CKBD: Jesse Tree Day 3

Thank you so much for checking out the Kids’ Bible Devotional Jesse Tree Podcast! If you happen to want to subscribe directly to the podcast via iTunes, or you want to catch up from the beginning, OR you want to see the downloadable files all in one place . . . just click on the “Podcasts” heading up on the menu. That’ll be your one-stop shopping (free shopping; the best kind!) for the Jesse Tree series.

The latest podcast is at the bottom of this post.

Kids Daily Devotional Jesse Tree Advent — Painting Jesse Tree

We rolled back into town from our Thanksgiving trip on Saturday night and quickly recorded the first podcast before putting the kids to bed for the night, so we’re running a little bit behind schedule on our Jesse Tree plans (we’re also running behind on laundry, our house is still decorated for fall, not Christmas, and we’re slacking on all sorts of other things . . . but I digress). Last night, before bed, the kiddos got to work painting a tree on our back door for us to hang our Jesse Tree ornaments on.

This won’t be the first time over the past couple of years that we’ve needed to hang up more than one Jesse Tree ornament at a time. It used to drive me crazy if I couldn’t start something and have it be perfect from the beginning. And when things didn’t go along as planned and on schedule, it would cause me to be stressed or discouraged. This need for perfection was a real problem, especially when it came to homeschooling.

Thankfully, I’ve discovered that it matters a lot more to me than it does to the kids. And, if I’ll just jump in and get going, we can usually make adjustments along the way that make things even better than I intended. When we put up a backlog of Jesse Tree ornaments, we review God’s story from the beginning. The kids tell me which part of the story each one represents and we have a chance to make sure that things we’ve talked about have really registered. It’s great! No perfection required.

So, if you’re behind, or just jumping in on Day 3, no worries. Just get going. There’s no reason you have to go back and start at the beginning unless you just want to.

While I’m on the subject of “Lessons Learned” let me tell you one we learned while my husband edited today’s podcast: We need to have a little discussion with our sweet, precious daughter about not editing God’s word, at least not without letting people know. After reading and recording one section of her verses for today, she mentioned being concerned that some of the kids listening wouldn’t understand what she was reading. We told her it was fine and that they’d be talking about it after reading and that would help clear up anything that was confusing. My husband realized, LONG after her bedtime, when he was editing the podcast, that she’d already tried to “help” the kids out there out by changing some of the wording in ways she thought was helpful. We felt like her changes weren’t particularly critical and decided not to wake her up to re-record. If you and your children are following along in your own Bibles, it might be a good exercise in checking what you hear against what the Bible really says!

You can download the devotional guide and ornament for Day 3 by clicking on the image to the left or here: Day-3-Promise.pdf (1671 downloads)

And you can page on down to find today’s podcast at the end of the end of this post.

Note: Our kiddos are going to be reading from the Common English Bible (CEB). We love this version because, while it’s a translation and not a paraphrase, it uses language that is approachable and more easily understood by our children. My husband and I like the translation for ourselves as well, and we enjoy all being able to open our Bibles (hard copies and iPad versions) and read from the same translation.