We’re well into fall, and everywhere you look you’ll see the beautiful,warm colors of turning leaves, pumpkins, and all the rich produce that comes with the harvest. Amidst the fall festivals, corn maze tours, and pumpkin-spice lattés, take time to harvest hope with your kids. Introduce them to the needs of your community and beyond. Food shortages and poverty afflict the USA and the world at perilous levels as natural disasters and drought seem unrelenting. Despite events beyond our control, you can empower your kids to be a catalyst for compassion! Give them the chance to grow up in the knowledge that they can make a difference and God can work through them to reveal hope—no matter their age or location in the world.Cottonwood Creek Baptist Church, Allen, TX is participating in "Scare Away Hunger" to benefit a local food bank as well as "Shine the Light" night resource kits for families to utilize. Here are some additional family experiences for you to harvest hope with your kids.
FAITH@HOME EXPERIENCES
Introduce kids to the impact they can have on the world:
- Harvest Time — Take your kids to a local farm or community garden and volunteer together. Use the time to talk with your kids about food shortages around the world and discuss how to get involved, as a family, in the solution. Ask the farm or garden’s manager if they donate a portion of the crops to a soup kitchen or other charitable foundation. Make that your next family destination to volunteer and see how the crops you helped harvest can feed the hungry.
- World Well-Fare Website Tour—Introduce your kids to the needs in the USA and around the world with a virtual tour of the efforts of nonprofit organizations. Explore websites such as compassion.com and worldvision.org to show your kids how other children in the world live with very little and how we can help them, even from the other side of the globe. There are also projects, such as Operation Kid-to-Kid (ok2k.org.), designed specifically for getting kids involved in impacting a stricken region of the world. Currently, ok2k is focusing on “squashing malaria in Mali.” The funds gathered by kids participating in ok2k will go to purchase effective mosquito nets that protect children and families while they sleep. Our church is working GAIN and setting aside a whole Sunday in November called THE GIFT to process and pack food, sort and pack seeds, collect hair and blood donations, all for meeting the needs of people in a needy region. Our kids are helping meet the financial needs by filling M&M tubes with quarters and presenting these at offering times.
- A Tricky Treat—If you take your kids trick-or-treating in your neighborhood, challenge them with this twist on an old tradition. As they knock on doors, ask them to request a single, non-perishable canned good at each door (rather than candy). Help your kids gather the cans, and then go with them to donate the food to a local food bank. Reward your kids with something special for giving up the usual swath of candy to help those in need. Our church is doing something very similar to this by partnering with Scare Away Hunger in order to benefit a local food bank.
GOD MOMENTS
- Equip kids with compassion. In the past decade we’ve seen an alarming climb in the occurrence of violence at schools, devastating bullying, and depression in very young children. Teachers and caregiver are doing everything they can to reverse the trend, but there’s only so much they can do. The real solution is in the kids themselves and introducing them to the power of compassion. When your child witnesses bullying, takes part in it, or is the victim, use the experience to bring into focus that cruelty is not the answer—kindness is.
- Allow for generosity. If you give your kids an allowance, label a savings jar where they can donate funds to go to a local charity. Don’t make it mandatory. Let your kids choose how much and when to give of what they’ve earned.
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