Pockets

by Pamela Holz Beres

There is a concrete bridge in my hometown with the year 1904 prominently inscribed. My grandfather once ran his hand along the bumpy surface, turned to me, and said, “This bridge is as old as I am.”

As a child, I had always thought of my grandfather as an eccentric fellow. He lived next door in a sparsely furnished home and wore ragged shirts and trousers while the new clothes hung in his closet, worn only for church and special occasions. Decades of hard work had earned him enough to live comfortably and enjoy a few extras. Instead, he chose to live simply, using only what he needed.

One day, as an adult, I thought about that bridge, the year my grandfather was born, and the years that followed. I pictured my grandfather — a strong young man eager to earn a living and support a family — when the Great Depression hit the United States. Finally, I understood. Now I see my grandfather’s habits not as eccentricities but as a solid set of values and traditions worthy of being passed on to his descendants.

Link to the Past

From the moment we’re born, we have a past. It shapes who we are, gives us a strong sense of identity, and strengthens our family ties. Even Christ, as the Son of Man, was born with a history. In fact, the New Testament begins not with the birth of Christ but with a lengthy list of his ancestors. Just as it is important for us to understand how Christ came to be born, so it is important for us to understand our ancestral background.

Search for the Gold

Quite often, we think of our family tree as a mere factual record—a list of names, birth dates, and death dates of people we barely remember or never knew at all. But a real treasure lies behind those names and dates. Who were these people? What were their strengths? their weaknesses? What did they do for a living? Was life a struggle? Or did everything come easily to them? Was their faith in God an important aspect of their lives? How did they express it? Knowing the trials and triumphs of past generations can give us a better understanding of our grandparents, our parents, and ultimately, ouselves.

A Bridge to the Future

Our family history is most meaningful when it is shared. But in today’s mobile society, our children are often left with little knowledge of who they are or where they came from. Unless we harvest the stories and traditions of our past, including those related to faith journeys, they die with the generations who lived them.

Take advantage of holidays, reunions, and other family events to seek stories that add spice and depth to your genealogical record. Talk to grandparents to find out about their childhoods, their courtships, their early years together.

Relate the stories you hear to your children. Does your child share a talent or special interest with a relative? Maybe your daughter’s lyrical voice reminds you of Aunt Betty, who sang in the church choir when you were a child. Or perhaps your son’s wild imagination reminds you of Grandpa’s endless tall tales. Let your children see these connections. They’ll take special pride in their abilities.

The stories you share will fascinate your children. Over time, the events, values, and beliefs that make them unique individuals will come together. They will appreciate their family’s traditions and will share them with the next generation.

Ways to Keep the Spirit of Family Alive

Integrate your child’s personal history into school work. For example, if your children are studying the Great Depression or the Vietnam War, encourage them to talk to a relative who lived through that period. Rather than doing a report on a famous person, perhaps your child can report on a family member.

When heirlooms and keepsakes are used or displayed, tell your child why these items are important to your family. Hang photos of grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins alongside current family photos.

Scrapbooking is a popular hobby. Give your children three-ring binders with dividers for different “branches” of the family—themselves, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents. Let them collect memorabilia and preserve it. Use rubber stamps, stickers, markers, and other inexpensive items to embellish the pages. Make sure you use acid-free materials.

Ask your children what they would like to know about a particular relative. Suggest that they include some questions such as “Who was your favorite Sunday school teacher?” or “Do you remember when you joined your church?” Have them record the questions in a notebook and interview that relative. The interview can be taped for posterity.

Moving from Christmas to Epiphany

by Janet R. Knight

The weeks leading up to Christmas are filled with excitement (and, yes, a good bit of stress) as already-full family calendars accommodate special church services, school programs, parties, holiday meals, shopping for and wrapping gifts, etc. Even families that choose to opt out of many of the more consumer-oriented parts of the season are likely to find themselves busier than ever. But for most families, certainly for most children, it is a fun and festive season. And it should be! We are celebrating the greatest gift ever—God’s gift of Jesus Christ to the world!

Then December 25 comes and goes.

Christmas is over, so what now? For most of us and particularly for children, the excitement, the awe, the mystery comes to an end as soon as the presents have been opened on Christmas morning or Christmas Eve. Even our churches return to a regular schedule. And the Christmas tree, the Advent wreath, the greenery—they’re all gone.

But the reality is that Jesus has just been born anew for us! Ahead of us throughout the church year, until it rolls around to Advent once again, are exciting and challenging times.

Occurring between Christmas and Lent, Epiphany is one of the seasons of the church year that many families overlook—maybe don’t even know about. Our word epiphany comes from the Latin/Greek word meaning “manifestation.” Many churches observe Epiphany as the time when the wise men found Jesus. Epiphany celebrates the first time Jesus was manifested to the outside world—that is, to people who were non-Jews. In many parts of the world, Epiphany culminates the twelve days of Christmas and is the primary time for merriment and gift giving.

In our families we observe the season of Epiphany as an “aha” time.

• A time when we, like the wise men, choose to follow a star
• A time when we, like the wise men, choose to go another way
• A time when we, as we begin to understand who Jesus really is, begin to recognize the Christ in ourselves.

Here are some things that your family can do to observe the Epiphany season:

• Place an Epiphany wreath on your front door or in your family’s worship center. Wind a star garland through a grapevine wreath and fasten a green bow to it. (Green is the liturgical color for Epiphany.)
• Bake a Three Kings Cake (a sheet cake is better for this). Place a dried bean in the batter. The person who gets the piece with the bean is crowned (with a paper crown) queen/king for a day. Other family members can do that person’s chores (as much as possible), and that person chooses a special meal.

Set a special time to meet weekly as a family during the weeks of Epiphany (from January 6 until the beginning of Lent). These would be times when you make choices about the suggestions below:

• Decide what gift you would bring Jesus. Your gift may be from the family as a whole, or each individual may decide on a gift. Someone may want to give a gift of time or a gift of prayer, for instance. As a family, you may want to give a gift of volunteering to sort donations at the food bank or shovel snow for an elderly neighbor.
• Decide as a family how you could choose to “follow a star” like the wise men. Think about the ways Jesus helped people—he fed people, he healed people, he said to visit the sick and prisoners and to give clothes to those who need them. Choose one project that your family could do for someone else.
• Decide how your family could, like the wise men, choose to go another way. For instance, does your family need to work on sharing or peace making? Or need to begin family worship? Or need to attend church and Sunday school more regularly?
• Talk about the different aspects of Jesus’ ministry: caregiver, servant, peacemaker, challenger, shepherd, teacher, one who forgives. You may think of others. Make a poster with those words. Under each word write something your family can do to carry out that aspect of Jesus’ ministry.

Janet R. Knight retired as editor of Pockets. She is a wife, mother, and grandmother, and an active volunteer in her church and the community.

by Timothy Jones

We live in an age, I once heard someone say, characterized more by “blah” than “ah!” I would also mention our lack of awe. Grateful reverence does not exactly spill forth from the internet, TV, radio airwaves, video games, or other popular entertainment. Many parents and caregivers wonder, How can we help our children grow in gratitude and wonder?

Several years ago, I asked my young daughter for her take on this. “Do you hear much about gratefulness at school?”

“No,” she said. “That doesn’t have anything to do with what we learn at school.”

Perhaps not. In an era meticulous in separating church and state, we would not expect much in this regard from the public school classroom. Even so, I heard Bekah’s answer with a tinge of regret. I wanted her to grow more into a calm thankfulness rather than fall into the day’s prevailing, grabbing restlessness. Complaining and rolling the eyes with cynicism might look cool to her peers, and practiced indifference might not affect her performance on the standardized tests her school made a priority, but I wanted her to know that life at its foundation warrants childlike wonder.

I wanted my children to pay attention to those quiet moments when something akin to gratefulness wells up. A teacher here or there, a biology lesson inadvertently pointing to the wonders of nature, a Sunday-school lesson on God’s character—any and all of these may spark a moment of grateful awe. But I also knew that helping Bekah and her brother, Micah, find a permanently grateful posture depended ultimately on what happened in our home. In order for our children to discover the goodness at the heart of Creation and at the core of our faith, my wife and I had to play a large role.

This meant several things, such as taking gratefulness seriously in our family prayer times. “The prayer of a child,” Annie Dillard wrote, “is always ‘Thanks,’ not ‘Please.’” And I did notice in our prayer times, when the children were younger, that they indeed thanked God for blessings more often than they asked God for things. And when we all prayed as a family around the table, we all found it natural to utter thanks for the food before us and the roof above us. But I wanted the children to know that gratitude to God always belongs in our prayers, not just when we enjoy an abundant spread. “In everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving,” Paul the apostle stressed, “present your requests to God” (Philippians 4:6b, NIV).

I also want to help Bekah and Micah to find glimpses of God’s glory and grandeur in the world that God has so lovingly, artfully made. “O Lord, our Lord,” the psalmist proclaimed, “how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise” (Psalm 8:1-2a, NIV).

I remember one autumn day when the children and I went for a walk in the woods. We followed a rise in the trail, a winding, circuitous path that opened onto a vista of maples and elms and slanted rays of sunlight. We all paused for the view. “Wasn¹t it good of God to make all this?” I asked out loud. The three of us enjoyed a hushed moment of quiet before we resumed our hike. Neither Bekah nor Micah said anything in that stilled minute between our steps, and I did not expect them to; but I felt my question hang significantly in the air. I had tried, at least in a small way, to help my children connect their native awe for nature’s handiwork with the One who made it all.

Most of all, I want my children to live with gratitude for a God who so loved the world that he became a human person, walking in Jesus Christ the roads and detours of dusty human life. My children grew up knowing that I believe not only in God, but in the One who made God known, who made God close. So much life comes from that relationship that I wanted them to know how much is possible in Christ.

Perhaps nothing will do more to make our children grateful.

The Rev. Timothy Jones is an Episcopal priest and author of several books.

by MaryJane Pierce Norton

When our sons were still at home, we had a ritual at our house. When we sat down for a meal, we joined hands. There was a pause while someone asked, “Whose turn is it?” Once we had remembered, that person prayed, thanking God for the food that before us and lifting our concerns.

During one summer drought, each time Christopher prayed, he included a plea for rain. Following the births of Benjamin and Bradford, our prayers included thanks for new life. Our prayers might include a friend who was ill or homeless persons in our city. These mealtime prayers became important to each member of our family. But I remember when our mealtime prayers were different. When Christopher was a preschooler, my husband, David, and I routinely asked him to pray and listened to his prayers.

Finally we took a look at what we were doing. We were always asking our child to pray, but we were never praying aloud ourselves. So how would Christopher understand that prayer is important to adults as well as children?

Prayer Is Important

Prayer—knowing how to pray, and understanding why prayer is important—may be taught at church. But prayer is primarily taught and  nurtured in the home. The question for us as parents is: “Are we intentionally praying for and with our children so that they begin to know how to pray?”

Sometimes praying aloud, even in front of our own children, is difficult for parents. Maybe we ourselves never learned to pray or to become comfortable praying in front of other people. We somehow got the notion that prayer was private and not for others to hear.

Public Prayer

Prayer is private, but it is also public. There are times for both and ways to help our children feel comfortable with both.

We begin to help our children feel comfortable praying aloud when we show by example that we are comfortable praying out loud in front of other people and when we encourage them to do so. Mealtime and bedtime offer two prime times for praying aloud in the family. Both are important times for establishing family rituals with prayer at their center.

By taking turns praying at mealtime, each family member shares the responsibility of saying thanks to God. Likewise, bedtime prayers can include an opportunity for each person to pray aloud, listing some of the things he or she is grateful for or seeks help with. We can include prayers for our family and friends when we call each by name.

It is important, too, for children to hear us name them before God in prayer. It says, in a very concrete way, that we care for them and love them and thank God for their presence in our family. This, too, teaches that prayer is personal and important.

Private Prayer

Prayer is also private. There are times when we want and need to be alone with God. Again, as parents, we teach our children by example. Just as they learn by seeing us read the Bible, they also learn when we ask for quiet time or a special place to meditate and pray. As parents, we show prayer is important when we keep a journal. In this journal, we write our prayers to God. These can occasionally be shared with our children, helping them see that prayers can be written as well as spoken.

In helping our children learn to pray in private, we can talk with them about the listening involved in prayer. In our public prayers, we do most of the talking. Sometimes in worship services, there is a time for silent prayer. But in most churches, the time is not really long enough for real listening to take place. When we pray with our children, if we include times to listen in silence to what God might be saying to us, our children can begin to understand that listening is part of prayer.

We can also talk with our children about what we do in our private prayer times. We can let them know that we allow time to be in silence and concentrate on what God might be saying to us.

The Language of Prayer

Sometimes feeling that we don’t have the “right” words stands in the way of our being able to pray. If a child hears mostly formal “church” prayers, using language not used every day, that child may begin to feel he or she doesn’t have the right language to pray.

Children who know only memorized prayers may also get the feeling that they don’t know the language to use in prayers. They may feel that their words aren’t good enough. When we simply let our children merely recite memorized prayers, we may teach them that people have to have set words to pray. When we pray our own prayers in everyday language, children learn that any language and any concern is okay to bring before God.

However, it is important to help our children memorize prayers as well as make up their own. These memorized prayers can take many forms. Certainly, “The Lord’s Prayer” is important for every Christian to know. Scripture can often be memorized prayer. In times of stress when other words failed me, the Twenty-Third Psalm became my prayer linking me with God.

Hymns are also prayers. Think about the words to a hymn you love. One of my favorites is “This Is My Father’s World.” When I sing that hymn, it becomes a prayer of thanksgiving, and I feel full of gratitude for the world and my place in it.

Prayer is important—too important for our children to miss. Our role as model and encourager will help our children know the joy that comes in talking and listening to God.

MaryJane Pierce Norton is Associate General Secretary of the General Board of Discipleship.

by Janet R. Knight

A few years ago I read a magazine article about what people were looking for in “dream homes.” One of the trends highlighted was the desire for “rooms for reflection.” Many people, according to the article, were interested in creating a sacred space within their homes. My reaction to the article was mixed. I was pleased that people were recognizing their need for quiet, for calm, their need to set aside a place where they can be intentional about their relationship with God. But I also noted that in the entire article God was not mentioned once. The article instead referred to people trying to get in touch with “the divine,” a term which may or may not refer to a gracious God who creates and loves us and lives among us.

On one hand, it was encouraging that people seemed to be recognizing that there is no real separation between daily living and living in God’s presence. But it was sad that in many of the examples people were really having to stretch to find symbols that might bring meaning to their lives.

Regardless of my ambivalence about the contents of the article, the concept behind it is important for families. We do need sacred space in our lives.

For many of us that space has been—and still is—limited to the church sanctuary. But that limited sense of sacred space may contribute to our failure to see, to worship, to rely on God in the midst of our daily living away from the sanctuary. To coin a phrase: “Home is home and church is church, and never the twain shall meet.” Is that the attitude we unwittingly communicate to our children?

Of course, setting aside sacred space alone won’t bridge the gap. Much more is needed. Families need to worship together in their homes. Children need to see parents reading the Bible and praying. Children need to be encouraged to spend their own quiet time with God. And God’s presence in the family’s midst needs to be recognized in the course of our daily routines.

But setting aside sacred space is a good visual reminder that God is in our midst.

The space need not elaborate. A small table can serve as an altar. You can place symbols of faith — perhaps a cross or a Bible or a candle — on the table. You can add seasonal items, for example, a dogwood branch at Easter or an evergreen branch at Christmas, perhaps some wild flowers in the summer or a beautiful autumn leaf. You can periodically add things that celebrate special times in your family’s life—a child’s baptismal candle, something brought back from a family vacation, a child’s drawing or other creation, or something to signify a child’s first day of school or birthday or graduation or an adult’s new job.

As family members begin to recognize God’s love and work in their midst and get in touch with their own need to thank God or to ask for God’s help, the home altar will be a place where they can give tangible expression to that recognition.

If space is a problem, a shelf or even a window sill can serve as a family altar. The amount of space is not important. What is important is that your family has recognized and honored God’s presence in its midst.

Janet R. Knight retired as editor of Pockets magazine.

By Mary Lou Redding

When I was initially asked to write about the role of parents in helping children build friendships, my first response was, “I don’t have the answers. Ask someone else.” But then I had an idea: I would ask my daughter, now an adult, what I taught her that helped or didn’t help her with friendships.

Her response? “I don’t know. Values, I guess.” Her answer points out something important: We aren’t analytical in thinking about how to make and keep friends.

Whatever our children learn from us about relationships, they probably learn it more by accident than by design on our part. But if I wanted to post a list to help me pay attention to what I want children to know about friends, I’d put these items on it:

Lasting friendships are built on shared interests. Playing on a sports team or volunteering for a community project offers opportunity to talk and laugh with others. Supporting our children in pursuing their interests helps them to build relationships with people who may become lifelong friends.

People don’t have to be just like us to be our friends, and friends may disagree—even about important things—and still be friends.

When Lisa was about 12, she heard me mention a controversial subject to one of my friends. Lisa whispered, “Mom, I don’t think you should talk about that.” When I asked her later why she had said that, Lisa said, “You might make her mad, and then you won’t be friends anymore.” That was an opportunity to tell her that this friend and I share a long history and that we can disagree and still be friends.

I like people who are not like me because I learn from them. People who have ideas different from mine stretch my thinking if I listen to them and ask questions until I understand their point of view.

Friends who help us to be the good persons we want to be are very special gifts from God. We all have met people who encourage us to be our best selves—and others who entice us toward the things that aren’t part of what we want. Children need help in thinking about what they want to be and who helps them to be that.

Sometimes we may find that people we thought were good friends actually are not. Betrayal is painful, and we inevitably encounter it because people are not perfect. Children need help in understanding that some friendships end and in believing that others will last.

Our friendships help children learn what it means to be a friend. When we make and keep commitments to friends, we teach children the value of doing so. If a friend is ill, we can bring our child along when we visit. If we write a note to a friend, we can invite a child to add a few lines to the message or decorate the envelope. When a friend has a birthday, we can include a child in shopping for a gift. We demonstrate that maintaining friendships takes effort but that making the effort is worth it.

We include our friends in our prayers. When friends are present to share a meal, giving thanks to God for food leads naturally to giving thanks for friends and for time with them. When children express concern about a person or an incident, we can stop to pray, asking God to help or to comfort or guide. When our children are concerned about making or keeping friends, we can ask God in shared prayer time to help them be kind and loving and to guide them to people who need and want good friends like them.

Welcoming our children’s friends into our lives can be an important way to share our faith and our values. Inviting our children’s friends into our homes and including them in family outings occasionally are opportunities to demonstrate healthy ways of interacting and how we value one another. It is always appropriate to help visitors understand the “house rules.” For instance: “In our house, we don’t shout at one another when we disagree. Lets’ talk about this to see how we can solve the problem.” When we do this, differences become opportunities to reinforce our values with our children while also sharing principles of our faith with visitors.

We continue learning about friendships as we mature, with our friends teaching us and us teaching them.

Mary Lou Redding is managing editor of The Upper Room daily devotional guide.

Many of us wish our families were Norman Rockwell-style portraits of domestic order and harmony: Mom and Dad at the table before a meal with the kids, the roast beef ready to be carved, the dog curled up at our feet, reverent silence as a heart-felt blessing is offered. The reality for many of us is that our family is not necessarily a perfect nuclear quartet, only a few of us may be around for any given meal, and we’d like to pray together but we just don’t know how. Maybe we didn’t begin this tradition when we were younger because we were too overwhelmed with the responsibilities of running a family, and the idea of beginning prayers from scratch seems too overwhelming.

The good news is that we don’t have to begin with a full-blown ritual of family prayer. We can start in small ways, continue what feels authentic to our family context, and build as we grow. At mealtimes, for example, we might model for our children taking a moment at the end of a meal to say, “That was good. I am grateful for it.” That might seem ridiculously basic, but prayer can be very simple. God doesn’t judge prayers on length or complexity. God simply wants to be in relationship with us.

It has long been part of Christian tradition to pray before meals. This comes from the Jewish tradition. Jesus probably prayed a blessing that in English would be, “Blessed are you Lord, our God, King of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.” Christian prayers began from the source of Jewish practice and evolved into a myriad of prayer types and customs.

Many families refer to prayers before meals as table graces. It’s a nice reminder; a way of acknowledging that everything we have comes from God’s grace. Another day to be alive, fresh fruit, money to buy burgers and fries, our family itself: all of these are gifts from God. We can give thanks to God for farmers, for cooks (and the clean-up crew) for the smell of hot bread and love of those around us. Offering our thanks to God helps us remember to be thankful the next time we get ready to eat. It helps put our schedule and our worries into perspective. And, praying as a family helps set a tone of gratitude and spiritual connection as the basis for our life together.

Others call these prayers blessings, and that too is appropriate. We are blessed by God, and we seek to use our blessings to be a blessing to others. That idea is echoed in commonly echoed mealtime prayer that asks:

Bless this food for the nourishment of our bodies and our bodies to your service.

Some families have standard prayers that use for every meal. One prayer passed down to a family went this way:

Father in heaven, smile us with mercy. And give us thankful hearts
for these and all our many blessings.

Another popular family prayer is this:

For the gifts we are about to receive,
O Lord, make us truly thankful.

Another popular prayer is a sung prayer.

For health and strength and daily food we give you thanks, O Lord.

To listen to the tune, click here.

There is no need to confine yourself to one kind of prayer: be creative, involve your family and experiment. To help you get started, Upper Room ministries has collected prayers for meals, for bedtimes, and other family needs in the in Family Devotional kit. To learn more about the kit, click here.

You can read more about families and prayer some of these helpful resources:

• Family: The Forming Center by Marjorie J. Thompson.
• Children and Prayer: A Shared Pilgrimage by Betty Shannon Cloyd
• At Home with God: Family Devotions for the School Year by Anne Broyles et al.

A lovely reflection on mealtime prayers and the sacramentality of eating was posted on the web at:
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1003

The Upper Room Family Devotional Kit

Build a stronger family foundation through spending time with God!

To help organize your family devotional time, we’ve assembled a kit to make prayer a natural part of your family’s life. The Upper Room Family Devotional Kit contains practical tools help your family get closer to God.

Order your kit now.

by Judith E. Smith

Dolores Leckey wrote that the vocation of the family is to renew the face of the earth. We are called to participate in the creative work of God in the world, renewing the whole earth. We are invited to participate in that work—to be partners with God in bringing love and justice to our world. We are not to sit by passively and wait. God comes to us and calls us outward, beyond ourselves, challenging us to bring the kingdom into reality. We respond to God’s call with our efforts to bring love and justice to God’s world. As spiritual guides for our children, we are called to give them a faithful and reliable way of being in the world and of ordering their lives. They look to us for encouragement as they grow in their own faithfulness to God. To encourage our children means, literally, to give them courage. How can we do that? How can we give them courage and help them understand what it means to be obedient to God’s call?

In order for our children to move out in response to God’s love, they must know and see others who are doing so. They cannot know in a vacuum what they are called to do and be. And so being a spiritual guide to our children means being an example for them. We must invite them to participate with us as we live out our faith. They learn from the way we participate in the life of the church and the community (and allow them to join us), the way we use our money for the welfare of others, the way we treat those who are not valued in our culture, the way we live in peace with others, and the way we care for the environment. Our willingness to respond to God’s call is what encourages and strengthens them as they attempt to respond.

Our children know when there are discrepancies between what we say and what we do. When God calls us, we must be willing to act. And we must involve children in that action, helping them to understand what they are doing and why it is important to us. Children, like all human beings, need to feel that they are of value. Often they believe that they must wait until they grow up to do something significant. But there are many ways they can act out their faith now, many ways that they can respond to God’s love by sharing it with a world badly in need of love and justice. Part of being our children’s spiritual guides is letting them know that they can make a difference right now.

Perhaps the simplest way we can encourage their growth is to talk with them about issues. We show that we value them by discussing with them our concerns and our hopes for the world, by involving them in family conversations about social issues in the local community and around the world. We can respect their opinions and answer their questions. Children are  often interested in history and in current events. They want to know more about their world. Include them in your conversations whenever you can. Another way to encourage the spiritual growth of our children is to join with them and with others as a family (or a church-school class or a congregation) to work on particular issues. Several years ago I was part of a large, downtown church that had a close relationship with a small congregation located near the prison. We paid the salary of one of the pastors of that church and she did special ministries with families of prisoners. The children in our church knew the children there. They celebrated special events with them during the year. They put their time and their money into providing activities and gifts for those children. The children of our congregation had a great deal of investment in the children of that congregation and believed that they were making a difference in their lives. That sort of concrete model of discipleship can give our children strength and courage as they grow in their response to God.

Often when families make decisions about their commitments, they do not involve their children. When adults plan ways of giving their money to the church and to other causes, they rarely include their children in the process.  Somehow that is considered an arena for adults alone. Of course, we cannot involve our children in all decisions, but I believe that it is important to involve them as often as we can. Children need to practice this kind of decision-making with others so that they will be able to lead in the process as they grow. How will we decide about our financial commitments next year—about money that will be given to the church and to other organizations and persons who are working to bring God’s kingdom into reality? How much time will we give and where will we give it?

Our children need to answer these questions for themselves and with us. Perhaps we will make different decisions when the gifts and talents of the children are a part of the decision-making process. Is this a project that everyone in the family can support and participate in? Does everyone understand, at least on some level, why we are making this decision? Of course, the ability of the children to participate will vary with age, but even preschoolers can participate in some projects and can make some commitments of their own. Even a small allowance can be divided up and some of it can be given away. It is critical that we do not underestimate our children. To underestimate out them is to devalue them.

To be spiritual guides for our children is to take them seriously and to include them as partners with us and with God in the work of the kingdom.

by Jan Johnson

The volunteer coordinator at the inner-city rescue mission seemed stunned when I asked if my husband, two children, and I could serve at the “neighborhood picnic” on the Fourth of July after the Los Angeles riots several years ago. What could she do with an entire family? Finally, she decided we could join the college kids serving food.

As anyone might guess, our children, 11 and 12 years old at the time, worked harder that day than they had ever worked in our kitchen at home. They cleaned up spills and (gasp!) cooperated with each other. I didn’t growl when they accidentally splashed red punch on my white shirt. The four of us worked side by side, listening to guests’ stories.

Since we usually mix fun with service, we had planned to take them out for a treat, but something better happened. The kitchen workers sat Jeff and Janae on stools and gave them tubs of ice cream to enjoy. It was a memorable day in the life of our family.

Sometimes we wonder how we can help our children grow into compassionate people in a self-absorbed culture. One of the best ways to help kids act as the hands and feet of Christ is by encouraging them to join us in our volunteer efforts. Consider how, by our examples, we already show our children how to shop, relax, and eat fast food. Doesn’t it make sense that we would show them how to serve by serving alongside them?

But What Can Kids Do?

Here are some family-size opportunities to start with:

• Help with kids. Help a church in your town that has a latchkey program. You and your kids can do simple things such as serve refreshments.
• Serve a holiday dinner at a street mission. When our kids were preschoolers, our family served a Thanksgiving meal. The other volunteers not only didn’t mind, but they gave our kids small tasks to do.
• Bring a meal to a house-bound elderly person. You can do this through a program such as Meals-on-Wheels or by adopting a senior citizen in your church or neighborhood as a “grandparent.”
• Do construction or maintenance outdoor projects. Our family has joined a church-school group that was cleaning an elderly person’s yard. Another time, we joined a Habitat for Humanity chapter repairing a home. (Some chapters let you bring children under sixteen.)
• Visit a nursing home. Mary Price, a nurse and mother, prepared her children to do this by saying, “The nursing home will smell funny — like medicine and cleaning products. It will smell of urine, too, because many of the people can’t control bodily functions. When they need help with the bathroom, the workers can’t always get there fast enough.”
• Mary urged her children to pick out someone and try to talk to that person: “First, get down on their eye level so they don’t have to bend back in the wheelchair. That’s being respectful to them. Then introduce yourself. Even though they may not understand what’s going on, they still need people to love them.” Those words describe what family volunteering is about.

How to Make Family Volunteering Work

• Find activities that are within the capabilities of all family members, especially if you’re including preschoolers or grandparents. Or you may want to join another family in a project to make it more fun. How a family chooses to serve together will be as different as families are themselves.
• Pray for the people you’re going to serve with your children ahead of time. You could do that several times at a meal or bedtime before and after you serve. Let your kids see that your relationship with God motivates you to love others.
• When you visit a nursing home, homeless shelter, or soup kitchen, develop friendships. We don’t serve to simply “do good.” When we served dinner at a street mission, we always carved out time for our kids to play with kids from the mission’s neighborhood.When Sharon Elliot saw that she had clothes and toys her two sons had outgrown, she asked her pastor if any families might benefit from them more than others would. The pastor pointed her to a family in need, but Sharon decided to form a relationship with them. “When we took [the clothes and toys] to this family, the mom and I sat and talked. The kids played together.” Why didn’t Sharon just drop the stuff on the porch and leave? “If I were in need, I’d like for the person to be friendly. I’d like to meet someone who could identify with me.” What a great lesson to teach our kids!
• Jan Johnson is the author of Growing Compassionate Kids, from which this article is adapted.
• © 2001 by Jan Johnson. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission of Upper Room Books.