Gardening, Kids and God

Gardening is a great way to teach kids many of the lessons God wants them to learn. In fact, Jesus taught several parables that involved growing things and taking care of vineyards and fields.

You can use those same parables and a few easy to find items to teach your kids about God. Gardening can also teach your kids about growth, God’s creation, patience, sin, love, nurturing, service and more.

The problem is that in today’s world, gardening is often too big of a commitment for many people. The idea of plowing, planting, weeding and processing a large plot of land seems overwhelming. Or perhaps your finances won’t cover the expenses of a large garden.

The great news is that you can plant incredibly small gardens – even in major urban areas – and teach your kids lessons. You can even use things you have on hand and the kitchen scraps you toss in the trash. We have found some great gardening resources so you can garden with your kids and teach them about God as you work.

  • Container gardening. Container gardening allows you to grow a few plants in almost any type of container. I had trouble getting extra pots earlier this spring so I am using a couple of beach sand pails to grow garlic and cucumbers. Just make sure the containers you use aren’t metal as they will become too hot later this summer. Here’s a link for more specifics on container gardening
  • Gardening with kitchen scraps. Did you know much of what we throw away when cooking can be planted to grow more food for free? I’m currently growing bulbs of garlic from small segments of one bulb. Not everything works because of hybrids in our food chain, but this list will get you started.
  • Gardening inside. If you live in a ninth floor apartment, you may think it’s impossible to grow food. Surprisingly, there are quite a few foods you can grow if you have a sunny window or can invest in lighting. This list can get you started.
  • Hydroponic gardening. If you want to try something really different, consider hydroponic gardening. This particular website has lots of different designs, from simple to elaborate. (Note: This would perhaps tie in well to discussions of Bible stories involving water.)
  • Aquaponic gardening. If you want to really get creative, grow food and introduce Bible stories about fish, aquaponic gardening might be for you. Fair warning, this type of gardening appears rather intense, but would definitely be memorable. This article can give you the basics if you are interested.

So grab some supplies, a Bible and your kids and start growing things. It’s a great summer activity that will also help teach your kids about God.

This Week’s Christian Parenting Challenges

Social media outlets are limiting access to more and more posts from non-profits like Parenting Like Hannah. We don’t want you to miss our daily Christian parenting challenges and their tips and encouragement.

We have decided for now, we will re-post the challenges for the previous week each Friday. You may want to tackle them during the weekend or post them on your refrigerator and using them for ideas in the coming week.

To make it easier for you, we have listed them by the original date they posted, but you can use them on different days or do several in one day – whatever works best for you. (The content is copied directly from our social media posts, so some of the wording may appear a little out of context.) We are hoping delivering the challenges to your email in a printable format will give you a helpful, new resource to use in parenting your kids towards God.

Monday: There have been a lot of things about our COVID world that are frustrating. Sometimes frustration can lead to unhealthy choices…even sinful ones. If you or your spouse is struggling with substance use/abuse, abusing your children physically or emotionally, experiencing depression/anxiety/suicidal thoughts, or you are having severe marital issues or anything else harmful or frightening…please reach out for help. People in ministry can still be reached by DM, email or phone. Don’t suffer in silence. Get the help you need now. If the first person you ask doesn’t respond, keep asking until someone does. You are not meant to handle this alone. God gave us the Church in part for community to help in stressful situations. Reach out to your church family for the help you need.

Tuesday: Your summer plans for your kids may have been changed, but to what? What can you do this summer to help your kids achieve your number one priority for them – spiritual growth? If that isn’t your top priority or you aren’t sure how to help them grow spiritually, we can help. Search past blog posts or go to our main ministry website www.teachonereachone.org for ideas.

Wednesday: Did you realize you probably aren’t seeing everything we post on Facebook to help you? If you go to our website and sign up for the newsletter you will receive no more than four emails a week from us – three new blog posts with tips, ideas and encouragement…and starting this week, a summary of our daily parenting challenges you can use each day in the coming week to give you a daily Christian parenting boost. So head to pwww.parentinglikehannah.com and sign up today!

Thursday: This container has all the ingredients for a wonderful pasta dinner. What, however, are the ingredients of a strong faith foundation for your kids? Check our blog this afternoon for some important basics. In the meantime, feel free to share what you think are some important things kids need for a strong faith foundation in a comment below.

Friday: We live in a world that loves to keep us anxious. Teach your kids how to manage their anxiety through scripture, prayer and godly pursuits like hobbies and exercise. If not, they may turn to less healthy or godly ways to manage their fears.

Is Your Child Being Bullied by Our Culture?

I was in an online Bible study the other day where we were discussing how culture is impacting Christianity. One woman spoke up. “Our culture is a bully. It bullies Christians for their beliefs.” While I am not in favor of developing a victim mentality, she is right. When you compare the tactics a bully uses and how Christians are often treated when they share their beliefs and God’s commands, the resemblance is striking.

If your kids believe in God and attempt to obey all of His commands, they will be different from their peers – even sadly many of their Christian peers. God calls His people to live a life so different from the surrounding culture that they stand out. In many cases, this will cause people unfamiliar with God’s culture to ask questions. Hopefully, some of these questioners will become Christians themselves.

Unfortunately, even churches and ministers have crumbled under the bullying. They have allowed the culture’s name calling and emotional reactions to influence how they read the Bible. They would rather find a way to reject God’s direct commands in order to better blend in with the culture and stop the bullying than stand up to it.

Your kids are going to make a choice to blend with the culture around them unless you prepare them to stand up to its bullying. What everyone seems to have forgotten is that a bully only has as much power over your choices as you give them. You can teach your kids how not to give culture’s bullies power over their lives and choices.

Here are a few ways to prepare your kids to stand up to culture’s bullying successfully.

  • Help them develop a confident faith. Young people who have really strong spiritual foundations are more confident in standing up to culture and being counter cultural. This will take a lot of work on your part. Your kids need to really know what’s in the Bible, who God wants them to be and how to do those things God wants them to do. They need training in apologetics and logical fallacies. They will be battling a cultural Goliath and just like David, they need to spend their younger years developing the skills they will need to be confident to follow God’s will for their lives.
  • They need strong connections to people of different ages in their church family. They need to find those one or two teens that are also being raised to defy culture. They need older Christians they love and trust enough to listen to their counsel or to be reassured by when being strong feels impossible. They need to be around examples of people really living their faith on a regular basis. They need godly friends when the loneliness of being different is painful. This goes beyond even regular church attendance. Bring that valuable hospitality in your home and regularly have people from your church family over post COVID so your kids really think of them as family.
  • Prepare your kids to speak up. Your kids need to be able to defend their faith with love and patience, but firmly enough that the culture’s bullies walk away when their only intent is to harass. Once again, this means knowing the Bible well, becoming familiar with effective apologetics and lots of practice conversations in your home. They also need to learn self control. Lashing back when bullied only strengthens the bully who is looking for an emotional response. Staying calm and clear will discourage many bullies from continuing to pursue.
  • Teach your kids when to disengage. Jesus told his disciples there are times when they needed to just dust off their sandals and move on. Your kids don’t need to waste their time and energy on debating people who are entrenched in their support of culture over God. There are plenty of people who are open to learning about a way of life that is fuller and richer than the shallow pleasures of culture. Your kids need to learn when to engage and when just to walk away from the ugly challenges culture likes to throw at Christians.
  • Teach your kids strategies for responding quickly and consistently to cultural challenges. Having predetermined strategies for handling common scenarios will help your children quickly and consistently handle temptations to join culture in ways that go against God. Helping them set limits of how they allow themselves to be exposed to culture can keep them from gradually being won over by it. Encouraging them to have a standard response to certain challenges will make it easier for them to think on their feet when confronted.
  • Teach your kids to STOP. When your kids are confronted by something in culture that confuses them, teach them to remember to stop. Stop is an acronym for stop, think about what culture is actually saying to them or asking them to do, consider all of their options, pray about it and then make a choice. Taking that extra time can help your kids remove themselves from the heat of the moment emotionally and lead them to make better choices.
  • Tell your kids it’s okay to ask for help. Young children are often told not to tattle. Teach your kids there is a huge difference from telling an adult something silly merely designed to cause trouble for someone else and asking for help from someone who can help them or someone else be more godly and avoid temptation. Your kids need to feel safe coming to you and expressing their emotions, experiences and more without fear of an over reaction from you. Often if they could come tell you when the bullying first starts, you can give them the help they need. If they don’t tell anyone who can help them navigate the bullying, they may give into the culture’s bullies like many of their peers have done.

Preparing your kids to stand up to culture’s bullies is essential if you want them to become faithful, productive Christians. It is hard work, but it’s work you really must do to protect your kids.

Tips for Raising Resilient Christians

How resilient are your kids? If you aren’t sure, their reaction to the COVID situation may give you a clue – even for very young children. There’s a myth of sorts about resiliency…that all kids are naturally resilient and the things that may upset adults barely make an impression on our children.

In some ways it can be true, but resiliency is something that is a combination of the personality God gave your child and various environmental factors. It can also be a bit deceptive. You would think a child protected from all problems in life…who always gets his or her way…would be super resilient, because he or she has not built up a litany of disappointments.

Unfortunately, that environment can produce a less resilient child. The child living in a seemingly perfect world has never had to learn how to recover from setbacks and disappointments. They have developed few coping mechanisms…particularly godly ones. This often entitled child, may fall apart at the first sign of lack of perfection in life, instead of rising to meet its challenges.

We’re not saying you should invent difficulties for your kids to endure in order to “toughen them up”. Nor do we suggest sharing information with children that they are too young to process appropriately.

What we are saying is that there are things you can do as a parent to help your kids develop resiliency. This is especially important for Christian kids as they will have negative experiences when the godly choices they make don’t align in a culture that often rejects God’s commands.

Here are some ways to prepare your kids to be resilient when COVID or any other crisis or problem arises.

  • Teach them lots of Bible stories and discuss what God wants them to learn from each story. Ever wonder why God put so many stories in the Bible instead of just printing off a list of rules for us? It’s because stories help people better understand and more importantly remember important things. The more Bible stories and principles within them you teach your kids, the more helpful information they will have from God to help them navigate anything life throws at them.
  • Teach them the power of prayer. Prayer at its core is about having a conversation with God. Your kids need a lot of real life experience with how God answers prayers. They need to understand God can do anything that is in His will – regardless of how impossible it may seem to us. They also need to understand how much God loves them and wants to listen to them. If there is ever a situation where your kids feel isolated, knowing they have God there with them can change everything and make them much more resilient.
  • Have an openly loving relationship with your kids. Tell them you love them. Hug them. Listen to them – actively listen to what they have to say – especially if they are sharing their emotions or how they are processing the stressful event.
  • Teach them God has a plan for their lives and God’s timing is perfect and part of that plan. This is an abstract concept young children may have difficulty fully understanding. It’s important though to keep repeating the concepts. We can’t always understand God’s decisions or His timing – although many times looking back, we can clearly see what happened and why. The important thing is to help your kids learn to trust God has their best interests at heart. Of course, if you consistently model having your kids’ best interests at heart, it will be easier for them to trust God does.
  • Teach your kids their true hope lies with God and spending eternity with Him in Heaven. Read scriptures that talk about hope, faith and God’s promises. Tell them about times in your life when you leaned on God in tough times and how it helped. Show them how being a Christian in a stressful circumstance is so very different from not being a Christian when life is difficult.
  • Recognize each child may process stressful events in different ways and they should not be mocked for their reactions. Obviously, you want to correct any misbehavior that may be part of their reaction. It’s rarely if ever helpful though, to tell someone they are over or under reacting in a particular situation. Most of the time, those types of comments are just adding more pain to the situation.
  • Don’t let them get stuck in a negative emotional state for long periods of time. Obviously stressful situations can cause sadness, despair, anger and other negative emotions. Unfortunately, if our minds stay in one emotional state for too long, it can become very difficult for the brain to change to another emotional state. You don’t want to rush their mourning or keep them from crying the tears that will help them heal. You do, however, need to try and give them emotional breaks from time to time. You can even say something like, “Let’s take a worry break for a few minutes and go watch this funny movie”, or whatever your strategy is to temporarily change their emotional state. If your child seems unable to switch emotional states for a couple of weeks, it’s probably best to call the pediatrician for advice.
  • Have schedules, routines and boundaries that are enforced. Children are reassured by schedules, routines and even boundaries and rules that are consistently enforced. Now, they won’t admit they enjoy having a bedtime or a limit on screen time…but in their heart of hearts, those things give them a feeling that someone who cares about them has things under control and everything will be okay.
  • Give them meaningful things to do. Never ending free time sounds good, but it’s not in your kids’ best interest. They need productive things to do like school work, learning something fun, doing crafts, playing an instrument, doing chores and serving others. Give them a role to play that contributes to everyone successfully navigating the stressful event, helps kids feel useful and productive…which in turn helps them understand they can contribute to the solution of a problem in at least some way. Keeping them busy will also keep their minds engaged in something other than the stressful event.

Becoming truly resilient is a process. Some personality types will be naturally more resilient than others, but teaching your kids these strategies will help them develop the resiliency Christians need to have to not only survive but thrive and produce fruit for God.

At Home Family Easter Activity

Every year about this time, I like to share one of our Easter family traditions with other parents. Even though we celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus every week, it doesn’t hurt to take advantage of an occasion like Easter to reinforce important Bible lessons. (Likewise, you can do this activity with your kids any time – not just on Easter.)

(Since most of us have limited access to stores at the moment, this is posting earlier than normal to give you time to find egg whites or other ingredients you may need.)

Resurrection Cookies are a great way to review the story of Jesus’ death with your children. I got the recipe from one of my neighbors years ago and suspect it is one of those that has been passed around all over the country. I would love to credit the creator, but have no idea who that would be.

You will need a Bible, preferably an NIrV version for younger children. Preheat the oven to 300* and make sure it has reached 300* before you start cooking. Your bowl and beaters need to be grease free for this to work well. We have used pasteurized eggs (or the boxed egg whites) and they work fine, although it is more difficult to keep the yolk out of the whites. It is best to do this right before the children go to bed, but aren’t so sleepy they won’t enjoy it. It can take up to thirty minutes at night and about five or ten minutes the next morning.

For ingredients you will need: 1 cup of whole pecans, 1 teaspoon of vinegar (apple cider vinegar), 2 egg whites, 1 cup sugar and a pinch of salt. I am numbering each step with its scripture to make the recipe easier to follow with your children.

1. Read John 19:1-3. Place the pecans in a large baggie and seal it. As your children beat the pecans with a rolling pin, discuss how Jesus was beaten by the soldiers after his arrest.

2. Read John 19:28-30. Allow the children to smell the vinegar and taste it if they are brave enough! As the vinegar is placed in the bowl explain that when Jesus got thirsty on the cross and asked for something to drink, he was given vinegar.

3. Read John 10:10-11. Add egg whites to the vinegar. Explain to your children that eggs represent life. Discuss how by Jesus giving his life up on the cross, he gave us the hope of eternal life.

4. Read Luke 23:27. Sprinkle a little salt in each child’s hand. Let them taste it. Put a pinch in the bowl. The salt represents the tears of those who loved Jesus when they realized he was dead.

5. Read Psalm 34:8 and John 3:16. Add the sugar. Tell your children that the sweetest part of the story is that Jesus died because he loves us. He wants us to become Christians and spend eternity with him in Heaven.

6. Read John 3:1-3. Beat the mixture on high (stand mixers work best) for 12-15 minutes until stiff peaks are formed (when you turn off the mixer and lift the beaters it leaves stiff little mountain tops). Discuss with your children how the color white stands for purity. Jesus’ blood allows us the chance to be cleansed of our sins and be pure again.

7. Read Matthew 27:57-60. Fold in the pecans. (Optional ingredient, but still drop the mixture as indicated.) Drop the mixture by teaspoonfuls onto a parchment covered cookie sheet. Explain to your child that each mound represents the tomb where Jesus was laid.

8. Read Matthew 27:65-66. Put the cookie sheet in the oven, close the door and turn the oven OFF. Let each child place a piece of tape on the oven door (or roll a large rock in front of it!). Explain how the soldiers sealed the tomb of Jesus.

9. Read John 16:20 and 22. As you send your children to bed, explain you know they may feel sad about leaving the cookies in the oven over night. Ask them if they can imagine how sad the followers of Jesus must have been when Jesus was sealed in the tomb.

10. Read Matthew 28:1-9. When your children wake up the next morning, allow them to open the oven and take out the cookies. Have them break open the cookie and see the empty air pocket. Remind them how surprised and excited the followers of Jesus must have been on that first Sunday morning after the cross when they found the empty tomb and realized Jesus was alive.

This is a fun reminder of the resurrection for any time of the year or you can make it an annual tradition. The goal is to create a memorable experience that will place the story of Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection firmly in the minds and hearts of your children.