Welcome to June! To welcome you to this new month, I’ve got a great batch of desktop wallpapers for you to download to your computer, cell phone, tablet or anything else that needs some prettying up. Each of these has been designed by a reader of this site who is a graphic designer. I think this may be our best batch of wallpapers yet. And each one is free for the download.

A few notes: 320 x 480 is for your iPhone; 1024 x 1024 is for your iPad; your desktop or laptop may take any of the other sizes depending on your monitor size and a host of other considerations. If you’re not sure of the size, just find one that looks like it would be pretty much the same size as your screen. Generally you set one of these are your wallpaper by clicking on the link to the image, then right-clicking on the image (once it’s open) and selecting “Set as Background,” “Set as Desktop Background,” or something similar. If you aren’t sure, post a comment and we’ll try to help you figure it out.

I am doing something new this month and featuring one designer—a new tradition I hope to carry on in the months to come. This month’s featured designer is Eric Novak.

Boundaries & Seasons

Created by Ruth Mar, Kirkland, WA. I always think of June as a month of change — be it students graduating and scattering for the summer or the coming of summer itself. Yet none of these changes happen outside the control of our unchanging Creator.

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I Am the Vine

Created by Jessy Spencer from Coeur d’Alene, ID.

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Every week Ligonier Ministries has a feature they call $5 Friday in which they offer up a selection of resources priced at (you guessed it) $5. This Friday they would like to offer at least 1 book or DVD of our choosing. I have narrowed down the choices to 5. All you need to do is vote. Whichever one gets the biggest share of the votes will be offered this Friday for $5.

Here are the options:

• The Masculine Mandate by Richard Phillips
• The Priest with Dirty Clothes by R.C. Sproul
• The Holiness of God (DVD) by R.C. Sproul
• What Is Reformed Theology? (DVD) by R.C. Sproul
• Living for God’s Glory by Joel Beeke

Clear? So go ahead and vote. Then check in on Friday and you can buy it at that price.

(If you are reading on Facebook or RSS you will need to click through to my blog)

I recently posted an article detailing how I get things done. Some who read that article were interested in a little bit more detail about the programs I depend upon. So here is the answer—a list of software that makes my life easier. Note that this article deals with software I’ve got install on my desktop computers, not on my iPad or iPhone (though where there are iPad or iPhone versions of the software I may have those as well).

Reeder - Reeder is a program that makes reading RSS feeds through Google Reader a much better experience. I’ve been using it since the early beta stage and since then it has grown in all the right directions. It simply takes all of the RSS feeds you’ve collected through Google Reader and makes them easier to read. It also offers the one-click to save them to Instapaper and other similar utilities. The iPad app is just as good.

Value: Speeds and beautifies the process of reading blogs.

Byword - Byword is a great little program for a writer. It offers what many programs offer today—the ability to write in a full-screen environment that blocks out all distractions. What makes it unique is its emphasis on beautiful typography and on de-demphasizing anything but the text you are actually working on in the moment. The only way it could be better is if you could copy and paste from there into blogging software. Unfortunately, for the time being, that will cause you to lose rich formatting. I use Byword for most of my writing these days, whether blog posts or sermons.

Value: Makes writing more efficient and more beautiful.

Word - When I first switched to Mac, one of my greatest joys was in getting away from using Microsoft Word. It remained that way for a year or two, but once I began working on a new book I realized that Word is a program I just couldn’t get away from. Yes, Apple’s Pages can access Word files, but if you are trying to translate formatting, commenting, tracked changes, and so on, it gets messy. So I had to go back to Word. The latest version is quite a substantial step forward, easing some of the pain.

Value: Standard software for sharing text

You know by now that every Wednesday we are previewing a series of 10 films that look at the Old Testament appearances of Christ as the Angel of the Lord. The films are produced by HeadHeartHand Media and are free for you to view for one week.

After the week is up you will need to purchase the series. Here's how you can do that. The DVD and Study Guide (sample here) are available now. You can also buy the digital download of the whole series here for $5. Or visit Ligonier's online store for the download or physical copies of the DVD and Study Guide.

Episode 9 looks at Zechariah 3. It is titled “A Brand from the Fire.”

David Murray is Professor of Old Testament and Practical Theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was a pastor in Scotland for 12 years before coming to Grand Rapids in 2007 with his wife Shona and their four children. He blogs regularly at Head Heart Hand.

Seeds Family Worship is a family favorite—a band that simply sets Scripture to music and does so with fun and with skill. The kids love it. They have just released their most recent album—Seeds of Character. And this post is one stop in an ongoing blog tour.

One thing I love about Seeds Family Worship is that they always include 2 copies of the CD with your purchase—one for you and one for a friend. They say, “We’ve taken inspiration from God’s perfect plan for seeds dispersal and designed packaging intended to facilitate the spreading of Seeds. Each package of Seeds of Character album includes two identical full-length CDs. So simply tear the CD cover in half and share a complete packaged album with a friend nearby or far away. You get to take part in spreading Seeds—helping take God’s Word to as many homes as possible.”

What’s cool about this tour is that it’s personalized. Check out the video to see what I mean:

About their music they say: “Both parents and kids will love the music. The lyrics are God’s own Word, straight from the ESV. It’s the perfect way to sing, dance, and make a joyful noise unto the Lord, while planting His Word forever in your heart and mind.It’s a Scripture-memory tool — It’s a CD full of fabulous music. It’s both! Seeds combines songs that use Scripture for lyrics with strongly produced music that is varied in style to create a sound the whole family will love. Each song helps a child (and any adults in the vicinity) memorize one or more Bible verses from the ESV. ”

Here is where the tour has been and is going. You can get a new and exclusive song on each of the tour stops.

In eleven years of parenting my wife and I have often discussed our responsibility to train our children in their understanding of money. We have often spoken of giving them an allowance as just one component of this training, but we’ve always lacked the “big picture” of how we should do this, and why.

Recently I read Family Money Matters by John Temple and in that book I found just what I needed. The final chapter is dedicated to this topic of training your children in their use of money. What I came to see is the importance of training the kids not just to use their money well—to be frugal and wise and generous—but to honor God with their money. And in order to train them in this way I will need to ensure that they a) have money and b) have a realistic context in which to use it well or use it badly.

With that big picture finally in place, I was left with 2 questions: How will giving my children an allowance train them to use their money in a way that honors God? And how much should I give them? Let me show how Temple helped me answer these questions.

How Much?

How much pocket money or allowance should be given? This is a tough question and one that needs to take all kinds of factors into account such as where the family lives and how much the family earns. It should probably not take into account what other children receive as this teaches from an early age that they should seek to keep up with the neighbors.

Temple provides a spreadsheet that I’ve found very useful. It “sets out a suggested range of allowances on a unit basis. Families can then translate these units into their country’s currency as appropriate.” The spreadsheet will not tell you how much to give to your children, but it will help you as you attempt to increase the amount you give them and as you attempt to teach that with greater age comes greater responsibility. If you need a little nudge, though, I can tell you that we’ve begun with 4 as a logical multiplier (based on a monthly, not weekly, allowance). Having said that, my two oldest children each have a paper route and earn money on their own, so their needs may be less than some.

You can download the spreadsheet right here (scroll down and look for “Children’s and Teenagers’ Allowances”).

Here is what you need to know to use the table:

First, the table assumes that an allowance should increase by 15% each year since this is generally thought to be the minimum noticeable amount. The table also accounts for inflation at 5% per annum. Here is how it all works:

Assume you have two children who enter the allowance scheme in the base year. One is four years old and the other is eleven. The four-year-old will start off with an allowance of 1.00 unit per month (or week), and the eleven-year-old will start off with an allowance of 2.66 units. After one year the four-year-old will get 15 percent more, taking him or her to 1.15 units, but he or she will also get the inflation increase, which will give him or her 1.21 units, as can be seen by following the shaded diagonal line downwards to the right.

When this four-year-old reaches twelve, he or she will get 4.52 units. The eleven-year old will likewise go from 2.66 to 3.21 units. Now, assume that in this, the second year, another four-year-old sibling joins the scheme. He or she will start at 1.05 and will then follow the diagonal line below the lightly shaded line—that is, 1.27, 1.53 and so on. This table can be used for all children between the ages of four and twelve.

Are you still with me?

Once every month, beginning in February, I have been gathering desktop wallpapers and making them freely available to the readers of this site. Let me once again express my gratitude to the graphic designers who have been graciously providing them.

Along the way I’ve accumulated a few favorite designs. And here they are—at least, here are ones that are not connected to a particular month. Each of these wallpapers is free for you to download so you can dress up your computer, iPad, cell phone, etc.

He Is Wonderful

Created by Ariseli Modica from Lynnwood, WA.

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Full of His Glory

Created by Jessica Hardesty from Morgantown, WV.

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You know by now that every Wednesday we are previewing a series of 10 films that look at the Old Testament appearances of Christ as the Angel of the Lord. The films are produced by HeadHeartHand Media and are free for you to view for one week.

After the week is up you will need to purchase the series. Here's how you can do that. The DVD and Study Guide (sample here) are available now. You can also buy the digital download of the whole series here for $5. Or visit Ligonier's online store for the download or physical copies of the DVD and Study Guide.

Episode 8 looks at Christ’s appearance to Samson’s parents in Judges 13. It is titled “Called Wonderful.”

David Murray is Professor of Old Testament and Practical Theology at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was a pastor in Scotland for 12 years before coming to Grand Rapids in 2007 with his wife Shona and their four children. He blogs regularly at Head Heart Hand.

Earlier today I posted the results of a survey that asked where we buy our books and why we choose to buy them there. One interesting result of that survey is that our most important consideration when choosing a place to buy our books is price—we buy where the prices are cheapest. Or we think we do. In many cases we think Amazon offers the best prices even though other e-commerce retailers have undercut them.

Just to verify that other stores do, indeed, offer better prices, I put together a shopping list of 10 books and priced them at 4 different stores: Amazon, Westminster Books, Monergism and CBD. I did not tell any of the retailers that I was going to do this (so the prices are “pure”) and chose books that the people who read this site might really buy. And here are the results (with the lowest price for each book bolded):

Shipping is also an important consideration, of course, since the price can’t be fully tallied until we’ve accounted for getting those books to our mailbox. Here is how shipping would play out (assuming that the order was to a US address):

Last week I posted a survey on my site—a survey that asked you about your book buying habits. This was a follow-up to a similar survey I had taken a year prior. The results were, I think, nothing short of fascinating. I sought to find out where we are buying our books today and why we are buying them where we do.

By way of background, 1,865 people completed the survey; 67% of the respondents were male and 82% lived in the United States. 88% identify as Reformed in theology, which means that this survey offers a little bit of a glimpse into this whole “Young, Restless, Reformed” movement.

As promised, I’ll share the highlights of the survey.

The first question asked this: “How many PRINTED (not e-book) Christian books do you purchase each month, on average, from e-commerce stores?” I wanted to continually distinguish between printed books and ebooks, hence the all-capital PRINTED. The results of this question were a little bit lower than last year, which makes me think that the difference could largely be attributed to people migrating away from printed books and toward ebooks.

The next question asked about book reviews, asking if a person tends to read at least 1 review of a book before purchasing it. The results were quite emphatic—we like our reviews.

The natural follow-up asked where people find these reviews. This question was asked on a blog so it was no surprise that blogging took the lead. But even with that bias in mind, it is remarkable how blogs have become a go-to resource for reviews. And close behind blogs is Amazon, showing that customer reviews can be very valuable. Publishers take note: continue to get your books into the blogosphere.