All From Abundance - Vol. #005
Hi Friends,
Hopefully you didn’t notice, but we realize we didn’t send out an email on the 1st of this month! It wasn’t an accident, though it wasn’t necessarily on purpose either.
When we first started this, we wanted it to be something we did solely from a place of abundance — as the name “All From Abundance” implies.
And as we find ourselves in the thick of summer, abundance for our family has looked less like maintaining a writing goal and more like staying up late for movie nights, eating popsicles and starting water balloon fights on the trampoline, and bribing our kids with candy walks around the neighborhood — essentially anything we can do to soak up every last minute of daylight the summer has to offer.
Our hope is to get back into a regular rhythm of writing soon. However, at least for the time being, we’re going to let this little passion project of ours take a back seat to maximizing the small number of summers we have left with our kids :)
More often than not, both of us will have something on our hearts to write. But from time to time — like today — it may mean only one of us has something to share.
As always, thanks for reading and for following along!
Starting Small - Tanner
A year or so ago, I picked up what has come to be one of my favorite books: Habits of the Household by Justin Whitmel Early. I can’t recommend this book enough and strongly encourage any parent to read it.
As the title implies, the author writes about the various habits he and his wife have implemented that have grown to shape their family. Halfway through the book I could feel myself getting a bit overwhelmed at the thought of implementing so many great habits and ideas in our home. Everything he was sharing made so much sense and seemed so impactful — why wouldn’t I try to implement everything? The author himself even disclosed that these were just suggestions to consider and to not attempt too much at once. But, as I often do, I took it to the extreme and tried to do it all.
Enter burnout.
After coming to grips with the fact that we must pace ourselves through things as a family, we decided to focus on only one daily rhythm: praying together as a family each morning. Before we all leave our home and scatter to our separate destinations for the day, we hold hands in a circle behind our front door and say a quick 30-second prayer.
We committed to doing this every single day. And thought we’re not perfect and miss a day every now and then, it has become one of the rocks of our family. A month or so into doing this, our daughter would see me start to gather my things for work and she would run to the front of our house, point at the front door, and yell “Pray! Pray!”
If it sounds like a beautiful spiritual moment that you might experience at the end of a church service, I can assure you it isn’t. It’s messy and imperfect. Sometimes it ends with Grayson yelling at Kennedy to stop looking at him. Other times it leads to us singing Ring Around the Rosie as a family before we ever finish praying. Occasionally we’ll make the entire way through with all heads bowed and eyes closed.
But the beauty is that it happens daily and our kids know it is a rhythm in our family. My hope is that one day when they are leading their own families, they won’t know any different and this will be a daily rhythm in their home as well. The thought of it becoming a generational family rhythm is pretty cool.
So why am I sharing all this? It’s certainly not to brag. We’ve struggled to implement a consistent family devotion at the table, as mealtimes for us are total chaos. We’re all over the place with enforcing a chore chart with our son. We’ve attempted a weekly memory verse and that hasn’t stuck. We’re so far from the model family.
But what we are is relentlessly consistent with one single habit. And I want to encourage you not to overlook or underestimate the impact one tiny rhythm can have on your children’s spiritual formation.
Just as Scripture talks about having faith as tiny as a mustard seed, I’m learning there is no such thing as starting too small when it comes to showing our children what it means to seek and follow Jesus!
Until next time,
-Tanner and Brittany
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