With or Without You

...with four guys, one guitar, and loads of creativity!


Today's Devotional

June 23 - Jesus prepared something better for us (I)

“And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise. God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us.” - Hebrews 11:39-40

Scripture reading: Hebrews 11: 1-40

We’ve probably come to the most well-known chapter of the book of Hebrews. I think we all love the stories of Abel, Enoch, Noah, >

Today's Manna Podcast

Manna Podcast banner: Manna Daily Scripture Meditations and open Bible with jar logo

When questions go unanswered: Ecclesiastes

Serving #882 of Manna, prepared by Ian Wildeboer, is called "When questions go unanswered" (Ecclesiastes) and is based on Ecclesiastes 8.











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News

Joe Biden and the unworkable, unbiblical (but I repeat myself) "believe all women" standard

The presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden, was accused of sexual assault in late March, and most of the mainstream media, and a key member of the #MeToo movement, doesn't want to hold him to the same standard he has proposed for others. It was only two years ago that the former vice president supported a "believe all women" standard. When the Trump-nominated candidate for the US Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, was publicly accused of sexually assaulting a woman, Biden told reporters: “For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not it’s been made worse or better over time. But nobody fails to understand that this is like jumping into a cauldron.” But now it's Biden in the crosshairs. In a podcast released March 24, one of Joe Biden's former Senate staffers, Tara Reade, accused him of sexual assault. It is a case of she said/he said, with no corroborating witnesses to the alleged event. Biden has, through his campaign spokeswoman, denied the charge, but, of course, that's what accused men do. So the obvious question is, why should we believe this man when this man has otherwise insisted we should believe women? One of Biden's defenders, actress Alyssa Milano, has been a public face for the #MeToo movement. But as ArcDigital.media's Cathy Young pointed out, when it was Republican nominee Kavanaugh being accused, Milano held to the same "believe all women" standard Biden was backing. Milano tweeted at the time: You can’t pretend to be the party of the American people and then not support a woman who comes forward with her #MeToo story. However, now that it's Biden being accused, Milano wants to modify that position: #BelieveWomen does not mean everyone gets to accuse anyone of anything and that’s that. It means that our societal mindset and default reaction shouldn’t be that women are lying. Theirs hasn't been the only hypocrisy evidenced. The mainstream media was slow to cover the accusation, with most waiting a couple of weeks or more before writing anything. If the lack of coverage had been due to them holding to a very different standard than the former vice president – if they believed that a reputable news organization can't simply pass along every unsubstantiated accusation they hear – then their lack of coverage would have been understandable. But as commentators on both the Right and Left have noted, that hasn't been the media's standard in the past. The same CNN that took more than two weeks to mention Reade's charges, reported the accusations against Kavanaugh immediately. The Christian satire site Babylon Bee summed up the extent of CNN's early coverage with their headline: "Cricket In CNN Newsroom Gives Detailed Report On Biden Allegations." But there something more noteworthy than the hypocrisy going on here. The #MeToo movement sprang to life in late 2017 when a number of women came forward to accuse Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Though Weinstein's behavior had been an open secret for years he hadn't faced this kind of negative attention before, because most of his encounters had involved just himself and the victim – like the accusation against Biden, they were mostly she said/he said situations. So, previously, victims hadn't come forward because these women weren't confident that they'd be believed when it was just one person's word versus another's. So how can we help women who are victimized in circumstances in which there are no other witnesses? The #MeToo movement proposed one sort of "solution" to this problem: always believe the women. The shortcoming to this approach was clear from the start though it took the Left until now, with their own guy getting accused, to finally realize it: women don't always tell the truth. There was always another solution available but, based as it is on biblical principles, it wasn't their go-to. God says in Deut. 19:15: One witness shall not rise against a man concerning any iniquity or any sin that he commits; by the mouth of two or three witnesses the matter shall be established. If we, instead of pretending there is some way of picking one witness's testimony over another, acknowledge that it can't be done, we'll be on our way to recognizing the risk that comes with one-on-one situations. And when we acknowledge that risk, then it'll become clear, too, how to minimize it. The only way to protect a woman from victimization in one-on-one circumstance is to so craft our culture that it is unacceptable to suggest such private pairings. Hollywood agents who send their young starlets off to see a powerful Hollywood mogul alone in his suite should be understood to be encouraging sexual predation. And any US senator who went off with his young intern for alone-time would be publicly condemned for creepy behavior. If we want to protect women from being victimized in one-on-one situations, we seem to have just the two choices. We either: Don't believe a man Don't have a man alone with a woman (other than his wife). This second approach is, of course, the much-mocked "Billy Graham Rule." Now that the Biden accusations have even the Left acknowledging the unworkability of the first approach, will they recognize the merits of the second? And if they don't, what alternative can they offer? Picture is cropped from the original by Michael Stokes and used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license....