SIMPLE SERVICE A FAMILY AFFAIR

PCW2 Trailson Moore, wife Kayla, baby Sawyer, Holden-5, and Jaxson-7

Last week I posted a piece on how serving can be messy! I was talking to my daughter Kayla this past weekend and she talked about how she and her husband, as a family, are going about teaching service to their boys. We all want to make a difference and sometimes it’s difficult to know how to apply that. So how can you teach service and do it together as a family?

Kayla and her husband, Trailson, decided that the best way to teach was to serve together as a family.  Their boys are seven, five and one years old, so simplicity is the best teacher. They decided to make it a goal to do an act of service everyday and then talk about it at dinner that night. How? It can be simple as opening a door for someone, picking up a piece of paper a friend dropped in the hall, Kayla saw garbage in a parking lot and had an extra bag in her car to pick it up and throw it away. The point is to pay attention to even the smallest opportunities to give someone a hand or make the world a better place.

We’ve all been there. A moment comes up where we think, “I should help him with that…” and then the moment passes and we let an opportunity to serve pass right on by. We are either afraid to step up or just don’t take the time to do it. Part of serving, the messy part, is learning to push past that and do it anyway! Teaching your children to pay attention to the opportunities to act in service gives them a priceless tool to make the world a better place one moment at a time, one life at a time. And if you are serving as well and they are watching…that’s the best lesson of all! The more you practice it, the more natural it becomes until it’s a part of who you are.

If you have had an experience to serve or teach service to your children please share it with us in the comments section below. We should all be encouraging each other to make the world a better place!