Love Your Neighbor

By now we have all come to realize that the world is becoming a place of ugliness and darkness. It is important for us to raise and expose our children to humbleness at an early age so once they are older they understand what it is. They will value their life and the things they have. So, how do we get our children to understand the importance of serving their community? Explain to them how helping the community will help them become a better person. In our home, we do not give our children an option when it comes to school, church or community service, just like When we were growing up. However, we also follow up with explaining why these things are important in their lives.


My two little ones are still too young to understand community service so we have been working on how to treat others. Aaliyah, our 3 year old has a strong personality however she is starting to learn that it’s not nice to yell at baby Aria and she should keep her hands to herself.


I wanted to focus on things that we have done to get our oldest involved in outreach and community service. As leaders of our church, outreach is a key point of what we do. From the beginning we have done different things to help the community we are in and the people in it. We have always explained to Maiya that she needs to be kind and care for others but community service puts words into action. Here is where we started.


PARTNERING WITH OUR NEIGHBORHOOD ASSOCIATION


One of the first outreach events we took our daughter to was a neighborhood clean up day. This event took place in our neighborhood and we were in charge of picking up garbage on the grass and sidewalks. During the pick up she asked questions about the amount of garbage laying around and came to the realization of how unsafe the garbage was making the neighborhood.


FEED MY STARVING CHILDREN


Feed my Starving Children is an organization where people can go volunteer to pack meals for children around the world. This one was by far the best experience a child can have. The staff at FMSC educates the volunteers on how many children will be fed with the amount of food that was packaged. Maiya enjoyed working in a group and learning about how her efforts on that day fed hundreds of children who do not have a lot of resources for food.


Church Outreach
As mentioned earlier outreach is the purpose of our church so last year we did a book bag give away with supplies and winter care packages for the homeless in our city. We made sure Maiya was apart of picking the book bags and stuffing them with supplies, this way she was proud to hand them out herself. We did the same thing with our care packages. We also fed a nearby shelter Thanksgiving Dinner. Now even though she was unable to cook the food she was able to serve food.


I think the biggest way to get kids involved in community service is to just let them be a part. Allow them to ask questions, make suggestions, fill bags or pass things out. Explain the reason why they are doing this and how important it is. Make this something you do as a family or with your church a couple of times a year. The more you do it the more normal it will become and they will grow up to do this on their own.


If you absolutely do not know where to start I would recommend starting with Feed my Starving Children. It’s fun, educational and a humbling experience for everyone.


Happy helping
Love Jo