Raising a Family

When working for a ministry, one of the things that many people give to you when you have kids...is children's Bibles.
When your kids start getting older, one of the things that you struggle to figure out-is how to actually READ those Bibles and to help make them relate to your children's current reality.
This is not unique to those of us in full-time ministry-this is all of us who love Jesus.
However, we have been given a multitude of Bibles. I would say, in quantities above the average family.

And yet, we like most families have struggled over the years to make reading the Bible with our kids a habit.

When Matt and I went to the Marriage Conference in March, there was a section of the conference dedicated to "parenting" and it was facilitated by David and Kelli Pritchard. It was absolutely fantastic.

One piece of real encouragement that they gave us was to make reading the Bible together as a family a daily habit.
In their family, they read five Psalms and a Proverb every morning before school with their school aged kids.

In our family, our kids are close in age and one has just started school.
So we opted to try reading the Jesus StoryBook Bible daily before school.

Have you read this Bible?
We were gifted it several years ago by our friend Luke Davis and it has been one of the greatest gifts to our family that we have received.

It is written from the perspective that God has written in our hearts the greatest Love Story of all time and it mirrors many children's books of the princess waiting for her prince to come and rescue her. Every story in this Bible points to the prince who is never stopping, never giving up, always and forever love. I choke up nearly every time I read it.

The illustrations really grab my kids attention and the perspective is so much fun. In different stories, you have to change the way you read the book from horizontal to vertical, which makes the Bible much more interactive than a typical children's book, let alone a Bible.

We love this Bible. 

Reading it daily with our kids has been a real gift to us and our kids. 

Now every morning, they ask: Can we read the Bible before we go to school? 

YES. 

It has become a treasured time. 

My favorite encouragement from the Pritchards on this topic was this:

I asked if we need to explain the Bible or lead a Bible study type of time with our kids. It was stressing me out. 

Kelli answered:

Let the Holy Spirit do the work in your kids. Your job is to place Scripture inside their hearts. 

His job is melt their hearts for his purposes. 

It has taken such a load off our shoulders to feel like we need to do "family devotions" on a daily basis. 

Not our jobs. We love our kids and lead them to the Lord in Scripture showing them what we think is truly important. 

We make this a priority now. I love that. 

You can get the Jesus StoryBook Bible here.