Conversation Starters
A few ideas each week you can use at the table, in the car, or any time an opportunity comes along to talk with your kids about wisdom and God's Word.
Telling Time
The famous poem in Ecclesiastes 3 teaches big ideas about seasons. One is that our times are in God’s hands. He is the maker of time, and He controls what happens and when. Another is that our seasons are always changing. We can begin to help our kids learn the wisdom of recognizing their times.
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Shepherds First
Many families read the Christmas story from Luke 2:1-20 together sometime during their Christmas celebration. If you do, maybe a few of these questions about the shepherds and the angels will get your family talking about that wild night, the meaning of Jesus’ birth, and why God chose shepherds instead of politicians.
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Faith Like Mary
Our hope this week is to prod our kids to be inspired by—and to aspire after—Mary’s faith. We hold her up as a role model not because she was extraordinary (which she was) but because she was also a normal human teenager. We want our kids to catch that they, too, can trust God when it’s hard and be used by Him right now, often in unexpected ways.
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Big Grace
One of the challenges of parenting for Christians is that we want our kids to be as excited about God’s unbelievable grace and forgiveness as we are—but we still want them to perform. We pray they’ll be absolutely convinced that their place in God’s family (and ours) is not conditional on how well they follow Christ or obey us, but we still stress repeatedly and doggedly that their best option is to follow and obey. Paul could relate.
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Talk About Humility
How many naturally humble people do you know? The answer is “none.” Human beings don’t come in that flavor; we are instinctive self-promoters. Some of us may be more obvious in our arrogance, but no child is left behind when it comes to inborn sinful pride.
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Talk about Saying Thanks
Thanksgiving week is both the best and worst of times to try to teach kids about gratitude. It’s easy for all of us to tune out the message to “be thankful” when we hear it from every corner, even the secular ones urging us to buy more stuff and root for our favorite teams. But the conversation is still worth having, especially if you can break through the “Thanksgiving noise” in a creative way.
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When God Changes the Plan
Does your family live and die by a schedule or is constant, spontaneous change of direction the norm in your household? Neither approach to life is wrong, necessarily, but we want to help our kids to learn both wise planning and to be open to having our plans changed to reveal God’s agenda for our lives. That second scenario is the one we’ll be talking with them about this week.
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