My Mommy Diary: Thinking About Spiritual Development

What I'm currently thinking about motherhood... 

 For the last 11 months, I have been on top of Wesley's cognitive, motor, and even moral development. Working with him every day to roll over, crawl, stand up, walk, talk, clap, wave, high five, share, be nice, say please and thank you, and anything else he is suppose to do. However, recently I became aware that I wasn't putting the same effort into his spiritual development, something that as a follower of Christ is extremely important to me. 

I think it hit me when I was praying with a couple friends and Wesley was talking through the whole thing. While its completely appropriate for him to do that right now, it just made me realize that I haven't even tried to teach him to pray! I think somewhere in my subconscious, I think, "It's okay, he will learn those things when he is older and at a more appropriate developmental stage." But in my conscious brain, I know that's not true. It's important to teach him those things now. I work with adoptive families and one of the things we teach them is to tell their children that they are adopted right now. Meaning that even if they just adopted an infant, to tell that infant that they are adopted and its a wonderful thing that they were. That way, its not news to them that they are adopted, no secret, just part of who they are. They can then grow up being proud of the fact that they are adopted and go around telling everyone, "I'm adopted!" I want it to be the same for Wesley, second nature that he is a child of God, that God loves him, that Jesus died for him. And I want him to be proud of that and tell everyone around him, "God loves me!" 

 So then I started thinking about what I can do to foster Wesley's spiritual development. I think the first thing I can do is to PRAY for him, like really pray hard that Wesley grows up to be a strong follower of Christ, that he knows that God loves him and created him for a purpose. I feel this is the most important step, but since I am horrible at keeping a routine "quiet time" with God or carving out time in my day to really pray hard, I came up with a creative solution. I started pray-singing for Wesley while I rock him to sleep. I've been determined to sing Wesley to sleep (after I wrote this post), but for some reason I can never think of any songs to sing and end up singing the same songs over and over. One night while I was thinking about this spiritual development stuff, I was struggling to think of a new song, so I decided that I would just make up a song and the lyrics would be my prayer for Wesley. Its the perfect solution. 

 The next thing in Wesley spiritual journey is to make sure I tell him every day, God loves you!", "God made you!", "Jesus died for you!" and every other thing I want him to know about our God. I might be thinking it, but if I don't say it, he won't hear it! Then there is the other stuff like making sure we take him to church, listening to worship music, reading Bible stories and other Christian books, praying in front of him, and teaching him to pray. The other night, I got out a few of the Baby Bibles that Wesley has. One of them has a soft cover (its called the Hug Me Bible) and Wesley loves it. Its his new favorite book and he even opens it every once in a while ;) I wish I had brought it out sooner.

 So in short, I am going to be more intentional about Wesley's spiritual development and make it more of a priority. Help me out folks, what else can I do to encourage Wesley's spiritual development? What does your family do?