We have been checking out churches since we moved here in November. Our 2nd visit today was to a church that we seem to all like. The pastor's series is on leaving a family legacy. It seemed so appropriate after the week of everything that has happened in Joplin with the horrific tornado. We don't know how much time we have here. We can be here today and gone tomorrow. What will be our legacy to leave to our kids?
He (the pastor) said that most of us want to be doing "spiritual" things with our kids and having spiritual conversations but that there is this gap between wanting to do it, and actually taking action on how to do it. Most of us have not had the example set before us.
So, the challenge was to start our spiritual legacy. So what does that look like? He had us write down any and all the things we already do with our kids to teach them about Jesus and how we are training and guiding them to become men/women of God. We wrote some things down and everyone was supposed to do the same, and then we will share online everyone's ideas. He challenged us to share with someone our legacy and what we are doing. Here are a few things we are doing as a family to make living the godly life our legacy and hopefully passing that on to our kids.
In no particular order...here goes.
- We try and eat every meal we can together. Whether it's at home or eating out at a restaurant or at the park, we always try to eat together. So much is learned about each other's day (ups and downs) by simply eating meals together. It's amazing how important this is to our kids, even at a young age. One night Brent had to do something out of the ordinary and so he missed eating with us. The kids could hardly eat because they wanted to wait for Daddy to get home. Even our 3 year old asks Brent if anything frustrating happened at work that day. He'll ask Joshua how school was and if anybody made fun of him. It's just a time for us to communicate and get to know each other better. And to hopefully show our kids how much we care about every part of their lives. Just like God cares about every part of our lives.
- We try and pray before every meal. We want to always try and thank God for always providing food and nourishment for us.
- Every night we do family devotions. We read from an age-appropriate devo that has bible stories and lessons on how to become men and women of God. We talk about the story and how it applies to our life.
- We pray with and for our kids after devotions. We ask for prayer requests and praises and we trade off praying.
- We sing 3 Christian songs every night after devotions. We have done this since our kids were born and is just part of our nightly routine. We sing Jesus Loves Me, Amazing Grace, and As The Deer. :)
- Brent and I pray together as a couple every night. We too ask each other for prayer requests and pray together before bed.
-Brent and I both have a separate quiet time/devo that we each do daily. He does his before work and I do mine when Brayton is napping in the afternoon. We think it's important to individually be spending time with God and learning what He wants us each to learn. I usually read a devo from Girlfriends In God (a great devo for women), and Brent usually reads Our Daily Bread devotional. Both can be found online.
- We try and look for teachable moments in everyday living. If Joshua has a rough day at school with friends, we talk about instead of being mad at the friend, to pray for him/her. We have spent time praying for kids in his class, praying for a teacher that has wronged him, and trying to show them how to pray for those people that have hurt us. In our daily activities we try to point out things that God has made and how God has worked out something or just point out the beauty around us and just praise God for all He has made.
-When our kids do something wrong or "bad" we tell them what they did was sin and we try and show them how that went against God. We try and have them pray and ask for forgiveness and then we pray for them. We don't do this every time so we need to do that more. We try and use scripture to help them understand why what they did was wrong. The Bible is such a great parenting tool. We need to use it even more!
-We try and teach about serving and giving to others. It was so cool this week when they wanted to get out money to send to Joplin to help others. We want them to always be thinking of others.
- We want to serve others who are less fortunate than us. When we lived in the Joplin area, we as a family helped serve in a local soup kitchen. Our kids went with us and helped prepare a meal for people who were homeless. It was a real eye opener to them. We really want to get involved with something like that here.
-Last but not least we try and go to church every Sunday. We feel it's really important to fellowship with other believers and for our kids to learn biblical principals and truths from others. We try and ask them what they learned from their story and it gives us something to talk about with them.
I am hoping you don't think we think we have it all figured out. We don't. These are just little things we are trying to do to get started on this big task of spiritually raising our kids. I would LOVE to hear your ideas and we can all share and learn from each other.
