Do you enjoy planning? As a creative girl, I don’t always appreciate the idea of planners and I certainly don’t schedule every moment of my day (or month or year or or or!!!!) Yet spending time pondering and praying over dreams and visions for the future does capture my attention and help me hone my focus for the important things. We even taught our children to make plans for their days, early on …
As our family grew—with Sarah born in 1984, Joel in 1986, Nathan in 1989, and Joy in 1995—we increasingly made numbering our children’s days a priority of our parenting. We still tried to have our weekly planning breakfasts, but overseas ministry, numerous moves, and then living out in the country forced us to be more creative about planning. Whenever and however it happened, though, we tried to plan weekly for the spiritual influence and training of our children’s lives. It was a priority in the patterns and practices of our parenting and family life. We also took time out around September or January each year, sometimes as a weekend getaway, to plan for the year ahead—for us and our children.
Our children would take part in the planning too. When they reached an age where they were able make a list of some kind (I allowed a lot of latitude in list making), we would involve them in setting their own goals. We never wanted our children to become passively dependent on us to number their days for them. Rather, we wanted to model for them how to begin thinking about their own lives and how to follow our example in setting goals for themselves. We deliberately avoided making it an onerous duty and enforcing list completion by certain times; instead, we modeled goal making as a positive and fun thing to do.
Each child approached planning differently. We didn’t insist on one right way but simply enjoyed seeing each of them get involved and excited about planning their lives in ways that made sense to them and reflected their own personality preferences. Whatever they did, and however they did it, we would delight in their goals and affirm their efforts. We focused on the children’s work, not just the product of their work. Sally and I were still mostly the ones who were numbering our children’s days, but we were also teaching them the first steps in acquiring the habits and skills they would use as young adults to develop a “heart of wisdom” through following the guidance of Moses’ prayer.
We considered planning for each child’s spiritual life and char- acter development—practices and qualities of their relationship and life with God—to be distinct from planning for their schooling and activities. We would help them develop their own personal goals for Bible reading, Scripture memorization, and prayer, and plan times to do them. We could create charts of varying sizes, colors, and complexity, depending on their age, to help them keep track of their consistency and progress. We used a variety of methods to help them be faithful with chores and meeting other character-development goals.
When they reached their teens, although we would engage in planning and spiritual life discussions with them, we began to trust them to make their own plans for their days and for growing in wisdom with God. For our family, we saw the process of planning with our children as a relational, dynamic, and organic process, not as just a task or procedure to be accomplished.
Numbering our children’s days was the first lifegiving practice we initiated in our home. It brought the life of God into our midst in very practical and practicable ways for our children. As they began to think about their own goals and how they could follow God and grow in wisdom to please Him, they began to think in terms that brought the reality of God who is “our dwelling place in all generations” (Psalm 90:1) into their own place of dwelling and their own generation. We were training them to think of God not just as an impersonal source of truth to be known or maker of rules to be followed, but also as the living God in whom they would find real life and develop a real relationship.
