Elijah and the Apples

It's really fun now that Jonah gets to go to a real Sunday school class at the church since being potty-trained. They do crafts and Bible stories and verses and all that! I knew the lesson today was on Elijah, so I was asking him after I picked him up what he had learned about Elijah. He said, "Elijah and the apples." I asked him several more times, and all the details I could really get from him had to do with apples. I kept thinking, "Hmm....I don't think there's anything about apples in the story of Elijah, but it has been a while since I read about him...." I was trying to think of some detail about Elijah that would clue me in to the apples, but I was coming up with nothing. So I mentioned to his teacher later that when talking about the Bible story about Elijah, Jonah was saying a lot about apples. She informed me that they went into another room for story time, and that room had a bulletin board that had apples in it. She noticed that the whole time they were teaching the story, Jonah was staring at that board and really focusing on that instead of the story. SO....my son had just mixed up his daydreaming with the teaching and associated the apples on that board with what they were saying. Great. We're going to have some really mixed up ideas of what God's Word says!

Today was the first day of our Shepherding a Child's Heart class at church, and I'm going to LOVE it! Today was all about asking the "why" questions about our children's behavior to get at the heart issues involved. I really want to make it a practice to constantly be thinking about the heart issue involved in whatever Jonah does and make sure to address that. I pray that God gives me that perspective all throughout the day, every day. We also talked about how hard that is to do if we as parents don't do that for ourselves and get at the root heart problems in our lives. We have to make it a practice, as adults, to deal with the things in our hearts that stand in the way of our fellowship with God, or we'll never lead our children there. What a good reminder to live in grace, or else I won't be imparting it. There was more, but I'm needing to make this a short post and get Jonah down for a nap. But I'm sure I'll be sharing more about this as the class continues!