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.

The No Excuses Challenge

King Saul could have been called the King of Excuses. From the time Samuel told Saul he would be king, almost until his death, Saul had an excuse for just about everything. He couldn’t be king because he was from the smallest clan in the smallest tribe. He sacrificed when he wasn’t supposed to because Samuel was taking too long to get there. He didn’t kill animals he was told by God to kill because he was saving them for sacrifices. And on and on. Saul had excuses for why he couldn’t do what God wanted him to do and excuses for why he disobeyed God.

Excuses are one of Satan’s best weapons. From Adam until today, we seem to think excuses will either get us out of doing something we don’t want to do or keep us from getting punished when we do something wrong. Reading the Bible though, gives us a picture of a God who is not fond of excuses (to put it mildly).

Continue reading The No Excuses Challenge

Service Project for Teens

Service Projects for Teens - Parenting Like Hannah Are you in a service rut with the teens in your family or youth group? It seems as if there is an unwritten rule stating all teen service projects must involve painting some portion of a building or doing yard-work. By relying on the same types of service projects over and over (often with only the locale changing), we are denying our teens an opportunity to explore how they can use some of their talents for God.

Recently, we had a few teen girls over to our house to work on a project. Going into this project, all of them claimed to have minimal artistic talent. Yet as you can see, the results were adorable. The girls were making these particular onsies for their youth minister’s new baby. This project would be great for the girls to do again and donate the finished products to shelters catering to mothers and infants who are abused or homeless.

Continue reading Service Project for Teens

Parents Waiting for God(ot)

Parents Waiting for God(to) - Parenting Like Hannah — Photo by Leticia Bertin

In college, I was supposed to write a review of the play Waiting for Godot. I am sure it was wonderful, but frankly at that age my only take away was that Godot was a metaphor for God. I was also pretty sure the waiting (and the play) would last forever. With my apologies to Samuel Beckett for panning his play, I think we may just be spending too much of our time in our own production of Waiting for God.

At some point in their lives, most people develop a sense of missed importance. Most of us in our heart of hearts know that given a chance we could win American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and/or be discovered at the Mall by a casting agent. We know we were meant for something more exciting, more important than the normal mundane lives we are living. We are even training our children that way. “You can be anything you want to be,” is spoken over and over again to children all over this country. So we all sit and wait for someone to discover the greatness within us and introduce us to the life we know we were meant to live.

Continue reading Parents Waiting for God(ot)

What Mary Poppins Can Teach Parents

One of my favorite movies is Mary Poppins. With all the sliding down banisters, jumping in chalk drawings, cleaning rooms with a snap of the fingers and tea parties on the ceiling, it is easy to entirely miss the point of the story. You see Mary Poppins isn’t really about Mary at all. It is about two parents who are so caught up in their own lives, they have almost forgotten they are raising two sweet, very lonely children. Sound familiar?

My heart breaks as I meet child after child desperate for some positive, meaningful interaction with an adult. Their parents are often delightful people and may even be faithful Christians. They are great parents by the world’s standards. Their children are well-dressed, clean, well-fed, educated and in a variety of societally approved activities. Yet, these wonderful parents are so busy with their careers, charity work, errands and even running the kids to various activities, that they barely know their precious little ones.

Continue reading What Mary Poppins Can Teach Parents

Asking Your Child For Forgiveness

For many parents, the concept of asking your child for forgiveness just sounds wrong. Why would you apologize to your child? Wouldn’t that give your child the upper hand? Or did I really mean the sarcastic “I’m sorry you don’t like it, but that’s the way it is”, faux apology?

One of the biggest building blocks of the Christian faith is forgiveness. Remember the parable of the servants who owed debts? One owed an unbelievable amount of money to his “boss”. He couldn’t repay it and his master was ready to throw him in prison. After much begging, the master not only relented, but forgave the man’s entire debt. So what did the servant do? He turned right around and threatened someone who owed him a very small amount of money with jail. In spite of the guy’s pleas, the servant was unrelenting. When the master discovered what had happened, he was furious.

Continue reading Asking Your Child For Forgiveness