Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Deuteronomy 6:4-9
One of the things I love about the children’s ministry curriculum we use at Northstar, called Orange, is that it understands parents spend most of their time with their children, rather than their children spending most of their time at church. In Deuteronomy 6 Moses tells God’s people that they are to love the Lord their God with all their heart, with all their soul and with all their strength. They are also to impress this on their children. Then he gives practical examples: when you sit at home (talk about God) when you walk along the road, or in our case when we drive in our cars (talk about God) when you go to bed (talk about God) when you wake up (talk about God). These commands aren’t meant to be a legalistic check box, but rather a way of life. Finding God in every day life and sharing that with our children.
I have found that “walking along the road” or drive time can offer some of the best times for conversations with my daughter.
Our curriculum offers ideas of ways you can talk to your kids about God during drive time and what they are learning at church in our monthly parent cue. The parent cue is sent out by email each month in our newsletter, and before Covid, handed out at church as well. These ideas are great to have on hand for intentional conversation. But often, some of the best conversations are when you least expect them.
One day my daughter and I were driving and a song came on that she really liked called Locked Away, by R. City. We had listened to this song multiple times. I know that most of the time she doesn’t understand all the lyrics to songs and just likes the way it sounds, but this time she had a question. One of the lyrics is “If I showed you my flaws, if I couldn’t be strong, tell me honestly would you still love me the same?” She asked, “Mom, what are flaws?” For some reason the innocence of that question combined with the knowledge of all the ways I struggled with my flaws as a young woman and even now, hurt my heart for her. If you’re a mom maybe you can relate, in the span of 5 seconds I thought about all the ways my daughter would also struggle with her flaws as a girl, a teenager and later in life and began to worry. I know, crazy. But then the Spirit hit me. Tell her about flaws. Tell her that we all have them, no one is perfect. Tell her about how Christ sees us as flawless if we believe in Him and will always love us, flaws and all.
I want to reiterate, this thought was the work of the Spirit, not my own. So we did talk about flaws and we did talk about how Jesus died for all of our flaws and that if we believe in Him we are seen as flawless in God’s eyes. There is nothing we can do to make Him stop loving us. I think this was a lesson for my daughter but also a great reminder for me.
Drive time can be a sweet, intentional, relaxed environment to talk about Truth.
Our kids are bombarded with false messages from the world daily. Often we don’t even notice or we are too consumed believing the same lies ourselves. Use your drive time to remind them of who they are and WHOSE they are in Jesus. It won’t be time wasted.