Adventures in Family Devotions: (Mis)Adventures and Failures

Next week, I will be featuring a review of the New Growth Press family devotional called, “Old Story New“. Leading up to that, I thought I would share some of my adventures in family devotions. Earlier this week, I wrote about my first experiences with Family Devotions, you can read about it here.

There is an old Scottish story of a rich young ruler. As he was courting women, he was famous for saying that he had many theories on raising children. Then he got married and started having kids. A few years later a friend asked him how the family was going. The now middle aged Scot replied, “Before I was married I had 4 different theories on raising children. Now I have 4 children and no theories.”

When it comes to family devotions, I sometimes feel like this. I had all kinds of ideas and ideals. I had the “Barcott Template” from seminary. I had a children’s Bible, and a heart full of the best intentions. So about the time our oldest son transitioned to a toddler bed, I decided we would start to read a story from the Jesus Storybook Bible. My two year old was unimpressed. I would try to shorten the stories, but he would still not want to listen. One night I can remember calling him up onto my lap to read our story. He obliged after some light bribery. As I tried to read him the most exciting story I could think of, Jonah and the Whale, he was twisting and squirming. I pressed on, reading the story and holding him a little tighter, encouraging him to sit still. This battle of wills ended in my son head-butting me, breaking my glasses. In half.

So we decided to abandoned the story time model. Instead, we began using the Children’s Catechism to work through each night. At first this was great. Our son was taking to it great. Each night we would review the previous questions and work on the newest question. This was all going fantastic until we got to question 30 or so and our son insisted on going through every question, every night. All of the sudden, our nightly family devotional time was stretching to 20 or 30 minutes. And we were just going through the motions of the avalanche of questions and answers.

O yeah, and one time, my son gave me a flying elbow drop in the middle of question 18.

It sure seemed like every idea my wife and I had for family devotions ended in pain and destruction in the most literal sense. We were at the end of our rope, ready to give up on the idea of family devotions.