484 | The Importance of Family Devotions (Sean Allen)
Show Notes:
Family devotions are an incredibly important part of the lifeblood of your home. Do without them and your home suffers in obvious and not so obvious ways (and the not so obvious ways are the scariest). This episode discusses a few practical considerations that will help you to get started with devotions in your home or will help you be more consistent than you may be now.
About Sean
Sean Allen is the founder of The Well Ordered Homeschool, husband to his beautiful bride Caroline and a proud father of eight. He has a bachelor of fine arts in graphic design and is passionate about creating materials to assist parents in the incredibly challenging, yet surpassingly beautiful, work of schooling and training their children at home.
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Show Transcript:
Sean Allen Hello. Welcome to the Homeschool Solutions Show. My name is Sean Allen and I am one of the many hosts here on the podcast. Since you're listening to this, I'm guessing you already know that homeschooling is both incredibly challenging and incredibly beautiful. Every week we're here doing a little guidance, some helpful counsel, and a whole lot of encouragement your way as you navigate this busy, yet blessed journey of educating your children at home. Now, even though the show is called Homeschool Solutions, it should come as no surprise to you that we do not have the answer to every homeschool related question. But if you come away with nothing else, our hope is that today's episode will point you to Jesus Christ and that you will seek His counsel as you train your children in the way they should go. And now on to today's show.
Well, hello everyone, and hope that everyone's doing good out there. And thank you for joining me today. In the last episode, I'm hoping that they'll air these in order, and if not, you can catch it a little later. But all these things that I'm talking about, they all kind of connect to one another, and it's very, very important for the life of our homes. In the last episode I talked about singing in your home, singing amongst your family. It's really is a lost art. It's something that we don't do very often anymore. You could tell, you can tell by the quality of the singing in our churches that nobody's singing in their home. And that again, that wasn't the case with my wife and her family. They were singing all the time, and they loved it. You could tell they would just light up as a family when they gathered around the piano and they sang. And I wasn't familiar with that. I’d never been exposed to anything like that. And so but it really shows, and my wife has passed that on to our children, and our children love to sing around the piano.
And so another thing connected to that that is so important to the life of your home is your family devotions. And of course, you can incorporate singing into your family devotions, but I think most of us recognize how important these are, and it's it's easy to fall off the apple cart and you know, and to allow other things to distract you and to pull you away from a consistent maintenance of this habit. It's a very good habit in your home. But I'm here to remind you that it needs to happen. And it needs to happen on a daily basis. There might be times in which it's absolutely impossible, but you just get right back up again. And there are a lot of things that stand in the way of us consistently performing family devotions. And if you're not consistent with doing this, you might be tempted to think, well, oh, it's just it's so labor intensive, and I've got to get it get this study together, and I've got to we've got to read and then we've got to sing, we've got to pray, and then we gotta have all and it's gonna take an hour and we don't have an hour. And that probably is actually true. There are times when you do have an hour, but for the sake of a consistent maintenance of this performance, you know, if you said it were to take an hour, you might not be able—you probably won't be able to pull that off. And so then it's just like, what's the use? Like I'm here to tell you that it doesn't have to be an hour. It actually shouldn't be an hour, probably. I could put it that way. If making it 30 minutes or making it fifteen minutes or making it ten minutes, five minutes even, is the thing that's going to enable you to consistently pull this off, then by all means make it five minutes.
And here's the thing about consistent attendance to this responsibility or to this duty, really this privilege, is that the more you do it, the longer it will probably take. But that's a good thing. That's a good thing because then it will just kind of like naturally emerge. Like five minutes isn't enough. And now it's ten minutes, and now it's twenty minutes, now it's twenty-five minutes, and at some point you're probably gonna need to cut it off, or because you derive so much pleasure and so much joy, so much benefit from this activity, you will just know on a given day, like, okay, this isn't gonna going to be able to be 30 minutes today. We're gonna have to make this 15 minutes for these reasons, and so then there's very basic practices that you can squeeze into even a five minute devotion in your home. And really it's the fact that you did anything at all is perhaps what's most important because that helps you to get to the next devotion.
So again, if you're thinking to yourself, well, I can't do fifteen minutes today, we're just gonna not do it today. Well, that increases the likelihood that you won't do it tomorrow and the next day and the next day, and then before you know it, it’s been three months and you haven't had a devotion. You're like, Well, what happened to those? Oh, we're so busy now. And then, you know, and we kind of adjust to whatever the routine is that we have in our lives, and your children adjust to that too. And I've shared this before in the experience of our home when we started having what we call family meetings. We have devotions and then we have family meetings. Those are two separate things, but they can kind of like squeeze together too. We can do both at the same time at times, but we have the family meeting portion of it is is just like it sounds like we're talking about the day, we're talking about what's going on, what we need to do, and and we're kind of connecting with each other, we're dreaming with each other, we're, you know, we're trying to set expectations, we're also trying to like lay out a vision and and a pathway to accomplish the vision and those sorts of things. It's very inspirational for all of us, I think. We get excited. Everybody loves family meetings now, but it didn't used to be that way.
When I first announced that we were gonna be doing family meetings, my two oldest boys in particular—this was years ago, but apparently they were old enough to be too cool for school. So when I announced the family meeting, they were like, What? Family meeting? What are we—what is that? I think, well, we're gonna get up, we're gonna get up in the morning, and we, mom and I, think that the best time to do this would be like right around 9:00 or 9:30. I think it was 9:30 at the time. And every day we're just gonna sit down and have a meeting with each other and explain to them all the parameters and the purposes, and they were still not convinced. They're like, Okay. And so I thought, you know what? They don't know what this is, we've never done this. So I'm gonna I'm just gonna—let's just get into this and see how they respond. And the first meeting it was kind of huffy, puffy and kind of disinterested, and then we got the second, the third, and the fourth under our belt, and then we'd been going along for about two weeks or so, two or three weeks. And for whatever reason, and it was actually actually strange as I think about it, like we got up in the morning and I either forgot or I got sidetracked, and I wasn't going to do the family meeting. And I'd actually— it wasn't on my mind. I was just kind of like blow through the time period. And my oldest son comes up to me and goes—he was just pretty nonchalant about it, but he was like, Hey dad, I was just wondering are we gonna have that family meeting today?
And I was so happy about that because you could tell he had been converted, you know. He began to enjoy them and it's like that in the other direction too. Like if you go three months without a devotion or a family meeting your children are going to get used to that and when you reintroduce it again—okay, time for devotions—they're gonna be like many of them could be tempted to be like that because they're now used to the current routine of whatever it is that you're doing in place of the devotion so again if having a five minute devotion is all that you can do well it's important for the purpose of at least carrying you across to the next family devotion. You see, maybe it's two minutes, maybe it's everybody gather into the room and we're gonna have a prayer night, that's what you do for two minutes and then you move on with your day. We can't do this today, but we're gonna do it tomorrow. Now that also can get you into a particular groove like okay we're only gonna have a two minute prayer every day but that's good that's better than nothing. Do that but my expectation is that if you add a prayer and you read a scripture and then talk about it a little bit and then now we're gonna do some singing and have some more discussion and have some other contributions from other members of the family and now but you know you're that you're there for 30 minutes or whatever and you're enjoying it. And there's a cutoff point there which is necessary because you know now it's time to go forth, right, we've had our time of worship, we've had our time of discussion. And say it's the same with family meetings like we've had our—okay we know where we are, we know what we're doing and this is the day and it's all lined out for everybody now let's go team you know that sort of thing.
So I mean I expect that they could probably be too long too and you don't want to burn people out. You don't want to burn yourself out. So I don't know what that looks like for your family, but you can find that sweet spot and, again, if you find that life is, you know, you're going through a season of life that's really pressing on you, for heaven's sake, at least just get together for five minutes, you know and just have that short family devotion. And we have periods too, absolutely have had periods where we've completely fallen off and it's been my children who have called me back like, Dad, why aren't we having family devotions? You're right, you're right, you're exactly right. And I feel bad about that
Now, family devotions aren't as easy as they sound. There are some challenges that that come along with them, particularly if you have young children, that could be make it very difficult, and that might be a period where you need to make them a little shorter, you know, for the benefit of the younger children because they're up and down and all around and they're fussing and they're making noise and they're interrupting people and they're climbing and laughing and all they don't know what's going on. But again, the more you do this, and the more you reinforce how important it is that the family do this, that I think they'll eventually get the idea and they'll calm down. That's probably a sign that you're not very consistent with your family devotions, actually. Because if you're doing that every night, and every night you're reinforcing like so and so you need to quiet down, so and so you need to sit, so and so this is very important, then they'll get more and more used to it. But if it's very sporadic, if it's once every two weeks or it's whatever, yeah, they're not—little ones in particular are very susceptible to kind of the effect that is caused by interruptions to their normal routine or if there's no routine at all. Sometimes, yeah, little ones just don't like routine at first blush. But when they get into the routine, then they need the routine. Like if you're putting them down, this is off topic, but if you're setting them down for a nap at noon or at 1:00 or at 3:30 or whatever, it's all different hours of the afternoon, you're gonna have a hard time with that. You're probably gonna wrestle with that. But if you're setting them down at 12:30 every single day without fail, then you're probably going to arrive at the day where they just march themselves upstairs and lay themselves down at 12.30 and go off to sleep because that's part of their routine now. It's the same with family devotions. So if they're squirrely and you're having you're fighting them and they're being fussy in the family devotion, that's probably a good sign that you're not very consistent with it because they'll come around. They'll come around.
Another thing that I would recommend for your family devotions is try to involve everybody. Ask your daughter to offer the opening prayer. Ask your son to prepare a short devotion. Ask your wife to bring some thoughts or to pick out a song to sing or to play, you know, all these different things. Everyone can pray, everyone can read, everyone can contribute thoughts. And yeah, I would highly recommend that, particularly when your children are getting a little older, and you're the one that's normally as the father perhaps or the mother, you're the one that's normally bringing the thoughts. You know, you've done that for a time, and then you kind of pass that off for a devotion or two or whatever to your oldest son or your oldest daughter, and they're like, Wow, wow, that's really impressive. I can't believe I've been asked to do this. That's a privilege for them. But maybe it's something that they're reading in their personal studies and they have a chapter or they've got a figure that they're studying in the scriptures and they can bring some thoughts on that. Like, okay, so read some verses to us, and now could you bring us some thoughts about this and what you think this means? Or maybe you've—and another good thing is to have your children to prepare some questions, maybe they've been studying something and they don't know what it means, and bring that to the family devotion. And they're like, you know, Dad, I've read this andI don't understand it. Like, why did he do this? And why did God say this? And you can have really interesting discussions. And that's when you could be like, okay, this is take it, this isn't we've been here for an hour and a half. And so you might need to rein that in a little bit, but you know, there's always tomorrow, and/or there's always the next devotion that you can get into.
So these are just some practical considerations. And you know, another benefit of this is that it's in the episode about singing in your home, I talked about the benefit that comes about in the larger body of Christ when in what whatever assembly that you attend, if you're singing in your home, then your family will become stronger singers, and that will bless and benefit your assembly, because now you have entered into the service, and every one of every member of your family is a better singer, and that just contributes to the overall quality of the singing in your church. And it's the same with this. It's the same with this. Like if you're having consistent family devotions, you're more reverent, you're more in tune, there's more of an expectancy there. And then as far as practical concerns go, your children are better at setting in the service. Which helps you to get more out of the service. If you're not fighting with a fussy child for the entire service, it's like, well, you've trained them at home, haven't you? They do this almost every day in your living room and so they learn how to sit still and they learn how to sit still in the service. That's a blessing to those around them because I've been in many services where there are fussy children and the parents will not take them out. And you know, that distracts everyone. It's hard to— you can't hear this the preacher, and you know, that's just no good for anybody. So if you have children that sit still or for the most part sit still in the service because they've learned that in a devotion, that's a blessing to everyone. And again, also the reverent manner, the expectation, the worshipful attitude. This is just a blessing to everyone around you. It helps everybody else to participate and partake of the the spirit of the service and, you know, the message that's being shared, and these things are all such such great blessings to those around us, and I really do think that we have an obligation to not just do these things for our own benefit, but for the benefit of those who are around us. We have to have them in mind as we go through these routines and these exercises and we build these habits up in the lives of our children. It's not just for us, but it's for other people, and that's just such a beautiful thing.
So I hope this has been good food for thought for you. Just a word of encouragement. I'm sure every one of us struggle to some extent with, you know, getting back on this horse and riding, but it is so important, it's critical. It's a critical thing in the life of your child and in the life of your home, and your children won't forget it. It will be one of the most memorable things of their lives when they think back on the times when they spent together as a family in your living room, worshiping together, reading, praying, singing, it's something that they won't soon forget. It will be among their most cherished memories. So thank you very much for joining me today. I hope that this has been encouraging to you. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you and look forward to talking to you again very soon. So goodbye for now.
Thank you for joining us this week on the Homeschool Solutions Show. You can find show notes and links to all the resources mentioned at Homeschooling.mom. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the podcast. And while you're there, leave us a review. Tell us what you love about the show. This will help other homeschooling parents like you get connected to our community. And finally, tag us on Instagram @homeschooling.mom to let us know what you thought of today's episode. Have you joined us at one of the Great Homeschool Conventions? The Great Homeschool Conventions are the Homeschooling events of the year offering outstanding speakers, hundreds of workshops covering today's top parenting and homeschooling topic, and the largest homeschool curriculum exhibit halls in the US. Find out more at GreatHomeschoolConventions.com. I'll be there. I hope to see you there too.
