Faith Archives • Page 2 of 2 • The Foster Parenthood

Teaching your Children to Pray

July 16, 2015 by Roxanne

We want our children’s experience of life to be better and more rich with meaning than ours. That’s not to say our lives as children were bad necessarily, it’s simply that every parent’s desire is to offer more to their children than they had in every realm. It follows then, that Christians want their child’s experience of God to be deeper and more impactful than theirs was as a child. This begs the question: how will our children come to experience God more deeply and intimately than we did? It won’t magically happen.

When it comes to teaching our children to pray, how do we go about this? How exactly do we teach our children to pray? In what ways do we lead our kids into prayer such that God is seen as an ever-present, ever-loving, always-filled-with-mercy kind of Father who longs to be connected to His children?

We’ll talk about some basics to practice with your children this week: why, what and when. Why pray? What to pray? When to pray?

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Trusting God in the Waves

July 9, 2015 by Roxanne

Is there anything more difficult than placing our trust in someone other than ourselves? We are humans, this is our sin nature. We believe we know better, we have it all figured out and we are in control. Trusting God with our lives is an afterthought at best.

I’m fairly certain very little is more upsetting for our Creator. I mean, other than blatantly discrediting Him as God, acting as if we are more worthy of trust and are capable of doing it all alone, is very likely a slap in the face. After all, choosing to trust ourselves over trusting God is doing exactly that – discrediting Him.

In this season of flux where I am not even remotely in control of our circumstances, God is lovingly and gently releasing my death grip on the need to control. He’s teaching me what trusting Him REALLY looks like and reminding me it is a safe place to be. I’m learning that my death grip on control, is actually letting control keep its death grip on me.

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The Journey – Sparing or Preparing Your Children

July 6, 2015 by Caleb Foster

Life is short. How many times have we heard it? I remember hearing this phrase as a five-year-old kid. Of course I didn’t care then, but I didn’t have to. As kids we want time to pass. The passing of time is the rite of passage into the fullness of responsibility. So kids say, “Bring it! Let the time pass.”

Having my own children changed my perspective on this drastically. My childish desires for time to pass quickly have long since died and I have grown to hate the passing of time in some ways. It never actually speeds up but it manages to slip away faster each year. With each new tooth in my kids’ mouths, every new physical development they undergo not only means another gray hair on my scalp but another moment I’ll never get back.

And this isn’t even the most unsettling thing. As more time passes I become more deeply aware of the fact that I’m on a journey. A journey that has an end. A journey is defined by Webster’s Dictionary as: “An act of traveling from one place to another”. I am on a journey from one place to another and my passage into another place from this one is physical death. I am going to die one day. So are you. So will your spouse, and so will your children. We are all on a journey that has physical death as the doorway to “another place”.

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Where is God in the Waiting?

July 3, 2015 by Roxanne

The Man Foster and I have been in a long season of waiting; excruciatingly so for this highly impatient, I-want-what-I-want-NOW woman. We will all walk through many variations of waiting, and can be sure there will be numerous more to come if we are blessed with a long life. The question on repeat in my mind has been, “Where is God in the waiting?”

In this season of waiting, I have come to realize that it isn’t the start of the waiting or the end that will mark the season, it’s how you deal with what’s happening in the middle. The middle, is where we learn the lessons.

*Full disclosure. When I started writing this post, I really thought by the time I posted it we would finally have some direction. We don’t, which has made writing this even more challenging and humbling. I have had to remind myself of these truths over and over again – sometimes moment by moment.

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