I told my kids that tonight. It’s been an exhausting month as we’ve been getting our house ready to put on the market. We had an open house this weekend, and I was tired and needed the kids to go to bed. Grumpy dad reared his head. I hate it when that happens.
Then I ran across this video on Ragamuffin Soul:
I know how he feels. All you can do is say sorry and hope to do better next time.
How about you? Do you feel like a horrible parent sometimes?
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A huge HT (hat tip) to Jared Kennedy for this resource for families!
The resource is called Let Your Kingdom Come: Preparing Your Hears for the King by Carri Garvey. It is a devotional guide for families to do during Holy Week beginning with Palm Sunday. There are daily readings and reflections as well as using the idea of the Advent Wreath and putting a little twist on it so that it becomes a Lenten Wreath. In addition to the readings, there are some suggestions on how you can learn and reflect as a family during all of Holy Week.
Jared found this resource from another site called Passionate Homemaking.
I’m definitely going to try this with my family.
Oh, by the way, did I mention that the guide is FREE! Yes! So go ahead and download it and tell parents you know about it!
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(photo originally uploaded to Flickr by sean drellinger)
I began this series entitled Passing on Faith over at Elemental Children’s Ministry and thought that it would be good to crosspost the series over here at Elemental Parenting. My senior pastor sent me a couple of articles that sparked the series on Passing on Faith. The first article is from The National Post, written by Brendan T.N. Caldwell who is a CEO of an investment management company.
Click here to read the article.
I thought the parallel of passing on a financial inheritance with the passing on of faith to be a really good picture. Caldwell talks about going from “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” In other words, the first generation works hard to earn financial stability, the second generation enjoys and lives off of that, and the inheritance is gone by the third generation who needs to roll up their sleeves and start over.
“When it comes to faith, our nation is somewhere between the second and third generation. We still enjoy the benefits of a society whose ethics are rooted in faith, but we have forgotten how we got here and we may soon need to rebuild again.”
I think the above quote hits the nail on the head. Now, we can look at that assessment and become discouraged by it, or we can look at that and head into the challenge of “starting over.” While this may not be what we want to do, it is what is put before us.
“In a society that has largely forgotten God, how do parents pass along a spiritual inheritance to their children?”
I think Caldwell states something that is key to answering the question he poses. He reminds parents that our children first and foremost belong to God. He wants to be their father as well as ours, and it is our job as parents to introduce our children to him. We do that by sharing our God stories with them. We need to connect our children with community beyond us who hold the same beliefs and values we do. We also need to stay faithful ourselves be an example of a follower of Christ that our children see from day-to-day.
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