Sunday...

We had intended to travel into London again and attend Westminster. Instead, we had a quiet day at home experiencing sabbath rest. We gathered together, sang, read God's Word, and prayed. It was a sweet family time with leisure to discuss the passage we read about Moses.

I think one of the things we will take back from this sabbatical and particularly our time in England and Scotland will be the three families we stayed with and their modeling of family worship for us. I think my kids were all surprised to find other normal families worshiping together.

Family worship is something we have always done since Jacob was about 2yrs old. Now that we have entered Jr. High and High School, life seems to have gotten quite complicated and time for worship has been very challenging as our family is not always together.

I think as a family, we always felt strange or different that we practiced a time for family worship. Yet at the same time, family worship is what grounded us and knit our hearts to God and to each other. In times of stress, sorrow, or great joy we had a place we could turn to with each other in the worship of God.

So here we find our selves in the UK longing for family worship and now each of our children have been the ones encouraging us parents by asking "when will we have family worship today?".

So I asked each of my kids individually how important family worship was to them, what they were willing to sacrifice in order to have it and just plain old how would we do it or make it work with all of our different schedules? Jacob was quite sure that we should carry on without him if he had a late night at school. Some nights he doesn't come home till after dinner, 7, 8 , 9:30pm. I told him that we had a high value to worship all together and that it would be too sad to worship without him...but he insisted that worship was important (and with a tear in his eye) we we did need to carry on.

So, we plan to have worship at dinner time to the best of our ability with whoever is home. We also plan to read scripture in the morning before the kids go off to school. Jackie said she was willing to wake up a little earlier for this as the 3 boys will leave the house at 7:05am.

I was asking one of my friends from her perspective with our daily schedule how we could fit worship in. She told me that she just wouldn't feel right if she missed scripture in the morning and worship at night. It was just like brushing your teeth. I have thought about that quite a bit on this trip especially as we have toured sites of many great reformers and spiritual leaders. How dear they held the Word of God. I would like to take this back with me...

-Jenny