After learning about how awesome God is, I wanted to move to respecting God’s sanctuary, as in the verse, “Have reverence for my sanctuary…” Leviticus 19:30.  But my beliefs about physical church buildings have changed through the years – going from an extreme where the altar is a holy place that only a priest can walk behind, to almost the other extreme where it is not an actual place that is holy – it is what happens there that makes it a place to be respected.

We meet in what many would consider a very large home church – very large because there are almost 300 people meeting together, and we actually do meet in a home – a home with a very large meeting room added on to it.  This meeting room is not only the place where we pray and worship the Lord, but it is also the place where we fellowship together over lunch and where the kids run around to get their energy out after being cooped up in their Sunday school class.  How can I reconcile the idea for Elias that the place where the boys are encouraged to be kids is also the place that at times there needs to be respect and reverence?

Please know that I am not talking about respect for property or even others’ beliefs about their church buildings.  I want my children to fully respect property, a building, a place – and that comes as I correct and train my children.  But I want to get to the heart belief – what makes a place (such as our meeting room) so different two hours after a time of prayer and worship?

Where two or three people meet together in my name, I am there with them. Matthew 18:20 (NIrV) The present spirit of God is what makes a place different!

I prepared a whole bunch of paper dolls (paper people, paper chains, people chains – Josh called them all kinds of things last night as I was cutting them out.  And did you know he didn’t know how to cut out paper dolls?!  He does now!) before the boys were up – they wouldn’t have lasted while I cut out all the chains.

And then I created a little poster for our new memory verse:

And then Elias and I talked about where people meet together in God’s name… church, Sunday school, Bible studies, prayer times, music class, and even when we pray together at meal times and bed times. As we talked, he glued people to a separate piece of paper – we have 6 groups of people for the 6 times we talked about – I thought that was kind of cool!

We’ll continue to talk about this, and I have a couple more crafty ideas up my sleeve to try to illustrate this verse. I will also be trying (or rather, continuing) to impress upon the boys the need for quiet and respect while they are with us in our prayer and worship time.

I’m excited because now Elias knows that God is there when there are even 2 or 3 people coming together in His name! Why didn’t I think about teaching him this before?  This seems like something he was able to grasp right away…

How do you teach your children about respecting the place/time that you meet for worship?

I had a rough beginning of the week, and I really appreciate your comments – it’s a wonderful thing to be reminded that I’m not alone…

As the week got better (and praise the Lord it did get better!) I tried a little craft with the boys – just something that I thought they would have fun with and that we could use to help us sing some songs about God (who doesn’t like waving flags while singing songs?).

The night before, I cut out some stars and felt letters, and I glued a rectangle of felt onto a dowel rod for a flag.  I did everything the night before so the boys would be able to play with the flags right away…

You can see I just wrapped the short end of the rectangle around the dowel, and then I smothered it all with glue (Aleene’s Original Tacky Glue worked a lot better than regular white glue, for some reason).

The next day, both of the boys got busy waving their white flags…

…and then Elias got to gluing.  He decided he only wanted stars on his flag.

I gave Donovan an extra rectangle of felt and let him play with the felt stars and letters like a felt-board or a flannelgraph.

Here is Elias’s finished flag…

…and then he decided he wanted a plain white flag again, so he traded with Donovan.  And then Donovan waved the starry flag really hard, and all the stars flew off.

So Gam and I took over the crafting responsibilities.  Hi, Gam!

The boys continued waving the flags and running around, trying to stick them into things…

Great job, Gam!

Great job, Momma!

We never got to sing any songs with our flags, as my boys tend to turn any stick-type items into weapons, so the flags were confiscated.

So lessons learned:

• White school glue does not hold felt together. Tacky glue is where it’s at.
• Plan to do more crafts when Gam is around.  It’s less frustrating to finish a craft without the kids if my mom is doing it with me.
• No more crafts with sticks for at least another 2 years or so.

I’ll be moving on with the boys next week to respecting God’s house… I’ve got some really fun things planned, and I’ve got some things I need to think through with this one, too.

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Thanks to Heather from Not a DIY Life for her guest post about teaching kids to pray yesterday!  Both Amanda and I will be back at you next week after Amanda gets back from the West Coast!

He is more awesome than all who surround Him.  Psalm 89:7

I chose this verse for Elias and me to work on so he could begin to respect God in his heart – nothing is more awesome than God… no one deserves respect, adoration, and devotion more than God!

Hey – God is so awesome, He made the stars!!! And a 3 year old with a fascination for all things spacey can really get in to that…

…so we painted stars on our window!  We didn’t have any real window paint or window markers, so we made our own…

…with shaving cream and food coloring.  Note: do not use shave gel.  I cannot imagine anything but a mess with that…

Mix together a healthy amount of shaving cream and a couple drops of food coloring (I used way too much shaving cream – I filled up a large yogurt container with it!  No need to do that unless you are going to cover every window in your house with the stuff).   You can just eyeball it – when you get to the color you want, stop adding food coloring.

I cut out a couple stars out of card stock and held them on the window while Elias “painted” the star with our shaving cream concoction.  He painted 2 stars, and then he moved on to taking pictures of me finishing up the project.

Good shot, kiddo!

We painted 5 stars, and then we added our memory verse to the window as well…

I globbed the shaving cream on the stars because I didn’t want it all to dissipate as the shaving cream evaporated… and I think it would’ve been OK even with just a thin coat. The places that the shaving cream was painted on thicker are still more yellow (second picture is 4 hours later), but you can still see everything that was painted on thinly, too.

While we painted the stars, we talked about how awesome it was that God made the stars, and how much fun He must’ve had creating something so beautiful for us!  We repeated the verse a couple times, too, and when I took Elias’s picture, I told him to say “God is awesome!” instead of “cheese.”  This stuck with him a while, because I heard him repeating (in Rhino’s voice from the movie Bolt) “God. is. AWESOME!”

I’m going to continue on this for a while – Elias is very much into things and people being awesome, big, and strong, and I pray that learning about how awesome, big, and strong God is will replace whatever is in the first place spot in his heart right now.