Tomorrow begins the forty days of Lent.
I am making small changes, getting ready, preparing.
This year my children will have a visual representation of the forty days, and I am excited about that.
I plan to spend time teaching them the Stations of the Cross, and learning them myself.
The stack of books on my nightstand has begun to reflect the coming season (In Conversation with God: Meditations for Each Day of the Year, Vol. 2: Lent, Holy Week, Eastertide
, Introduction to the Devout Life, and A Family Journey With Jesus Through Lent: Prayers And Activities for Each Day
.)
, Introduction to the Devout Life, and A Family Journey With Jesus Through Lent: Prayers And Activities for Each Day.)And finally, we all have new journals.
For my family, it is my hope and prayer that when Easter comes we will find ourselves more aware of our blessings, and more grateful for all the little gifts that God gives us each day. I have been very inspired this year by Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts, and am happy to be joining the thousands of others who are following in her footsteps, making a written record of the graces we are showered with throughout every single day of our lives.
More than anything, I want to share this with my children, to model a grateful heart, to teach them to be fully aware of all the goodness that they have been given.
My oldest four have decorated their moleskin journals, and have already begun recording gifts. In fact Larkspur had me record more than sixty in the first half hour after she had decorated it and it was all I could do to keep up with her, while spelling words out loud for Keats and Gabriel who were writing in their own journals.
I believe there are stages in this process of writing down. The first stage is the one where each of my children is at: sitting down with the journal and thinking of all the things you love, recognizing those things as God’s gifts of love to you, and then recording them.
Can I help my children reach the second stage, the stage of noticing gifts throughout their day? Will this journal keeping, this list of gifts, teach them to be more aware of the gifts they are given? Will they learn to notice them as they happen, to count them, to write them down?
And finally, is it possible to teach children to search for the gift in the hard moments? The times when it seems that all has gone wrong? Will this journal keeping help them to look for the silver lining so to speak?
As a mother, can I model this ability to find the gift in the darkest moments for my children? When the house is a mess, lessons are undone, and my youngest won’t stop crying, can I find the blessing in that moment? I have been struggling lately, and I honestly don’t know. I practiced this often in the first year after our adoption, and that is how I survived. Surely, I can do it now. I am going to try.
Habitual Thanksgiving, that is my goal. Starting by writing down one gift at a time, and doing my best to teach my children to do the same.
Where did you get these laminated Stations of the Cross prints?
I bought the prints from Catholic Heritage Curricula, and I laminated them myself!