Thursday, December 9, 2010

Teaching Generosity at Home

Christmas is an ideal opportunity to be reminded of the opportunity to learn generosity. Dr. Tim Elmore has provided a guest post on how to help children learn to be generous at Christmas. He suggests the following:

1. Start a new tradition with your children in helping them create a list of gifts they plan to give away to others. These may include gifts which they purchase with their own money or something which they treasure.

2. Suggest that for every gift they put on their wish list, they get to plan to give one of their own toys or electronic device (which is fully functional) to another less fortunate child.

3. The author shares that one set of parents he knows had their children go through all their toys one December and make two piles -- one pile to give away and the second they felt worth keeping. Then the parents talked about sacrificial giving and suggested that the children give away the pile of toys they had planned to keep.

As parents and adults, what are the ways that we can practice and model generosity in the name of Jesus this Christmas season?

Thanks to so many of you who have been involved in sharing with your neighbors, Operation Christmas Child, through the ministry of Valley Grace and in many other ways. May we continue to learn generosity and what it means to give!

PS - if you would like to read the full blog post from Dr. Tim Elmore, you can find it here.

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