05-14-17 Mother's Day: What's Your Role?

Before I forget, let me retroactively wish all of you reading this a Happy Mother’s Day!  As we do every year, we turned the Mother’s Day service over to our Youth Group, who all did a wonderful job.  Alex and Dakota joined the Worship Team, Dougie and Arielle greeted people, Joe shared the prayer, the rest of the Youth Group took up the offering, etc.

We also spent time praying for our Haiti Missions Team.  They will be heading out first thing (as in the crack of dawn) next Sunday morning, and we wanted to make sure that we commissioned them in prayer as a church family.  But please spend time every day over the next two weeks praying for the members of the team -- pray that they prepare well this coming week and get off safely, pray that they minister well and serve well and stay safe during their time in Haiti, and pray that they travel back safely and without hiccups on Memorial Day.  We look forward to hearing how God uses them to minister to others.

Youth Director Sara Diemer shared the message this week (which struck several of us as odd this time around -- how come a Mom delivers the Mother’s Day message while a Dad delivers the Father’s Day message each year?), and she spoke about the importance of living out our roles as parents to raise children up in the Lord.

She shared that 70% of churched teens in America fall away from their faith during their college years... but then shared how that number changes significantly when parents have invested in really living out their faith in their homes as a family.  Let’s be honest -- there are only 168 hours in a week, and kids’ church involvement only takes up about 5 of those.  Sleep takes up another 50+ hours, school takes up another 37-40, extra-curriculars another 10-15... leaving roughly 60 hours of personal time to really build the people whom our children are growing up into.  How many of those 60 hours are spent with their family?  And how much of that time is spent interacting with our faith as a family?

As Sara shared, God created men and women to work in tandem with one another as parents -- a team effort of different roles, consciously lived out in different but complementary ways.  That can and should include direct things like family devotions, etc., but it can also be a simple as making sure that conversations, decisions, and daily actions actively and consciously honor the Lord. 

So as parents -- or even as a whole church family, since this is never just about parents -- how can we actively and consciously invest those 60 crucial hours of children’s lives with a significant, personal, and consciously Christian presence?