This week I’m going along with the main point that the sunday club leaders are doing – Jesus is happy that Mary listened to him.

We’ve done a few bits of play involving listening – just little things to make the boys laugh, like hiding and making noises and jumping out at them when I know they’ve listened and heard. Mikey really enjoys it when I whisper things in his ear and giggles when I whisper, “I love you, I love you” over and over again! Also when the boys have been playing and paying attention to what I say I’ve given them lots of praise for listening well. But these have been fairly incidental bits of play.

The main thing we’ve done at home to help reinforce this message is laid it on really thick when we do family Bible time. We’ve said “let’s listen to Jesus” a lot before we read the boys’ Bible book and given lots of praise and encouragement at the end for how well they’ve listened and used phrases like, “Jesus loves it when we listen to him!” and, “listening to Jesus is really important”, “I like listening to Jesus”. The reason for focussing on this area is that this is surely the application of the passage for us now – the way we listen to Jesus today is by paying attention to his word, the Bible.

It challenged me actually. Family Bible time is something we do everyday. We say thank you for God’s book when we say thank you for the food and one of us reads while the boys have their breakfast, whoever read also prays a quick response to the passage. But being challenged to listen – well, it showed me how easily it’s just become part of the routine and not a special and exciting time. I’ve enjoyed really ‘bigging up’ Bible time and think we should think about ways to make it more of a precious time and perhaps help the boys focus, to see it as something important and different to the rest of the day. How you do this when it’s hard enough to keep them in one place I don’t know!! Perhaps we should just be glad the routine is there and think about building on it more a little further down the line!

But that’s us so far on listening to Jesus.

Do you do Bible time with your kids? Have you got any ideas for me?!

ps the picture has nothing really to do with today’s post, it just made me laugh – Mikey’s quite into pretending at the moment – quite convincing I think.