VIDEO: Spontaneous Ministry Family Style

Giving More Freedom

In order for our children to mature into adults (this is the goal of parenting), I believe we need to allow them to have some freedoms to make mistakes, to get into trouble, to be in situations that are sticky and allow them to struggle through them. They need to learn to hear the Lord's voice. They need to see that living according to God's Word actually will work out better for them. They need to feel conviction, fear, doubt, uncertainty, failure, depression, anxiety and all that comes with this flesh, and they need to do this while they are still under our care and direction.

Prayer and discernment from the Lord is important on our part. All parents want to protect their children especially from some sort of sin being perpetrated upon them. We need to be seeking the Lord on what kind of freedoms to give while still making sure we are being wise.

My seven-year-olds have proven themselves discerning and resposonable enough to gain some of this freedom that I am speaking of. 

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A few weeks back I gave my oldest three girls the freedom to go to the park themselves. In my neighborhood that's saying a lot! And although it's only a couple blocks away, it was nerve wracking for me. I instructed them that they were indeed actually not going by themselves, but I was sending them with the Holy Spirit. I told them to make sure they're listening to Him and if He tells them anything, they NEED to listen. This along with a few other small guidelines. 

I sat at my kitchen table and called my little sister so I wasn't sitting at home like a nervous wreck waiting for my girls to come back home. 

I was so pleased to see them all together walking home at the time I instructed them to. And I love to hear the stories of how they tried to be the peacemakers between the kids at the park, or how they tried to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with the kids at the park! 

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Another time we were at my sister's house and I allowed my older 4 kids to ride their bikes with the neighbors all around the block. Again, I sent them with the Holy Spirit. However, this time they didn't listen to Him. My son came riding back and told me that the girls were following some creepy man down the ally way. I went and sought them out and asked my kids,

"Did the Holy Spirit ever warn you that this wasn't a good idea? Why didn't you listen to Him? If you're not going to keep your ears open to His voice and His leading, you could get into a very dangerous situation. Just like how you need to keep your ears attentive to when Daddy and Mommy call you and we expect you to drop everything and seek us out, you need to do that with the Lord. If He's trying to warn you about something you need to listen."

Their friends were just staring at me like I was insane. My kids totally understood and were sorry and encouraged to go out again in the leading of the Holy Spirit.

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My daughter were playing with some older boys and they were playing a tag type of game. My oldest got her hair pulled very hard on accident. She came to me crying. Immediately I told her to stop crying and go to that boy and tell him what he did and ask him to be more careful. She went in confidence and boldness and explained to him that he was playing in a way that hurt her and didn't make it fun. He said he understood, and although he never said he was sorry, he did change his behavior and my daughter got to experience standing up for herself.

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Lastly, a very recent situation: My daughters have been praying for and evangelizing someone for years now. This gave one of my children a gift. MY child received this gift with gratitude. An hour or so after, they came to me and said,

"Mom, can I talk to you for a minute?"
"Of course! What's up?"
"Well you know the ____ that ____ gave me? Well, do you remember at God's Not Broke (an outreach our church does) and you were sharing Jesus with that drunk lady? She said she believed in Jesus but I remember how she was acting and I don't think she did. Well I get that same feeling I got around her when I look at this _____ that ____ gave me. I don't think I am supposed to keep this."

"Well that's fantastic discernment! What you are feeling is called the discerning of spirits. You feel that, although this gift had the appearance of being of God, it in fact had a different spirit behind it all together! What do you think you should do?"

"I think I should get rid of it."

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All these situations are the small beginnings of my husband and I learning and praying and allowing the Holy Spirit's voice to be heard and encouraging our kids to begin to practice listening to Him, walking in boldness, growing in maturity. We don't desire to shelter our kids to an extreme extent so that they are unprepared for life as adults. We desire to see our children grow in wisdom and knowledge and discernment and boldness and in faith.

I am excited to see that maturity the Lord has built in them and I am very excited to nurture that even more! 

Parenting is so exciting! 

It's so rewarding!

There really is nothing better!

~Deputie Purim Celebration~

Purim is probably one of the most loved holidays in our house. 
It's a chance for the kids to dress up, which they don't do on the traditional Holloween.

This year it started Wednesday night.

Our family doesn't fast for Purim, we feast!

Wednesday night we had a big meal together and then make noise-makers and paper dolls that represent the characters in the Book of Esther. We then read through the book of Esther saying, "Awwwwww!" when Esther was mentioned, "Yaaaayyy!!" when Mordecai was mentioned, and "Boooooo!" when Haaman was mentioned. 

We then asked the kids questions about the stories and taught them the moral truths and character lessons we could pull out from the story. 

The next day we took off school and baked more Challah bread and meatloaf for our feast as well as hundreds of Hamantaschen cookies to hand out to neighbors and friends since Purim in known as a time of gift giving. 

That night we went to church for our BIG celebration and feast all together. It was LOUD and SO FUN!

We packaged our hundreds of cookies and made individual tags for them. 

Delivering cookies to the neighbors. 

Elias, my brave knight, wouldn't deliver the cookies in fear that a dog would come. He stayed back a safe distance. 

However we had to leave right afterward since I suddenly felt horribly ill. I was up all last night with pains so severe I was rolling around on the floor crying. I am praying that that Purim celebration puts me into active labor today. 

Hayven and her Best Friend as Esther :)

Haman! Booooooo!!!

My Best Friend and her husband decided to dress up and be Alex and I! Hahaha I love them so SO much!!

Thank you God that You deliver Your people. 

Thank you for continued provision and deliverance from our enemies. 

Thank You that You fight for us.

Thank You that You're a living God and You make Your Name known! 

All praise and glory and honor and power belong to You!

Deputie's Hanukkah 2017!!! **LOTS OF PHOTOS!!**

Happy Hanukkah!

We LOVE celebrating Hanukkah as a family! We've done it before half-heartedly, but this year we purposed to go all out. We typed up our own Bible study to do each night of Hanukkah, went over the history of the holiday as a family, made all the traditional food, listened to the music, and purposed to try to have people over and involved over the whole 8-day celebration!

In the first part of this post I want to talk about how simple it is to start celebrating this holiday then I want to zoom into the studies we did and how we see Yeshua (that's Jesus' actual name folks!) throughout the WHOLE Bible! My husband lead these studies and had the kids or whoever was joining us that night read the passages out loud. These studies were filled with some serious laughter sessions! Sometimes it took us over an hour to do one of these because we were having so much fun!

Where Do We Start?
(1) Get a Hanukkah Menorah. These Menorah's have 1 Shemash (the servant candle in the center) and 8 branches for the 8 days the oil lasted for the Macabees when they were rededicating the temple.

(2) Know the History: Do a quick study on the history of this holiday.

(3) Know what the Bible Says: Research where the Feast of Dedication is mentioned in the scripture. It's important to realize that Jesus celebrated this holiday as well as read what he said while attending this feast.

(4) Cook some Food: Fried in oil is really the goal. You can make latkes or traditional Hanukkah doughnuts called sufganiyot or just make simple friend doughnuts. We eat a very un-kosher Hanukkah meal (after all we are Gentiles), so we're not too strict on the dairy-meat regulations or even the pork regulations... Just being honest.

(5) Print the Study and Open Your Bibles: At sundown light the shemash, use the she mash to light the first candle, pull out your Bible's and start exploring the Light of the World through all of history!

(6) Play Games and Watch movies: You can play the traditional dreidel game with chocolate coins, or just your normal board games or card games. You can watch movies as a family, dance to music, or just wrestle on the floor.

It's really not that difficult. But the studies are the core of the holiday for us. Even if we don't have time every evening to sit down and play games, we fit the study in before we do anything else.

Why Do This?
Personally, the Lord laid on our heart while we were in Israel this last month to celebrate all the feasts of the Bible with our kids this year. WE have celebrated Hanukkah a little bit our whole marriage, but never fully. We do it simply for the opportunity to teach our kids the deep symbolic meanings of these feasts and how they all mirror Jesus Christ (Yeshua)! It's amazing the amount of wisdom, knowledge, and peace that we've seen our family grow into over this 8-day celebration!

We don't feel we have any religious obligation to celebrate this feast, we simply wanted to use it as a time to teach our children and enjoy a feast that Jesus celebrated. It has so much more meaning then Christmas does in terms of Biblical application.

What If My Husband's Not On Board?
He's the head of the home! Ask him if he's okay with you celebrating it and ask him if he's willing to participate in any degree even if it's just being present. If he's still not feeling it, then let it go. You can still lead your children in a Bible study without celebrating the whole holiday. :)

8-Night Bible Studies:
These are the core to the celebration for our family. Everything else is just icing on the sufganiyot! We easily spend 1-2 hours on these studies and ask questions, cross references verses, bring in the kids memory verses from their CKC books (similar to Awana), and talk about current events, historical events, and prophetic events. It's so rich, yet so simple. Every person receives something from these studies. Our 4-year old all the way to the adults that join us that night. 

I attached a PDF copy of what we started with for our studies and some activity ideas for the day. We added to these as we went through them and they'll probably change as the years progress and we make our celebration of Hanukkah our own!

If you want the full study in PDF just leave a comment below with your email and I will email it to you without publicly sharing your email address. :)

Day One: Light of Creation
We learned that Jesus (Yeshua) is the light of the world who has always been since the beginning of Creation. All things are made for Him and through Him and nothing was made without Him. We learned that in Him there is no darkness!

We made traditional jelly doughnuts (Sufganiyot) invited a few friends over, made paper dreidels, had a Big feast, frosted Hanukkah cookies, and watched half of Fiddler on the Roof!

Day Two: Light of Noah
We explored the similarities of Judah Maccabee and Noah standing u for righteousness in a dark time. We learned how Yeshua and the ark that Noah put his faith in are similar. Yeshua is our salvation that hides us from God's (Yahweh's) wrath coming on the earth to judge sin. We talked about what faith is and how we can apply the faith Noah had to our lives.

We made TONS of cinnamon sugar doughnuts, then packed up our feast and shared it at church with our brothers and sisters in Christ!

Day Three: Light of Abraham
We explored Abraham's obedience to Yahweh and his willingness to sacrifice his son, just like Yahweh did with His son Yeshua!

We colored some wooden dreidels, did a questionnaire sheet on Abraham's story, spent time dancing, had a big feast, ate doughnuts, played dreidel then finished watching Fiddler on the Roof.

Day Four: Light of Moses and Israel
We read through the Passover and investigated the parallels between the Passover lamb and Yeshua! We also read about when Moses received the law from Yahweh on Mount Sinai and how the intention of the law was to show us our need for a Savior. 

This was Alex and I's date night, so the kids had fun with their babysitter playing games, watching a short movie, and dancing to music. 

Day Five: Light of Yeshua: Birth, Life, and Death
We went to my mom and step-dad's house for our celebration this night. We read Isaiah 53 and talked about how that passage was written hundreds of years before Jesus. We broke it down and talked about how it applied to Yeshua. We read through the story of Yeshua's birth, some of death, and His purpose for coming to earth. We went over the gospel message and how we can attain salvation.

My mom and husband set out my mom's Christmas Village, we ate food, cut the kids hair, danced to music, played with toys, and watched movies until late into the night.

Day Six: Light Given to the Jewish People then the Gentiles
We learned about how Yeshua was Jewish and talked about what it meant to become a Jew. We learned that Yahweh chose the Jewish people to be a light in this world. We read that the Jewish people rejected Yeshua as Messiah and salvation was available to Gentiles. We learned what "grafted in" means and looked at the grafted in symbol and talked about what it means for us.

On this night, we laughed so HARD during the study! Aryeh was enjoying himself so much he was just hysterical. He was opening a Bible pretending to read and then at any sign of something funny he was rolling on the ground laughing. Elias fell asleep while sitting up during the study which caused us to laugh even harder. The people we planned to get together with ended up getting sick so it was just us.

Day Seven: Light of Today (Evangelism & Great Commission)
On this night we spent the day making our Hanukkah Window Decorations that I put off until Day 7! Oops!! We did our study and then spent the night watching movies and eating cookies. Nothing too exciting this night. Our plan was to practice sharing the gospel and role play situations with the kids, but we were so wiped out we ended up just going to bed :)

Day Eight: Light of Rapture & Millennium Reign of Yeshua
Our last night was one with two of our dearest little friends and we talked about Yeshua's return! We were anticipating this evening to be a joyous one sharing with the kids what we have to look forward to, but turns out one of the scriptures we read lead to the discussion of the ANti-Christ, mark of the beast, and installment of the one-world religion which lead to fountains of tears! 

We shared with the kids that there are believers all over the world being put to death for their beliefs. We also reassured the kids we won't be here when this anti-Christ system is put into motion, however, persecution is a real thing and death is going to come to all of us. But we get to reign and rule with Jesus Christ for all eternity!!! 

Oh, the hope we have!

We had a complete blast celebrating Hanukkah this year and plan on doing it every year adding to our family traditions and hopefully bringing others along for the ride with us! Alex already has many ideas and is jotting down things he wants to implement next year!