CCC Gainesville | Blog
Summer is just around the corner. This morning as I packed my daughters lunch I sang out, “Only 7 more lunches to pack!” Many of you are preparing for long awaited vacations and time together as a family. Our family will be heading to the mountains in Tennessee to spend a week with grandparents and an aunt and uncle. We are planning other things to do as a family among them includes choosing the books we will read together. One of the books we are reading is Sally Lloys-Jones’ family devotional, Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing.
This family devotional has 101 simple-yet profound thoughts on faith. It is perfect for bedtime, story time, reading in the car, at the dinner table, the breakfast table, in the park where ever. Each entry is short and yet filled with biblical truth. It can be a companion to the much loved Jesus Storybook Bible. Once again the author has joined up with the illustrator Jago to create a family devotional that is rich in word and image designed to do one thing: make the reader’s heart sing.
Quote from the foreword by Tim Keller:
Why has so little attention ever been given to the devotional lives of children? Of course we should be doing all the standard things: teaching them catechism, including them in family devotions, helping them to participate in worship. But encouraging a child to develop his or her own devotional life has been a missing piece that has direct effect on whether a child grows up with a balanced spiritual life or one that is dangerously one sided.
By that I mean that it is all too easy to concentrate on data-transmission to our children… Somehow, however, the experiential side of a relationship with God is often neglected, so that by the time children are teens, they are woefully lopsided-long on information, but short on experience of God’s presence… Thoughts to Make Your Heart Sing may be the best, first introduction for children to have their own time with Jesus.
This book is available in both hardback and Kindle versions. I would love to recommend the hardback version so that it can be held by young children and the pages can be touched as they look though the beautiful images.
Enjoy your Summer!
I’m not sure where you all are in reading through The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (LWW) by CS Lewis*.
The scene where Lucy meets Mr. Tumnus is simply delightful. That he sees her as–in her essence–a human, a “Daughter of Eve” is so inspiring. And that he thinks “wardrobe” and “spare room” are geographical places is realistic, and funny.
*Reading Philippians a dozen times and LWW once are sorta the law of the Medes and Persians this summer.
Coming soon to CCC…
Journey to the Lamppost: A Narnia Adventure
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All children ages 3* to rising 5th graders are invited on our journey into Narnia! Join us as we play games, sing songs, create art, serve others and learn about Jesus and his amazing life.
*3 year olds require a parent or guardian to stay on property.
For more information or to register visit our VBS page on the church website.
As you begi your journey into Narnia through reading C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe we will be providing complementary essays that will deepen your experience. Some of these readings will be helpful for adults, or books club discussions, while other readings will be more helpful for parents when answering questions children might ask.
Jerram Barrs wrote Echoes of Eden in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Jerram Barrs:
In his Narnia books, Lewis very intentionally set out to tell the Christian story but not in such a way that those who were ignorant of or resistant to it would find it thrust in their faces. He wanted to capture the imaginations of children and touch their hearts just as he had been captured by the fantastic tales he had read when he was young. As an avid student of the Gospels, Lewis also knew that Jesus himself told wonderful stories which he used to communicate truth indirectly to people who, for all sorts of reasons, would no longer listen to straightforward presentations of it. Lewis wanted his stories, like the myths and fairy stories he loved, to reflect the underlying truths of reality but to do so even more deliberately. In fact, his goal was to ensure that his stories were full of “echoes of Eden.”
Continue reading Echoes of Eden at this link
The Opus Project’s Reading Group has embarked on a series with select works by C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien that started in April and will go through August. In April we read Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories”; next we turn to essays by Lewis in the collection The Weight of Glory, before joining in the church-wide “one read” of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (to accentuate the summer Narnia-themed VBS program). Finally, we will discuss Lewis’ adult novel called Till We Have Faces.
Lewis is one of those names that anyone who gets anywhere near thoughtful streams of Christianity will hear quoted with much frequency. And yet, I would be willing to wager that most of us rarely read Lewis beyond his most famous works (Mere Christianity, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Screwtape Letters). For some he can be seen as overplayed and outdated. But we suspect there’s much more to Lewis than we’re accustomed to hearing.
I hope you will consider joining us as we look deeper into Lewis as a resource for recovering the Christian imagination . We will meet on Sunday, June 2 at 9am during the education hour to discuss The Weight of Glory (get your copy now). We will primarily discuss the title essay “The Weight of Glory”, though we hope to get to others as well.
While you are at it, why don’t you bundle together an order for our next couple of months? We will discuss in various forums The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe on June 30. Then for July 28 and August 25, we’ll read Till We Have Faces.
Hope you’ll plan on joining in on the conversation.
