FAMILY PROVERBS READING CHALLENGE
“Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”
It’s May 1! April was a milestone month in our home. Our oldest turned 16 and our youngest turned 13. And this momma made it without a major meltdown! April, with all its allergies (y’all, Arkansas pollen….) and the new season it brought for our family, has me happy to see May.
Life has become even more crazy than normal, with one child now driving and having a job, baseball season for our other son and having our foster little. Tim and I have been working through how to transition our family devotion time to better fit this new season in the life of our family. We want to continue to be intentional with teaching our kids in this new stage of parenting, but let’s be real-life is just busy. Instead of trying to force and end up frustrated and feel like a failure, we are attempting an entirely new approach to our family devotion time. It’s just not reality for us to sit down daily, some weeks even weekly.
For several years, I’ve personally used May to read a chapter from Proverbs each of the 31 days. It’s convicting and grounding. And I want my kids chasing after the wisdom it provides. The solution we’ve come up with for our family bible study is that we individually commit to read a chapter a day from Proverbs in May, then group text each day about the chapter we read, a favorite verse, something God taught us or something we need to obey. It’s simple. It’s doable. It keeps us accountable and connected. It gives our teenagers an equal role as us in our family study of God’s Word. I’ll let you know how this goes!
If you are in the same season of teen parenting, I encourage you to pray through how you can transition into a coaching role. For their younger years, we sat and read and taught. With this new season, the approach we began about a year ago was to take on more of a mentoring role, asking them the following questions:
- What is God teaching you?
- How are you struggling/obeying with what you are learning?
- How can we pray for you?
No, we are not as consistent as we should be with asking these questions and no our kids are not always in the Word as they should be. Yet, this does allow conversation, teaching moments and a glimpse into their world and struggles. It allows them to safely but independently work through their faith and their fears and their failures.
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