Creating Thirst Thursdays

If you haven't been following Creating Thirst Thursdays, click here to read the inaugural post.  Here is a snippet of that post...

I recently heard a message that has profoundly changed my life!  We have all heard the saying  ” You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink.”     That is, unless you ” Salt the oats!”  What is it that you are doing to create thirst for your children?  Thirst for their Savior? Thirst for knowledge, Thirst for service?

That little quote has begun to reshape how I look at parenting.

 

Part of creating thirst in our children, include creating thirst for their family. In today's culture, many children grow up and want to high tail it out of their home, never looking back.

What are you doing to create thirst for family? Creating a desire to be around the family that the Lord has blessed them with?

When I first became a parent, I heard over and over, it's not the quantity of time you spend with your children, it is the quality of the time you spend with them.  Bah Humbug is what I say about that.

Don't our children deserve the best? They deserve our quantity and our quality time! What does that mean? How does that translate?

First, play with your children! You need to spend time with them. Not just simply exist with them! Take an evening, or an afternoon, every single week (or more) and just play... board games, sports, roller skating.... whatever it is your family enjoys together.

So many times we get so wrapped up in the busyness of our lives that we forget to actually take the time to enjoy each others company.. times where we can be silly, and tell stories, and make memories! Not expensive memories, but the most valuable memories!

The next thing you should do is serve with your children. Now, there should be an element of service to each other that happens within your own family, however, that is not what I am talking about. I mean to actually get out and serve others.  One way you can do that is by serving at your local church together as a family. Now, our family serves at our local church weekly. Several of our family members work in the children's ministries, while several also sing in the choir.

We also have opportunities at our church to serve together as a family. We serve together during several special events at the church that happen several times a year.  In addition, we as a family have had the opportunity to serve at a local Christian Camp that reaches out to children from the inner city. We worked for them during their winter camp. It was an amazing time. We have decided that this will be something that our family will be doing each year. We were able to serve side by side for a common purpose.

When we serve together as a family, as well as, consistently serve in our individual ministries we are working together for a common good. It helps to define what our family stands for, what we represent.

If you look at what we have covered so far, from last week and this week, we have learned that when creating thirst in your children, we need to bathe them in prayer, and pray with them, and we need to spend time with them, both working and playing!

Take some time this week and enjoy those children that God has blessed you with!