Discipling my girl – sometimes I get it right and other times I don’t

I’m especially grateful for my Saturday mornings with Sophie. We are usually the first ones up so we head out to McDonald’s and grab our standard coffee & biscuit and cinnamon roll & sprite. After we eat we read a few books that Sophie has brought from home.

Our Saturday morning time is still evolving. I think that’s good – it needs to have room to change and grow. The past several months it has been mostly about reading fun books to each other. Recently, however, I have felt the Holy Spirit guiding this time more towards the spiritual. I’ve been looking into different girls devotional books and finally found one that is a great match for me and the Sophers. I love it because they are short devotionals with a little activity you can do at the end – activities that don’t require glue and glitter I might add! I am not a glitter Mom. My nerves don’t do glitter unlike my artist friend who is so chill about children experiencing art at the sparkliest.We did an art project recently and I’m still finding glitter in my kids scalps and on the church floor after vacuuming three times. So yeah, I like this craft-free devotional we’re doing. Such a spiritual reason to love a devotional book isn’t it?

Discipling, or training up our children to follow Christ, is what God calls us to as Christian parents – and it looks different for everyone. For me right now it involves Saturday mornings at McDonald’s. But that’s just one small strategic way. And it’s an important one because if we don’t plan it many times it won’t happen. But I’m realizing that for every strategic, planned moment of discipleship there are many more spontaneous discipleship moments throughout a day with our children.

Honestly, those are the ones I worry about.

You know what I mean – the one where the Grandma in front of you is driving 5.4 mph and you need her to burn some rubber because you’re late for church. You’d totally honk but you’re afraid she might be sitting in the pew in front of you in a few hours when she arrives.  Or how about when you’ve placed your order three times and it’s still not right. In that moment of unplanned discipleship do I roll my eyes and sigh with guttural disgust and say something about how incompetent people can be? (yeah, sometimes. Dangit I wish it wasn’t so.)

These are powerful moments of discipleship – they can be as powerful as the sit down and whip out your Bible devotional kind. What if in these spontaneous moments of training, patience and empathy was modeled instead of huffing and puffing? Or flat out kindness and a soft answer to the one who just dished out trash talk?

Because living out what we teach and preach is where it’s at friends. If all we do is speak of God’s love or sit down and read about God’s love or write about God’s love but don’t exhibit His love then all we are is a big brass resounding gong. The Bible tells us so.

So I pray that God will help me see where I am a resounding gong – where I talk more about spiritual things than actually live in them. I’ve never aspired to be the “gong” in a brass band, ya know what I mean? I’d much rather be an instrument of grace bringing melody (oh my word – that’s my name! cool) and harmony to the scene.

Discipleship – we’re doing it all day long whether we realize it or not.

Linking with Michelle, Finding Heaven, The Beauty in His Grip and The Wellspring.