Sunday, March 28, 2010

Parental Legacy Tip #1

Parental Legacy Tip #1
Rev. James T. Allerton

I recently took on the challenge of leading the Kid's Club at our local Congregation. As a part of this role, I thought I would throw out some tips, thoughts, insights, struggles and the like on building a spiritual legacy for our children. About once a week I will post a Parental Legacy Tip for the parents of the Club Mac kids. The rest of you that read my posts regularly are welcome along for this added on ride.

This week, I gave the kids some bibles from my collection of give away bibles. Some of the kids were pretty excited, wondering how you find some of the stories we have talked about, if they could write in the bible and why there were so many psalms. Afterward, one of the parents told me that they would encourage their children to read them. Then, I began to think about how they would go about doing that.

One of the best ways I have found to get children interested in being interested in the things that they should develop an interest in is to let them see us having an interest in it. If we tell them they they need to be reading their bible, but they see that we always put it aside for other pursuits, then it will be meaningless to them. The same is true for other things.

Yes, we will still have to make them do the things they ought to be doing. We still have to send Ethan off to read his bible lessons before he can do other things. But, his interest is growing because he see us interested in this too.

You may not see results immediately in their lives, but we are going for a long term legacy. It will happen.

Hope this helps in some small way.

1 comment:

curumba said...

I think a lot of it is about making time so that reading the Bible is not a rushed thing done badly, but something that can be done in a relaxing way with plenty of time for discussion. That way, they start wondering about all the other people that come up in the discussion and want to find out more.