Encouraging Our Kids to Walk With God
My friend Tammy is hosting a Mom 2 Mom Carnival on encouraging our kids’ relationship with Jesus.
If I’m going to be brutally honest, I’m not entirely sure how we’re going to go about helping our kids build a relationship with God!
One thing we currently do is pray before dinner each night. We try to pray for specific things and for specific people instead of saying a generic prayer. One thing I remember about growing up is that we generally only saud prayers by rote (ie. “Now I lay me down to sleep …”) so I was very uncomfortable actually praying out loud around other people since I’d had so little practice. I want to give Gwen the opportunity to pray out loud her own prayers in our home so that she becomes used to using her own words to express herself to God.
Another thing we hope to do is family Bible reading. I don’t yet know how best to do this and not make it a chore and boring, though, as that was most of Brad’s experience regarding family devotions as a kid!
I hope, also, to expose our kids to other Christian adults. Living in an intentional community in which we have deep relationships and intentional get-togethers (ie. weekly potlucks and weekly morning prayer) is a wonderful way to show our children the love of God through others. I think having positive adult role models who talk about their faith, their relationship with God and their walk with God is an awesome thing for kids to have!
All in all, I think the number one thing to do to encourage kids to have a relationship with God is walk with God yourself. Kids learn the most from what they see, and if all they ever see is a ‘Sunday Christian’, how can we ever expect them to move beyond that? That means that both Brad and I have a lot of work to do in how we live our lives and ‘walk the walk’. I hope, and pray, that we can rise to the occasion.
