Office of Marriage & Family Life

Take time to read and reflect on the Scriptures for this Sunday.

Don’t have access to a Bible?

1 Kings 19:9a, 11-13a

The Lord was in the tiny whispering sound.

Psalm 85:9,10, 11-12, 13-14

Lord let us see your kindness.

Romans 9:1-5

I wish for my people to receive Jesus.

Matthew 14:22-33

O you of little faith, why did you doubt?

Here are some reflection questions to help you have Great Conversations with the whole family.

Teach your children to direct their intellect, senses and will to Jesus:

Start out by acknowledging our own experiences when we were frightened by powerful forces in nature, like the wind and waves at sea. Don’t use frightening imagery, (they don’t need more to worry about!), but let them know that experiencing anxiety is normal.

Sit with your children and practice using our senses to refocus. Maybe go into the garden and pick a flower or sit in the grass and look really closely at a blade of grass or dandelion and focus intently on how it looks, feels and smells. Encourage them to pretend they are seeing it for the first time ever. If you have food from the garden, encourage them to taste it like it was the first time. Really spend time on this and let them know God made these things for us to know and enjoy. 

Now encourage them to ask Jesus for help and to feel free to do it a lot. Tell them about how Jesus will take our hand if we ask him for help. A great prayer to teach them for this is the Jesus Prayer: 

“Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Let them know that Christians have prayed this prayer for more than 1,500 years and Jesus loves to hear us say it.” 

The Pew Research Center found that 70% of teens believe that anxiety is a major problem for their peers. God made us with a longing to be in communion with him, and the only place we can fully experience that communion is heaven.  Should we be really be surprised that we are anxious? 

Peter sinks when his attention shifts from Jesus to his fear of the wind and waves. The same thing happens to us. Our minds can easily become flooded by our fears when we think about all the things we need to do or all the things that could happen and we realize that we have so little control over the ‘wind and waves’ of the world around us.  

We help our children enormously when we let them know that, until we are in heaven, it’s totally normal to be anxious at times. The key is to shift our focus from what we fear to whom we love. If we turn our attention to Jesus and ask for his help, he will grab our hand just as quickly as he grabbed Peter’s.