Serving Others

At some point the faith your family has been building has to reach somebody. Not because it wasn't real before. But faith that only circulates inside a family — that knows all the right things and stays warm in its own house — isn't quite fully itself yet. God loves the world in the particular. Through ordinary people doing ordinary things in the actual moments of their actual days. That's how the love that reached us keeps moving.

These 20 lessons don't ask your family to take on a project or clear a weekend. They ask you to look at the people who are already right in front of you — the neighbor, the kid at co-op who eats lunch alone, the person at the checkout who looks like they're having the worst day — and do the thing love does: notice, and respond. Each lesson connects something your family has already learned about God to a specific kind of service. The sequence is intentional. We don't serve to earn anything. We serve because we've been loved, and love moves outward when it's healthy.

Something tends to happen to a family's attention during this month. When you spend 20 mornings asking who's in front of you and what they might need, you start seeing differently. The lessons close; the attention stays open. Kids notice things they didn't notice before. They ask questions you weren't expecting. By lesson 20 your family will have a working picture of what loving people actually looks like in the middle of a school day — specific, doable, not dependent on a special occasion or a surplus of energy you don't have.