I think a lot of us have heard of saying similar to this serve your family as Jesus

would serve your family but none of us are Jesus so how do we even do that how do we serve our family well in a way that pleases God well I'm John Fuller along with Dr Danny Werta who heads up our parenting department and we're going to revisit a conversation with

author Courtney Ellis who has some perspectives on that question. She and

focused president Jim Daly talked about how to have an attitude of service

toward your family, towards your kids,

especially when things aren't perfect.

Courtney, let's go over a few of those experiment outcomes.

Being a science guy, I like that.

But what were some of those failures and successes

in that idea of serving your children?

So when I wrote that chapter of the book, I intended this book to be a 12-month experiment

in spiritual practices and it ended up taking me over two years for reasons that I talk about

in the book that just things got delayed and stretched out and life happened.

I got pregnant with our third and it was a rough pregnancy

But the spiritual discipline of service is wonderful because it parenting is all about

serving and you're making the food for your kids and you're changing the diapers for your

kids and you're buckling them hopefully safely into their car seats and all of these things and what I

started to learn was when I became aware that Jesus was in the boat with me I

just I felt so much less alone in this evening routine.

Often my husband had meetings at church.

I was still in maternity leave, and so it was this long hour

of loneliness until I started realizing Jesus was in the boat.

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