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.
Responding to Sadness
We know days or even seasons of sadness can be par for all of us, but that doesn’t make it easier to watch our kids struggle with loneliness or depression or “the blues.” And those kinds of feelings are a lot more common this time of year—maybe especially this year.
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More about Grace
If your child has grown up in a Christian home and church, he or she has probably heard all about the grace of God repeatedly. But especially for kids—whose lives are dominated by behavior and performance and reward and consequence—we just can’t talk enough about God’s free gift of love and acceptance and eternal life.
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Jesus Above All
During Christmastime, our kids hear a lot about Jesus being the reason for the season. Now that Christmas is winding down, we want to say again that Jesus is the reason for every season, not just the holidays. All of life is His story.
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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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