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Lately I’ve been challenged with the idea of sharing my thought processes with my teens.  I take in a lot of information during the course of a week – there are newsletters in my email box, blogs I subscribe to, books I slowly get through and audios I listen to.   Whenever I read or listen I am formulating ideas, opinions, and knowledge.  Discipleship is about passing that on.

I have started to email my older two with recommended online reading.  I have been doing this for a while but lately I’ve been struck with the need to be intentional about it and I’ve started to share the context of why I’m sending it to them.  I’d like them to read it and I’d like them to respond in some way.  Sometimes they respond with a quick email reply and other times we end up discussing the issues at hand in great length.

I also earmark articles/blogs etc to share over the dinner table.  This is particularly good if Peter is home as it opens an opportunity for him to speak into the kids thinking as well.  It also includes the younger two, who aren’t ready to read and think on these things independently.

We can easily get caught up in encouraging our children in their learning, in their passions and interests.  We teach the values and beliefs our family holds and yet the idea of inviting our children into our learning journey somehow gets left out.    For us to be showing our children that learning truly is a lifetime pursuit, we need to be showing our children that we are learning: not just by them seeing us sitting down with a book and pen in hand, but rather by them interacting with the very same ideas we are interacting with.