Author: Thereasa Winnett

Thereasa Winnett is the founder of Teach One Reach One and blogger at Parenting Like Hannah. She holds a BA in education from the College of William and Mary. She has served in all areas of ministry to children and teens for more than thirty years and regularly leads workshops for ministries and churches. She has conducted numerous workshops, including sessions at Points of Light’s National Conference on Volunteering and Service, the National Urban Ministry Conference, Pepperdine Bible Lectures, and Lipscomb’s Summer Celebration. Thereasa lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband Greg, where she enjoys reading, knitting, traveling and cooking.

Vacations and God

We are in the middle of a school break. Many of our friends are out of town. We stayed behind only because we leave town on a big mission trip in a few weeks. Vacations are a great way of connecting with the people who are important to us. Often we are able to see many of God’s wonders of creation as we explore the world on our travels. I even enjoy seeing the talents God has given people displayed in artwork and architecture.

I also know vacation is a time when many of us also take a vacation from God. We run around to the point of exhaustion. We are too tired to pray or think of mentioning the connection between God and the things we are seeing to our children. If we are away on a Sunday, it seems silly to waste valuable vacation time at a congregation we picked blindly out of a telephone book.

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Teaching Hospitality

I love the story of Abraham entertaining angels in the Bible. As a child, I was fascinated by the idea you could invite strangers into your home for a meal and find out they were angels. Unfortunately, entertaining is quickly becoming another casualty of our busy lives. Our children are not learning how to show hospitality to others. Having people in our homes is not necessarily high on our lists of things we attempt to accomplish as we pursue a Christian lifestyle. Hospitality to others is so important to God though, He makes the practice of it one of the qualifications for being an elder.

Children learn so much when they grow up in a family where hospitality is practiced regularly. They learn how to make “outsiders” to their family feel as if they are a part of the family. Hopefully, they begin to realize entertaining is not about how nice your home is or how good the food tastes, but it is about the interaction between the hosts and the guests. Practical skills are also learned. By entertaining, I have learned how to make a large group of very different people feel comfortable together, how to cook for a lot of people with little hassle and how to entertain with little or no money or space. (We had a full Thanksgiving one year in New York City for 15 people in 250 square feet!)

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Family Devotional Time

If you ask Christian parents one thing they wish they had done with their children, the answer for many would be family devotionals. The idea of your family sitting around the fire reading and sharing from God’s words seems like the ideal of the godly family.

Our lives are filled with obligations, extra curricular activities and church ministries. We are often hard pressed to find the time to eat together. Work and sleep schedules may mean your child doesn’t even see a parent for a day or so because she is sleeping when the parent leaves and returns from the office. Honestly some weeks are so hectic in our house, I feel we have accomplished something spiritual if we are able to find our Bibles in time to take them to church! The idea of a family devotional time seems to be an unrealistic goal left over from a time when life was slower.

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Lunchbox and Pillow Notes

Strange as it may seem, I believe part of the ability to dedicate your child to God springs from having a close relationship with her. The scriptures don’t tell us much about the short time Samuel lived with Hannah at home. I imagine Hannah treasured the time with Samuel and showered him with her love. I often wonder about the conversations they must have had each year when she visited him. What did she say to him about her love for him? What wisdom did she try to leave with him in those few days each year?

We are blessed with having our children live in our homes for several years. If you have been a parent for more than a few weeks, you already have a sense of how quickly the time with your child passes. As your child grows older, you feel a greater urgency to teach him everything you want him to know before he goes into the world. Unfortunately, this is also often the period of time when your child may want to shy away from what he considers a “mushy” conversation.

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Teaching Stewardship

When our daughter was about to turn four, she begin to notice you could buy things if you had money. We decided having an allowance was a great way to teach lessons on stewardship and giving. (There are a lot of different theories on allowances. Our personal take was that since we are a single income household, everyone shares the money “daddy” brings home.)

At the time banks were not popular, so I had to search high and low for three banks and a “church coin purse” that looked very different. On her birthday, we explained that since she was now a big girl she would begin receiving a weekly allowance. To make the math easier on everyone, we gave her four dimes a week. Each of the banks was labeled with how the money in that bank could be spent. She had one for church, one to buy presents for family, one to save for college and one she could spend as she pleased. One dime each week was to go in to each bank.

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