It was, you know, speakers like Scott Hahn, and Matt Maher, and a whole bunch of other amazing speakers. It was truly incredible week. And I had so many powerful takeaways from that experience, but there was one sentence that rocked me to my core. And it was in, in the midst of a talk by Mark Hart, if you maybe might be familiar with Mark Hart, he’s kind of known as the Bible geek. He’s, he’s on a lot of Catholic speaking circuits and he’s really involved with life teen. But anyways, as he was, he was talking about scripture and he was talking about leading teenagers and Bible studies and, and proclaiming the word of God to young people. And then there was this moment where he paused and he looked at us and he said, I just want you all to know it. And obviously he’s talking to a whole group of people who are dedicated to working with young people, but he said this, it is a sin to make the gospel boring.

And then he paused for a moment and then he repeated it he said, let me repeat this again. It is a sin to make the gospel boring. I wrote it down on my notepad. I circled it. I highlighted it. And it just, it hit me. That phrase rocked me to the core. Even as a young person myself, I understood exactly what he meant. And he went on to actually say, he said the gospel story, the scripture, the word of God, the story of salvation is anything but boring. And he said, this is like, the story of our existence is a story of who we are. It’s a story of being saved by God and being called and chosen. And this is the greatest story in all of existence. This is our story. And he said, and it is a sin to make it boring.

It is a sin to make our faith boring. And we as youth ministers, as youth leaders have a really incredible responsibility to make the faith what it is, which is true and beautiful and good and exciting and engaging. And I walked away from that talk truly convicted that in my call to minister and administering with young people that I never, ever wanted to make the gospel boring. I never wanted to create an environment where kids came to youth group and they were bored. What I wanted to do was I wanted to bring the truth and the, and the beauty and the goodness and everything that our church has to, to offer and make it come alive for them, make it exciting, make it engaging and relevant. And yes, even at times, really, really fun. And so that’s kind of what I set out for my mission in ministry.

And that’s what I’ve spent the last 25 years doing. And it’s been exciting. It’s I it’s made me fall more in love with our Catholic faith and the thing that’s been so cool about it is as I’ve learned how to do this over there the years, and I’ve dedicated so much of my life to doing this, it has helped both myself and my husband to transmit what we’ve done in ministry and to bring it into our home and to our family. As we started having children and raising children. Now we have children of all different ages and it’s no different, like we have the same passion, the same desire to make the faith relevant, engaging, exciting, meaningful, and yes, really fun. A lot of the times, one of my all time, favorite quotes is by Saint Augustine of hippo. And it is this to fall in love with God is the greatest romance, to seek him the greatest adventure, to find him the greatest human achievement.

I always start off every semester with my students and my campus ministers with this quote. And I tell them that I, that it’s my hope and my prayer, that when they come into my class and that they’re in my class for a semester, that this quote will take on a significant meaning that my hope and my prayer for them is that they will fall in love with God and that they will come to understand that in falling in love with him, it is truly the greatest romance that searching after him and seeking him is by far the greatest adventure. And of course, finding him the greatest human achievement. I mean, this is what it is, and this is what our faith has to offer us the greatest love story, the greatest adventure, the most extraordinary experience. So in this episode, I’m gonna be just sharing some of the ways in which we’ve really tried to make the faith come alive for our children, how we’ve tried to engage them, make things more relevant and fun over the years at all of the different ages.

And I’m just gonna share with you kind of a lot of different things with the hope that, that if, if you’re listening to this, what’s probably gonna happen is that I’m gonna share some things and you’re gonna say to yourself, oh yeah, we do that too. Or we’re doing those something similar to that. And that is so awesome. There might be other things that you’ll go, oh my gosh, that’s a really cool idea. Maybe we could try that at our house or, or change it a little bit or try something different. And then of course, there’s gonna be some things that you might go, that’s not really what we would do in our family. My hope is not to try to encourage you to do all of the things that we do, but it is my hope and my prayer that possibly I might share something with you that is exciting, or that you might think to yourself, oh gosh.

Like I would love to try that with my kids. And I think sometimes when we hear, I mean, I always just get so inspired from hearing how other families are living out their faith. And so much of what I’m gonna share with you today is really things that other families over the years have shared with us. And then we’ve applied them to our lives. And so really this is just an opportunity to just share those things, the things that have worked in particular and with myself and my family, like we do, we have traditions that have been ingrained now over the years and who we are as a family, but then we’re always wanting to try new things and have new experiences. So this is what I’m hoping to share with you. I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed by anyway, or make you feel like, oh my gosh, well, we’re not doing this or we’re not doing that.

And, and maybe we should be, that’s not what this episode is about. This episode is really to spark a conversation to help us think about, gosh, oh, maybe I could try to do this, or maybe this would work for our children, or maybe this is something down the real we’d love to try. So first of all, I wanna talk about the mass, obviously the mass, this is the source, the summit of our, of our faith life. The, the most important part of what we do as Catholics. And over the years, you know, I’ve, I’ve worked with so many teenagers and it, it just breaks my heart because I hear them say a lot, you know, mass is so boring and that’s one of the things that I’ve always tried to work on. Even with the kids in our youth group, my own children is how can we make mass more relevant to our young people?

How can we help engage our children a little bit more or a mass? So I’m gonna talk first about some of the things that my husband and I have done over the years to help our children engage a little bit more in the mass. First of all, as I’ve mentioned before, we had our first five children in just under five years. So those years it was like, boom, boom, boom. We just had children, child after child. And it was crazy and chaotic and exhausting. And it was a lot. And those first few years, I’ll never forget trying to get the little ones to mass. And it was, oh my gosh, it was so much work. And so exhausting and so challenging. And of course, as a family, we sat in the back pew, we had to be near and exit near the doors. The bathrooms, we were always taking kids out, kids were crying or, you know, falling down or dropping a bottle or screaming or hitting each other.

I mean, it just felt like such a circus. And it was so hard to focus at mass to pay attention, to even get anything really out of it. But there we were on Sunday mornings and I always remember thinking, gosh, like my kids aren’t paying attention at all. There’s like, it was just so discouraging on so many levels. And I remember one time kind of venting to one of my friends. She had older kid, her kids had we’re teenagers at this point. And I was just complaining to her about how the kids are so outta control and it’s, you know, all of that. And she looked at me and she said, Lorissa, I wanna challenge you to do something. And I was like, what, what is what tell me? And she said, I wanna challenge you and your husband to sit in the front row next week at Mass.

And I looked at her like, you’ve got to be kidding me. And I’m like, there is no way we are gonna sit in the front row at mass. And she said, trust me, I know it sounds crazy, but she said, you and your children, like she said, your children will really behave so much better if they’re in the front row. And I just, I couldn’t even believe it. I was like, there is no way we will, our family will be such a distraction and I will be terrified and like humiliated. And my kids will be so outta control. And then we’ll have to like walk past every pew to get to the back to out the door when something happens. And she said, no, truly. She said, your children will be able to see they’ll be up front. They’ll be able to see what’s going on and they will behave so much better.

So I talked to my husband, he thought he thought she was crazy. Gee, like, there’s just no way. But the next weekend we did it, we got there a little bit early. We took our hits to the front row. And I just, I remember feeling so self-conscious and so scared and so nervous, but you know what happened? She was totally right. My kids paid attention. They were looking at things. They were far more engaged. And I don’t wanna paint a picture that they just sat there, like little happy chairs, just perfectly in the pews. Nope. They were little boys moving around and being active, but they were also so much more present and engaged their behavior, significantly improved sitting in the front row. And some of the things that we’ve learned over the years that my husband and I have learned is that every time we would go to mass, we started to challenge our children at different ages, like to pay attention.

Like one, one of the things that we would do is before mass, we would drive to mass and I would tell my children, I’d say, okay, you guys, after mass, I’m gonna ask you questions and I’m gonna see who is paying attention. And so I would, you know, mass would get over. And one of the things I would maybe ask them is what color of vestments was the priest wearing? And you know, how many, how many candles were on the altar? What was one of the songs we sang at mass? And as the kids started getting older, I would ask him maybe a little bit more challenging questions. Like, what was the homily about what was the gospel like? Was it Matthew, mark Luke, or John, that the gospel was like read from this week. And it was just fascinating to get like less sent to them, starting to get more and more engaged.

My children sitting in the front row would sing more. They would pay more attention to the alter servers and everything that was going on at mass. And it really did change things. Then as my children continued to get older and were able to become alter servers, they went through the training where ultra servers, as soon as they could be trained to be LECs, they could be, you know, we started having them Lecter. And this is the thing that I’ve learned from ministry. And from my own children is that young people want to be engaged in the liturgy. Anytime they can have a role it’s incredibly powerful, incredibly meaningful. In fact, I work with senior campus ministers at the high school that I work at. One of the main responsibilities we have is setting up and running the all school masses that we have every single month.

And it’s always powerful for me to hear my campus ministers at the end of the semester and reflecting back at what they experience. And so many of them say that for the first time in their life, really mass became so much more significant to them because this was the first time in their lives that they actually had a role to play in it from the planning of it, helping out as a SAC, serving at mass lecturing, being a Eucharistic minister, all of that ushering greeting, everything really gave them a sense that they were participating and, and being a more significant part of it. So I always like to encourage young people, especially to get involved in their parishes, to get involved in the liturgy in any way that they can. And it doesn’t even have to be at a teen mass. It’s my dream.

This is the youth minister speaking in me. My dream is that every young person at any mass could be involved, you know, as lectures or ushers or helping in some capacity greeting, handing out song sheets, things like that, where they feel like they have a purpose, they have a gift, they have something that they can contribute. And it’s a great experience. Lecturing at mass is a very incredible experience for our young people. They can start doing that as early as sixth or seventh grade even. And it helps them when they’re speaking skills. It helps them build confidence, helps them to dive into the word of God in a really powerful way. So those are all things that I really encourage being part of the music group, all of it. So that is one of the things, the mass, the other thing, when it comes to the mass that my husband and I kind of had to learn the hard way about is that getting to mass and like setting the tone for mass, particularly on Sundays is so important.

I can remember early on when the kids were little again, getting, just getting to mass was, was so incredibly stressful, getting all and stressed. And inevitably we, we would always not like not be able to find somebody’s shoe. And so we were scrambling around the house, running around the house, trying to find a missing shoe or a coat or just whatever. And then we would be yelling and yelling at the kids and get in the car. And my husband and I would be frustrated with each other and all the, those negative emotions. And I remember there was a stage early on where like every single week mass just felt just getting to mass was not fun in any way. And I remember there was this one kind of breaking point for us where we were like, this is not good. It’s not good for us to be this tense, this angry, this rushed, this stressed, trying to get to mass.

And it really like wasn’t good for our children either because we would come into mass in such a frenzied state that it just, it wasn’t good for our souls. And so my husband and I, we some serious conversations around that. And we started putting, you know, things into place where we would lay out the kids clothes the night before and make sure we had all of their shoes and ready to go. And we tried to make the mornings a little bit more peaceful, tried to give us a little bit more time to get to mask where we could feel more peaceful that we weren’t yelling at each other are that we weren’t yelling at the kids because this is the deal like these are those moments that are so incredibly important for us to set the tone. What are our kids gonna remember about mass?

Are they gonna remember the tense car, like the drives to mass every single week? Or are they gonna, I remember that mass was meaningful and a peaceful experience, a joyful experience. Now I wish I could say that it’s always a peaceful or joy or joyful experience, but that’s not always the case. We have seven kids and there are sometimes that it’s stressful and sometimes we’re yelling, but that is something that we’ve really, really worked on. And I wanna wrap up talking about mass with one more thing. I wanna go back to when my husband and I moved our family to the front row at mass, because that required for me, it was a huge dose of humility. And actually like in looking back, I had to really work on my, like managing my mind with that because I was so afraid that our family would be loud and distracting to others.

I was afraid of like, what would people think of us and our children like that, that fear of are they gonna think that I’m a bad mom because the kids are kind of wiggling or crying or dropping things or, you know, all of that. Like I was so worried about all of those things. And I had to get to a place where I just came to understand the beauty of children at mass. And this is one of those things, because I remember the first few weeks of this and I’ll, and I’ll never forget this one woman in particular, we were in the front row and the kids were being noisy and moving around. And there was this woman over on the other side, an elderly woman. And she kept looking over at me and I was so self conscious during mass. I was thinking to myself, all the things, right, all the negative things, like she probably is annoyed that my children are making noise.

And she’s probably, you know, frustrated that we’re sitting in the front row and all of those things. And I’m, I’m our, family’s distracting her from, from experiencing the mass. But mass got over and we were getting, you know, all the kids picked up from the pew and this, this woman walked over to me and she grabbed my arm and she kind of leaned into me and she said, I just wanna tell you how beautiful your family is. Thank you for bringing your children to mass. It gives me so much joy and I smiled at her. I said, thank you so much. And that means so much, but I’ll never forget that moment. As she walked away from me, it was almost like God was telling me in that moment, Larissa, don’t worry about what other people think. Don’t worry about being a distraction. You’re bringing your children to mass.

They’re supposed to be here and they’re children. They’re gonna make noise. They’re drop their bottle. They’re gonna cry. They’re little boys. They’re gonna push each other. They’re gonna do those types of things. But it was in that moment that I remember just really letting it all go and realizing that we didn’t have to be a perfect family, like sitting perfectly in the pew, making not a single sound. That’s never been what our family is, but I can tell you now, after all of these years of people watching our family grow and our children grow, it’s, there’s rarely a week that goes by that someone doesn’t mention something to me like, oh, I love your seeing your family at mass or your children is such a joy to watch at mass, things like that. And so I just wanna encourage you if you, if you’re in those younger years with your children and you feel like mass is so hard, I wanna give you a sense of hope that just keep going and keep trusting that you are exactly where you’re supposed to be, and that if your kids make noise or if they cry, then it’s totally okay.

There have been so many people, particularly older people who have come to me over the years and have just said, what a blessing it is that our kids are there. And I just believe our parish communities. They need to see our children and they need to see us as families striving for holiness. But it’s, you know, it’s always, it’s perfectly imperfect and that’s become my motto for my life and living out my faith life. Like it’s gonna be loud and messy and perfectly imperfect. But when we show up, that’s when God gets to do his greatest things. So that’s my encouragement about mass and trying to, you know, make it more relevant and exciting for our young people, our children asking them questions after mass, we always loved talking to them, asking them what they got out of it. What was the message that you took all of that.

Now, the next thing that I’m excited to talk to you about is adoration of the blessed sacrament from the time my husband and I first started dating. We started going to a holy hour once a week, every Tuesday night. And at that time, the only holy hour that was available was late in the evening. And that was fine. We were young, we didn’t have kids, but we started going every single week. And that was kind of our special date night with God together as this, you know, new couple. And then as we got married, we just kept that holy hour and we’ve kept it going ever since. And thankfully over the years, we’ve gotten earlier hours. So now we have an eight o’clock hour on Tuesday nights. And that is something that every Tuesday we take our children to, and my husband and I we’ve joked over the years, like sometimes we’ve called it our unholy hour because there have been times again with little children that it has been anything but quiet and peace full, but this is the deal.

And I know a lot of people that have, that I’ve talked to over the years that know that we have a holy hour and they’re like, how do you do it? How do you do it with babies and toddlers and you know, five year olds and kids running around and how do you, how do you do that? I can’t even imagine. And I think sometimes people have this idea that you can only go to, you know, take your children to adoration with the expectation that they’re gonna sit there, perfectly quiet for an entire hour. And that’s just not, it, that’s not even, <laugh> a realistic expectation to have, but I have to say this our holy hour, every week has been truly one of the greatest gifts in our marriage. It’s been one of the greatest gifts to our family. And it has been one of the greatest gifts for our children in ministry over the years.

Probably my most favorite thing to do with young people is to take a, them to the Eucharist, take them to adoration and to give them these moments, these powerful moments to en to encounter Christ face to face for me and my husband and our family. One of the main things is this. We don’t just want to tell our children about Jesus. We don’t want them to just know about him. I mean, that’s important to know his story and to know, you know, read scripture and to know about Jesus. Like that’s super important, but what’s even more important for us is that they know him personally, that they have an incredible living relationship with him. And honestly, I can’t think of a better way to know Jesus than to go and to sit and to be with him in person face to face in his presence in his grace.

Like there’s nothing better than that. And so for us, that’s been our holy hour and I, I love that this has been something that we do every week. Our kids look forward to it. They have never fought us about it. And yet we try to make it engaging for them. So one of the things that we do as a family, we get there and we start off, we usually ask them to take a couple moments in silence, kind of just get settled in to try to be quiet. Now, obviously we have teenagers and, you know, 10 and 11 year olds, they can do that really easily. But my three year old, she cannot sit still. So I don’t expect her to sit there for three to five minutes quietly. She walks around, she sits on the ground, she’ll climb into my lap, things like that.

That’s totally fine. But we sit there, we kind of get settled in, give them a few moments to quiet down, and then we’ll start our family rosary. It’s always a tradition for us as a family, with our rosary, that each child leads one of the decades. Again, this is their opportunity to be engaged. They learn the mysteries, they get to lead the decade. And when it it’s time for them to lead their decade, they always pray what their intentions are before the, before the decade. So it gives them that opportunity to practice praying out loud, praying, spontaneously, praying from their heart in the presence of God, especially is so beautiful. And we do a little bit of singing when we pray the rosary too. That’s been one of the things has been really powerful. We sing kind of like a, a little bit of like an Ave Maria part of the song, like with each decade.

And that’s been really cool and it really engages the children like the younger children in singing it. And that’s been part of our tradition. And then usually after we finish praying the rosary, my husband and I, my husband, or I will walk them through some sort of prayer meditation, or we will read the readings, the Sunday readings or the gospel coming up. We’ll usually allow one of our children to read it so that, so again, they feel like they’re engaged, they’re participating. And so if we do the, the gospel reading, for example, we’ll have somebody read it and then we’ll ask our children, you know, what stood out to you in this gospel? What do you think? Our, our priests might talk about in his homely at mass on Sunday, based on this gospel, if you were a priest, like, what would you wanna preach about like those types of questions sometimes in adoration?

Like after that, if there’s still some time left, maybe we’ll, we’ll walk through an examination of conscience or we’ll walk them or we’ll walk our children through a prayer meditation. Oftentimes we’ll encourage our kids, you know, is there anything you wanna tell Jesus you’re thankful for and give them an opportunity, whether it’s in the silence of their heart or out loud, if there’s something they wanna tell Jesus their they’re so, or they’re thankful for, or maybe something they’re sorry for, they can do that in the silence of their hearts. Sometimes we will put on the hall app and do one of the prayer meditations, or just listen to some peaceful, like prayerful music while we’re in adoration. And sometimes we will sing we’ll, we’ll put on maybe like a praise, like a hill song, praise and worship song, or Matt Mar. And we will sing a song in adoration.

So all of those things, again, trying to engage them, trying to make it meaningful and trying to make them feel like they are really a big part of it. Aside from mass. Our holy hour is truly my most favorite hour, my second favorite hour of the a week. And it’s a beautiful opportunity as a family to come together. There’s no dis outside distractions, no cell phones. It’s our time to really be together in the presence of God. All right. And now the last thing I wanna talk about is just kind of a lot of the other little things I wanna talk about FET stays and holy days, and things like that. We, as a family, we try to really make a, a number of feast days throughout the year, really special. And these are, this is again like opportunities to bring to life the liturgical year, our sayings, like holy days, things like that.

But my husband and I are always thinking like, how can we make this fun? How can we make it meaningful? How can we make it significant? And so one one of our favorite feast days is the feast of St of the little flower. She’s one of our favorite saints. And so on her feast day, usually we make a big deal about her from the moment we wake up sometime, you know, we’ll usually have flowers and roses in the house and we have this kind of statue of St Terese. And throughout the day, we just kind of try to do things that are special. But the real major thing that we do is that we’ve started a tradition with a whole group of our friends that also love St. And every year on her feast day, we get together. We have a beautiful rose garden in our city.

And so on her FET day, we go to the rose garden, we set up tables, we have a big potluck dinner, and the kids are in the rose garden. And then we at, after we eat, we kind of circle around in chairs and we share some of our favorite St stories or miracles or miracles of roses, things like that. And then we will end our novena prayer to St. So usually we start the novena, you know, eight days before leading up to that day and that’s become a huge edition. Our children love it is super special. We always try to really make that day special, but there’s days throughout the year, all of the major feast days, you know, obviously Christmas and Easter, but then we celebrate for us. It’s, you know, St. Anthony is one of our favorite saints. So every year on his FET day, we have a big Italian dinner and we’ll sit around in our living room.

Sometimes we invite friends over and we will share our favorite St. Anthony miracles or what things were lost this year that St Anthony helped us to find, or what were the miracles. And we share about that. We celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. St. Patrick is a big St for us. We have a lot of Irish heritage in our family. So obviously St. Patrick stays a, is a special day, but it’s not just for us about corn, you know, corn, beef, and cabbage. Like, we really talk about St. Patrick and how, you know, what he did and driving the snakes out of Ireland and sharing those stories and making those stories of the saints come alive for our children. We truly live in an exciting time where we can just go on Pinterest or go do a Google search and find really cool and creative ideas.

There’s so many amazing, like Catholic mom bloggers that share, you know, ideas and stories and recipes for celebrating FET days and special Catholic holiday is, and, you know, how can you make the feast of the Ascension and come alive for, for our children, all of those things, I’m always searching and Googling, and how can we bring liturgical living truly to our homes and do it in a way that’s not, I mean, I’m not saying like all of these things have to be like totally Pinterest crazy, but just again, looking for ways to creatively teach the faith and to make it fun, to make it memorable. One of the things that we do around our children’s first reconciliation is that AF usually they make their first reconciliation on a Saturday morning with their, with the other kids in their group at the, at the parish. And of course it’s a really big deal.

It’s a very powerful, special occasion, but then one of our traditions as a family is that my husband or myself, or sometimes is both of us. We will take that child and take ’em to our local Catholic bookstore. And they get to pick out a special crucifix for their room that goes above their bed at their first reconciliation. So that’s always been a special tradition. We also really love to look for meaningful gifts for our children, whether it’s for their days or Christmas, where we’re always like trying to find things that we can give them that will help them grow spiritually. So last year I bought my husband and I bought our older boys, the word on fire Bible with just the gospel readings. And we got the really nice leather bound versions for them. That was something for them to have as a gift.

Maybe it’s a really nice rosary, a scapular, a book, a religious book, things like that, that they can have something. Maybe it’s some artwork in their bedroom that they can put up, but truly, we’re always kind of looking for what can we give them as a gift that’s gonna help them grow spiritually. And then that leads me to probably one of the last things I wanna just wrap up with and this it has to do with artwork. And a number of years ago, my husband and I, we were listening to a podcast or some sort of, maybe it was a talk, a YouTube talk by Scott Hahn. And he was talking about the importance of having really beautiful Catholic artwork in your home. And he said, this is not like artwork that you wanna just buy that’s cheap, or, you know, like framed in a cheap way.

Like you wanna like really try if you can, to find nice artwork, invest in it a little bit, invest in a nice frame, put it up in your home in a way that’s beautiful and honoring to God. And at that point, my husband and I had, we had a few things. We had some crucifixes in our house, maybe I think a picture of the Pope and, and our blessing mother and the sacred heart of Jesus, a couple things. But over the years now, every year we try to, to purchase a significant art piece for our home. That is beautiful and something that our children love. So sometimes we’ll allow them to be a part of picking it out, but he talked about the, you know, the, the, the transcendentals, the truth, the beauty, the goodness, and our hearts are inspired by beauty, beautiful things, beautiful music, beautiful artwork, beautiful poetry, like all of that type of stuff.

Like it moves us. Right? And so those are the things that we want our children to be exposed to is the truth and the beauty and the goodness. And so it’s been one of those fun things. Like we live in such an incredible time where there are so many amazing Catholic artists out there. And I’m gonna just share two of my favorites. My one of my all time, favorite, favorite artists, I came across her artwork a couple years ago. I’ve bought a number of her art for our home. And even for the high school that I work at her artworks in the hallways, it’s just beautiful. And I will, I will find students like stopping in the hallways is standing there looking at the artwork. It’s, it’s so beautiful, but her name is Tiana Williams is so if you’re interested in checking her out, it’s her website, I think is called like sacred, sacred art by Tiana Williams.

She’s amazing. And then another one that I recently came across is Mike Moyer, you might be familiar with him. A lot of his artwork is on Ascension press, but just really beautiful. His artwork’s a li little bit more abstract, but it’s just captivating in the light that he uses. It’s just draws you in is so beautiful. And I know art is so, you know, so it speaks differently to everyone. But the idea of, of having artwork in our home that draws our children closer to God is so important. And it’s all of these little things, right, that we can do that can engage our, our children, our teenagers, ourselves as adults into a deeper relationship with God, for us in our home. It, we have a, we have prayer spaces in our home, in our, in our new home. We we’re still working on that in our old home.

We had a prayer closet and our children would, would oftentimes go in there or myself. My husband would go into the prayer closet and just have some kind of quiet alone time. That’s something that we’re working on in our new house to create kind of a, a prayer space. That’s kind of set apart just for prayer. And I would just wanna like wrap up this podcast just by saying how important it is truly to allow our faith to be infused into every aspect of our lives that we, as a family, we’re talking about God, all the time, we might be watching a TV show. That’s completely secular and it’s totally normal. I, I mean, my husband is really good at this in particular, but maybe something will come up on this show and he’ll pause it. And he will bring God into it in some way, you know, maybe it’s something that was said in the show that needs to be corrected, or like, Hey, you go eyes.

You know, we don’t, that’s not something we believe, or that’s not a, a value that we believe in, but at the same time, sometimes it’s like really something that’s good and we need to expand on it, or, Hey, you guys, how could you see God in, in this type of experience or this type of example, in our daily prayer life as a family, we always come together at the end of the day. One of the questions I almost always ask our children at the end of the day is how did you see Christ today? Or who did you see Christ in? Or tell me about a God moment that you had today. And we will kind of share those things. Who do you wanna pray for? Who in our lives, will everyone go around? Who should we pray for today? Sometimes I’ll ask my children, okay.

I want you to pay attention at school. If there’s someone that’s struggling or is down, how can you be Christ to them? Or who is someone in your school who is a teacher, is a student that needs our prayers at this time. And it’s always so beautiful to have these types of conversations to even like have those difficult conversations. Maybe when, when our kids are struggling with someone, they know that, that the answer to all of that is that we’re gonna be praying for that individual all. And so we as a family like meal times and prayer times, and even when we’re just hanging out and having fun, we are working on ways in which we can make the faith come alive and have meaningful conversations and bring God into it. And so my beautiful friends, this is what I have for you this week. I hope and pray that maybe there was one idea or a nugget in here that you can take away and, and bring to your family. And just know that I love you. I’m praying for you. I hope you have an amazing week. And remember mama, you are made for greatness.