How well do your kids know themselves? Do they know their strengths? How about their weaknesses? Do they know what makes them sad? Do they know if God has given them a passion to serve Him in some specific area? Do they know their heart’s desire? Do they know if their heart is turned towards God or away from Him? Do they have their own faith in God or is it just something they do to please you?
The answers to all of those important questions and more are in your child’s heart. Your children need to be encouraged to spend the time and take the effort to figure out what exactly is in their hearts and whether or not it is what God wants them to have there. To know their own hearts, they have to be able to think, dream and pray. They have to have undistracted time to ponder, reflect and read the Bible. They have to have time where nothing more is required of their brain than finding out what is truly written on their hearts.
Unfortunately, if your kids are like most today, there is no such time in their lives. Their days are filled with school, sports and other extra curricular activities. Even their youth groups probably have them participating in one activity after another. Any down time they do have is filled with screens and noise. Lots and lots of noise.
Have you ever bought an item for years and then the company suddenly repackaged it? Often it’s because the company wants consumers to view their product differently. They know they can often change the way a product is packaged and consumers will view the product differently – even if the product itself has not changed at all.
If your child has entered the school years, you are probably well aware how much attention teachers give to reading and reading comprehension. Your family has probably been encouraged to listen to your child read, ask questions and probably even enrolled your child in some sort of reading incentive program to encourage your child to practice reading on a regular basis.
Someone has taken the concept of idle hands being the devil’s workshop and decided children and teens should not have a spare moment of unscheduled time. Schools are pressured to give lots of homework and keep kids at the building for as many hours as possible. Extra curricular activities often demand young people practice or perform six to seven days a week – all year. We run our kids from activity to activity, coming home in time for them to do homework and get inadequate amounts of sleep. If our kids do have a rare free moment, all they have the energy to do is zone out in front of a screen – watching videos or playing games.
I am a firm believer Christian kids should learn about the Jewish holidays in the Old Testament. In part, because they give kids a better understanding of the culture of the people in Bible times. More importantly, these holidays remind us how much God has done for us and how these holidays all point to Jesus.