So with the shift from homeschooling to public school, family devotions have been challenging to fit in, I’ll admit. We tried getting everyone up early to have some “thoughts for the day” before school, but that would mean waking children up at five-something, which seems just sacrilegious in the first place.
We’ve opted, instead, to shoot for intentional time in the evenings around 7, with everyone pajama-ready and tooth-brushed and {hopefully} in better moods than we are finding them to be at 6:30 a.m. {Okay, okay, Matt and I are in better moods then, too.}
And the other evening Matt was waxing eloquent to the kids about courage and doing the right thing. We had just finished reading this story about some kid named Rob who took an arrow for King Henry, and then we had somehow rabbit-trailed into “why didn’t he just push the bad guy instead of getting shot, that was dumb,” and “do you always die when you get an arrow to the chest?” and “do you think he got some kind of reward?”
This is the stuff of family devotions with small children.
And then the discussion got really interesting as it morphed into a re-telling of Jesus’s interactions with the religious Pharisees and how angry he got at them. The conversation went a little like this:
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Daughter One: Jesus got mad, too.
Dad: Yes, he did get mad. At the religious people.
Mom: Yeah, the people who were talking big about following God but who really weren’t loving and who were really hurting people.
Dad: And so what did Jesus do when he got angry?
Daughter Two: He said, “You guys are all buttheads!”
Mom-Shock. Dad-Chuckle. Sibling-”Ohhhhh, she said a bad word”s.
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And I could blame it on school or the fact that she’s watching too much American television these days. I could claim that it’s just her firey little personality {she did tell me last year that “Jesus was gonna beat me up” if I didn’t do what she wanted} or I could admit that we have obviously failed at painting for her an accurate picture of the way Jesus interacted with people.
And all of these are probably partially true.
But the thing I love about kids, especially when I take the time to focus on spirituality with them, is that there is this simplistic honesty and clarity that I learn from the ways they see the world. They haven’t memorized the “right” Sunday School answers yet, and the knowledge they have of Jesus and his ways are framed in Children’s Bible illustrations and VeggieTales, the worship music I blast when I’m in a bad mood and the ways I ask for forgiveness for it later. And family devotions are shorter and more interruption-filled than I intend. There is usually a drink spilled, and at least one parental-thought of, “They are not getting any of this.” And, yes, there are the typical sibling squabbles about who gets to sit in the comfortable chair.
But it’s rich, too. And memorable. And maybe better than any church we could attend.
Because what other religious service would put “Jesus” and “buttheads” in the same sentence, would place little kids with great wisdom on the same couch?
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Do you/ How do you do family devotions? Have your kids said anything profound about faith or life lately?
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