I am away on vacation. While away, a couple of Compassion Bloggers have agreed to make guest posts on my blog! Enjopy and check out thier blogs for regular doses of awesomeness!
Summertime, Sum Sum Summertime!
Summertime, a wonderful time of year with a
gentler pace for many families. Away
from the schedules and demands of the school year there is time to explore and
experience different things together as a family and individually. The title of this post may bring a song to your mind, just know that I’ve
been humming that song for days. I guess
that is one way to come up with a title!
Sharing
purposeful times with our kids
Often in the summer, when my children were
younger, we would have “summer fun” camp and ministry related experiences that
just didn’t fit in the rigorous days of scheduled learning. The activities and experiences we planned
were based upon a couple of the goals we have as parents. We desire to inspire our children to
love God and men, to be lifelong learners, to be givers, to know this world
is bigger than our backyard, community, state, country, and continent. We also want to be intentional about
experiencing life together and making memories that will bring joy and give
direction in the future.
The summer camps often included local
cousins and always included the library reading program. Our local
library system has a wonderful summer program. Among other things, they give fantastic
prizes that include tickets to various activities and places in our town. With those tickets we discovered many
interesting places and enjoyed being tourists in our own community.
Pursuing
a lifestyle of lifelong learning and global awareness
As I said, often times our activities made
us tourists in our own town and got us outside.
Other times we had intentional opportunities to explore the world
outside our community. We sponsor
children through Compassion International and have a few international
missionary friends. One way I found to
expose my children and build relationships with those other places and cultures,
was to choose a particular geographical place and pick up a few books from the
library. If there were some interesting
videos, I would also pick those up. Then
we could choose recipes
from this list, and prepare a meal from that country or area. These countries and areas would usually be
related to our sponsor children. Doing
these things helped us to “know” these kids better and give us better
understanding of their lives.
Family
Ministry with Compassion International
Compassion International has various items
on their website to help parents in developing a global mindset, activities at
the Compassion Offices, aka the Global Ministry Center in Colorado Springs, as
well as publications that you can receive in your home.
One such publication and activity is Step into My Shoes. I only learned about Step into My Shoes last
summer, and since then have discovered much more about this fantastic opportunity. Last August, my youngest daughter and I had
the opportunity to participate in Step into My Shoes at the
Compassion Offices. The highlight of
this activity was definitely having a skype call with children at a Child
Development Center in Bolivia. My daughter got to take part in the
conversation and was able to ask and answer questions. While
we were able to participate in Colorado Springs with the program, the website
has a kit and other resources that you can order to do a Step into My Shoes
series of activities in your home or small group.
Learning, growing, exploring and
experiencing.
A
great way to spend summertime!
Michelle
Kelly blogs at byquietwaters.com. She is
a Jesus follower, wife to one, marme to many and nana to just one.
No comments:
Post a Comment