Howdy and welcome back to Beyond the Pew! Last week, Jennifer started us off in 2017 talking about the importance of praying before meals. Today, I want to check in on your  New Year’s Resolutions to see how they’re going! You and I both know that this is about the time gyms go from being packed to having very few people. So I just want to encourage you that with whatever resolutions you decided on, keep up! If you have already kind of fallen off, just pick yourself back up and keep those going! Also, if you started praying before meals as Jennifer suggested last week, keep doing that.

I want to talk about one other idea to kickstart your January, moving into the rest of the school year. One thing that was very impactful for me growing up was on the way to school. Me, my two sisters, sometimes we had neighbors that would carpool with us, my Mom would always have us read a daily devotional on the way in the car. We could keep it in the car for each morning. We would take turns reading- my Mom wouldn’t take a turn because she was driving and that’s obviously dangerous. But I would take a turn, my sister would take a turn, my neighbor would take a turn, so every day as we’re driving to our different schools we would just read the simple one to two minute daily devotional.

…here I am talking about it 12 years later saying how impactful it was on my life.

Being in junior high at the time, I would often roll my eyes at it. I would think it was dumb, but here I am talking about it 12 years later saying how impactful it was on my life. To start off my day personally in prayer, turning my heart and mind towards God before I went to school. In the hectic mornings of getting ready for school, it was great being able to stop, pray, and hear what God had to say to me. 

We also did this as a family and it was something that brought us together. It was something my mom did as part of her role of leading the family in prayer. I just want to encourage you to try something like that. If you don’t have a devotional book, maybe just start by saying the Our Father in the car all together as your family is on the way to school, or church, or wherever you’re traveling to on the weekends.

There are a couple of great books to do this with, one of my favorites is called Jesus Calling. If you miss a day, just pick up right where you left off. If you Google “devotionals for kids” or “devotionals for youth” it can be fun to look through with your kids and pick one together.

Here are three that we recommend:

I hope this is helpful for you guys and I just want to continue to encourage you to lead your family and your young people closer to Christ. Utilize the time you already have like in your car and before meals!

Until next time, this is Beyond the Pew!