Practice Makes Parent

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Dr. Danny Huerta: Hi and welcome to Practice Makes Parent, where we understand it's not about perfection but about transformation. I'm Dr. Danny Huerta.

Rebecca St. James: And I'm Rebecca St. James. If you are a parent who has ever thought, "We should be doing more spiritually as a family," then this episode is for you. Sometimes we feel guilty or overwhelmed, like, "Where do I start with that question?" As Christian parents, we think that from time to time. I want to do more. I want to be more intentional.

Dr. Danny Huerta: Out of love, right? I mean, there's this love for our heavenly Father, so naturally we want to do more. That is a natural impulse. When we go to guilt, that's a different story.

Four out of 10 Americans actually use their Bible and the majority say they wish they spent more time reading the Bible. That means, "I want to have more conversation with my heavenly Father," which is fantastic. But some parents may be asking, "I don't know how to do this," or "Am I doing this right?" That can be intimidating as a parent because there's a lot at stake here. You hear all the statistics about kids walking away from their faith or all of a sudden leaving their faith.

We have a listener question that came in and we're going to actually be diving into that topic. We're going to help build some confidence in you today as a parent. Most parents don't lack faith or desire. What we lack is margin, energy, and a clear place to just get started with it and then to be consistent with it.

We want our homes to be places where faith is lived from the heart, not just talked about. That's really at the vision of it all for us as parents. Somewhere between carpool, dinner, homework, and bedtime, it can feel impossible to build meaningful spiritual habits without adding one more thing to an already overloaded plate. That's just it. We talk about parents being tired. Parents in this community, you are intentional just by being with us on this show. We want to provide you with practical things as you're spending this precious time with us.

Rebecca St. James: So yes, this conversation today is about small, doable practices that actually fit real family life, not perfect routines, not Pinterest-level parenting. That's not what we're going for here, but simple rhythms that shape faith over time.

Our guests today are Pastor Chris Pappalardo and Clayton Greene, authors of *Building Spiritual Habits in the Home*. We've got their book right here. It's wonderful. If you want to know about how to move from good intentions to practices that stick, even when life feels messy, keep listening. Guys, welcome to Practice Makes Parent. We're so glad you're here.

Chris Pappalardo: We're so glad to be here. I'm excited for this.

Clayton Greene: Thanks for having us.

Rebecca St. James: This book is really doable. It's nice and short. It's a quick read, it looks like, and very practical. Just going through it, you have some good questions at the end to just think about what it is that you guys are talking about in each chapter and how to live those things out in your homes. It's great. I'd love to start with just both of you sharing why you were passionate about this book.

Chris Pappalardo: This probably happens often when it comes to people getting into ministry or publishing a book. We had a problem in our own lives that we felt like needed to be solved. We weren't the sort of people who said, "Here's a minor obstacle. We are equipped for this task." No, it began as, "We're pretty sure that we're failing in a lot of this."

I've got two kids. They are 11 and 7. But when Clayton and I started working together, they were much younger. We were just saying, "What does it actually look like with a preschool kid and an early elementary kid to actually do something meaningful when it comes to spiritual habits in the home?" I went to seminary. I got two degrees from seminary. I know what it looks like as an adult by myself to read my Bible, pray, and practice Sabbath.

Then the kids came along and I was like, "I don't feel like I know how to bring them up in this." I was thrown into this tailspin of, "Am I failing at this?" because I'm not going to teach my two-year-old to translate Greek sentences out of the Gospel of John. This was born out of necessity. We needed to solve a problem for ourselves, which was that we feel like we're failing as parents. We're at an excellent church. We have great community. But the everyday habitual level of this just feels too overwhelming. That set us out on a road to try to think through what it is that is getting in the way and how can we reverse engineer those problems to build something different.

Clayton Greene: The origin story of that and a very specific example was somewhere around 2019. It was December 23rd. My daughter Cara said to me, "Mommy and daddy, you say that Christmas is all about Jesus, but it feels like Christmas is all about presents." She was five.

She was pointing out this inconsistency—Eugene Peterson would call it a lack of congruence—between what we were saying and how we were living. It was like a knife in the back. The next year in November, I started scouring. That year that she said that, we were doing an advent guide. But there was something that was missing that was rivaling those presents in the home. That's kind of where it started for us.

We then, the next year, created something called Advent Blocks, which is a product now that is available. But essentially, for us, it was a very personal thing that our families actually started focusing on Jesus at Christmas. We took what was so successful about that because the next year our family was so engaged with what was happening. They essentially had taken the habit of every night reading and engaging with what was happening with the true Christmas story. They were more engaged with the story of Jesus than they were with the presents—or at least very similar.

It was a specific solution that happened with me and Chris fixing Christmas. Then we started applying it to other things. The book is really a culmination of us taking those things that we've learned about leading our kids in spiritual practice, almost without telling them the words, that led to us writing the book, which is essentially all the little steps that we personally use to be more consistent with the things that we intend to do, but we can't always actually make happen.

I love social science books, books on habits. There are *Atomic Habits* by James Clear, *The Power of Habit* by Charles Duhigg. Every time I would read those books, I was applying it to my Bible reading, like what you were saying, Danny. I want to spend more there. I was applying these habit books to Bible reading, but there was no Bible in the habit book. In some ways, what we wrote here and my passion for it ends up being a little bit like *Atomic Habits* meets Jesus, where I'm Atomic Habits and Chris is Jesus. That's how I like to think about it.

Chris Pappalardo: A lot of pressure.

Clayton Greene: What we ended up finding, and I think people who end up reading the book will find, is the things that the habit scientists discover are really, really good and healthy. They're actually embedded in scripture. Things like timing, environment, and friends. These other things that they're saying—use these things to be more productive—in scripture, God put those things there for our good and for our health and our relationship with Him. Hopefully, we've mined and put some of those things together.

Rebecca St. James: Guys, let's get practical then. Let's talk about the six key shifts you guys talk about, these habits, and how a family can begin to use these starting tonight or tomorrow. Let's talk about the first one and hammer that one out. Actually, list out all six first and then we'll go one at a time. How do we practically do this as a family?

Clayton Greene: The six small steps, which can be done one by one or all at the same time: make it easy, make it tangible, pick a place, choose your timing, make it playful—which is fun—and find your friends. So it's easy, tangible, place, timing, playfulness, and friends. Those are each things that can be individually used as a small tweak to a habit that already exists to make it more consistent. Or if you take all of them together, we believe you can create a plan to establish a new habit in a way that you can feel a reasonable amount of confidence that you're going to be able to actually do what you intend to do.

Dr. Danny Huerta: Clayton, that first one, simplicity, used to be defined as disciplined and focused. There was a connotation of good under simplicity and we've been going more and more so in the Christian faith towards a simpleness of our faith. The simpleness being that more disciplined life where you're able to say no to certain things and yes to certain things. Let's talk about what it means to make it easy. What does that mean? That simplifying, that making it an easy practice? What does that look like for a family that has so much going on?

Rebecca St. James: I love this question because people get so overwhelmed. I know I do as a mom. We've got kids nearly 12, nearly 8, and then 5. I can just go, "Okay, go big or go home. If we're going to do this, it's going to be elaborate and this whole thing." Similarly to you, Clayton, we had this last year with Advent. We just had a little devotional that we were doing and I had the kids coloring so that they were doing something while we were doing that reading.

I tell you what, doing the Advent season and it worked really well and they were listening and engaged. We've been able to move that into normal life because we kept it easy and we kept it simple and it was doable. I think this is such a huge question and our audience is going to really love this.

Clayton Greene: A little bit of Jesus and a little bit of practical here, Atomic Habits and Jesus. Chris brings into the story—I'll speak for you, Chris, because I've read your words now—Jesus is the one who said, "Take my yoke, it is easy." The burden is light. When we think about spiritual habits in the home, practices in the home for our families, we have to begin from the place of grace.

This is an invitation for God wanting to know us and have a relationship with us. It is not where we're having to earn our relationship with Him. That is incredibly important to making it easy because you can't conceptually in the introduction, we talk about five things about God that make us be able to think about spiritual habits in the way that we think about them. One of those things is He wants to know us and it's about our relationship with Him. We come to Him from a place of grace.

If you're not coming to Him from that place, making spiritual habits easy makes no sense at all because the urgency of me earning my way to know Him is so important. Now the actual practical thing: think about talking to a kid who's 5, 7, 9, 12. They've become a believer. Or say an adult even has become a believer. Okay, the next thing you need to do is you need to read your Bible for 15 minutes a day, you need to pray for 15 minutes a day. I don't know what numbers you guys would pick, but I'm picking even reasonably easy ones already. You need to give some of your money, you need to serve on Sunday and in the community, you need to share your faith five times a week. Probably should go on a mission trip overseas. Oh my gosh, what happened to the easy yoke?

In no way am I saying that all those things are not good for our spiritual lives. God does call us to a lot. Discipleship is costly, Bonhoeffer would say. There is something that Jesus did and something that we are called to that matters. But when you're starting someone out and you're teaching them the way, you can start easy. We would say then very practically, we would rather a whole congregation of people in a church memorized one verse of Romans than one person in that congregation memorize the whole book of Romans.

Everybody taking a small step because when you point yourself in a direction and you do that thing on a consistent basis, like the habit books would say on exercise or productivity, you're going to get somewhere by taking those small steps every day. That's why easy is so important because telling yourself that you're going to pray for 30 seconds each morning, it is possible that you're going to pray for 5, 10, 15 minutes at some point. But if you try to start at 15 minutes, I don't know if you're ever going to get over the hump. That's the combination of how we think about spiritual habits.

Dr. Danny Huerta: Something you guys call out in the book is asking the simple question, "Where did you see God today?" That's something I used with our kids growing up. Now they're 20 and 22, both following Jesus. They have their own way of connecting with God and having that devotional time. But that was something we asked on the way to church. Where did you see Jesus this past week? Because it was a longer drive to church that we had. Then when we were on hikes or walks, we would say, "Where have you seen Jesus lately? Have you heard Him?" At dinner time, sometimes. You guys call it out at dinner time.

I think that practice of being in that place of wonder and curiosity and anticipation that is not only just Advent but all throughout the year, that there's an anticipation that God is there, He's moving, He's right around the corner. He's right around us and we need to be aware of His presence. We begin to trigger that imagination, that child's imagination from an early age of, "Where did you see Jesus today? And where do you see Him now?" Chris, give us some thoughts from your point of view on what you've done with your family as well with the simplicity to it and ease to it.

Chris Pappalardo: I would love for my kids one day to be so familiar with the Bible that you could drop them anywhere in scripture and they could just start and have the context and be like, "Oh yeah, I remember what was going on in the book of Nehemiah. This is post-exilic and here are the main characters." They're not there yet.

A big piece of what we did especially early on, and this is going to sound completely ordinary and like old news, is we relied on the resources that already exist like story Bibles. For years, we just said, "This is an excellent way to give our kids the scope of all of the Bible so that when they get to the big kid Bible, the legit Bible, they will understand that this is one narrative from beginning to end about God trying to rescue His people."

I point that out because I think a lot of parents, we talk to a lot of parents who feel like they're not doing very much. Then when you ask them what they're actually doing, they have something like *The Jesus Storybook Bible* and they're reading it, maybe not every night but five nights out of the week. They're like, "I know it's not enough and it's not the real Bible." I'm like, "Yeah, it's not the words that God directly gave us, but you're doing something consistent that makes the story come alive."

We really leaned hard into that in the early years, which has made it easier now that my daughter's in middle school to transition to her reading and having more context for the rest of the Bible. She even will put it in the context of, "Oh yeah, I remember this." Or sometimes it's surprising. She's like, "You know, those story Bibles didn't really talk much about all the bad stuff David did." Good point. Let's talk about that. But it started so small. There's no shame in taking a resource that someone else has already created. You don't have to be a do-it-yourselfer with spirituality for it to be something that really matters. The point is, can I do this every day consistently? If you do that, it leads to somewhere.

Clayton Greene: We put that part in the book as well. Every chapter almost has something called Celebrate What's Working. Where it's like you take something that already is and you say, "How do we make this more meaningful? How do we add the spiritual to this?"

Two quick examples would be on the way to school, drive my kids to school every day. We've added a catechism to that time. We call it the "car-techism" because we like funny names. We ask these seven questions on the way to school that remind them of who they are. Very easy. We were already doing it. I didn't need to manufacture new time. I just did it on a consistent habit that was already in place.

Same thing, tons and tons of families have a weekly pizza movie night or a weekly ice cream night, some kind of fun night that culminates the week. This is so incredibly close to the kickoff of a Sabbath. Say a prayer, read a passage of scripture. Oh my gosh, we are instilling a habit in our kids and in ourselves that we need. There's something that we're already doing that is so close to that. Celebrate what's already working and tack on to that. It's called habit stacking.

Rebecca St. James: What about making it tangible? What ideas do you guys have for parents in that area?

Chris Pappalardo: This is one, I don't know if you recognized when Clayton was going through the list of all the shifts and steps you should take. They are all patently practical: making it easy, tangible, thinking about place. I just want to point that out because I know a lot of folks who get stuck when things aren't working. Their conclusion is, "If I were a better Christian or if I cared more about Jesus, I would be able to do these things."

Part of what we're saying is it's entirely possible that your kids don't enjoy the story of scripture because they literally don't have anything they can hold while they're doing it. Rebecca, you even mentioned coloring pages. That is a tangible thing that has nothing to do with the spiritual heart for you or for your kids, but that lets kids do something in a tactile way that keeps them engaged.

Our Advent Blocks are blocks intentionally. You just get these things out and the kids are like, "I don't know what it is, but I want it. Let me hold this thing." You can get the Advent Blocks for that time of year. We have another product called the Gratitude Cube, which I've got one here. It's a 12-sided die and very simple. On each side is just a cue for something you could be grateful for. Someone you saw today, something you did, something in nature, a food.

We have one of these at our dinner table, which has taken the conversation and the opportunities for gratitude at dinner and multiplied it five times, 10 times. Now notice what we didn't do. I didn't create a curriculum to teach my children about thankfulness because they don't want me to teach at them. But the physical resource is something they want to play with. So they roll it and they're like, "Ooh, someone I saw. I got to see Ian today. He's the best. We did this at recess." I'm like, "Awesome. Tell me more about that. And let's remember the friendship you have with Ian, that's something God gave you. Let's thank Him for that."

Making it tangible is so vital for kids, but it also makes it more playful. Then it takes the pressure off you because something external is creating the nudge rather than you having to say, "What are we thankful for? Stop and read your Bible," which can just feel, eventually, kids really nobody particularly likes that. But when you're opting in, it feels different and a tangible thing makes the opt-in easier.

Dr. Danny Huerta: Picture your kids having that time with you that's so memorable. They're enjoying the experience of rolling the dice and then being able to share those things and you're participating in it. It creates a memory marker for a child because it's something that's consistent and you're going, "Oh man, that was so much fun." You are releasing those biochemicals, the brain chemicals, that oxytocin and other things where you're having a positive interaction with your parent.

I remember with our kids when they were young, we were talking about creation. Decided to grab a lot of the herbs and things that smelled and the tastes that were out there and we talked about God's creation and the way that He created with so much creativity. If we can enter into that with curiosity, we begin to see how amazing and how big God really is and the intricacies and details of everything He created, from the microscope all the way to the universe. Then with the flowers, the fragrance that several different flowers have and their purposes. Man, I wonder how that translates to us as individuals and that we're masterpieces of His creation.

With our kids, that creativity that you guys are talking about, you've created some resources that parents can use right away. You don't have to come up with it. It's all around us, the idea of making things tangible. You could even have them drawing while you're doing the lesson. Those artistic kids that are out there that have a fantastic imagination can draw it out. I love the ideas.

Rebecca St. James: This is something so tactile that they can instigate instead of mommy going, "Yeah, let's talk about something like our highs/lows of the day," or whatever. They can instigate it. Can we move to picking a place and picking a time? Those components of getting so specific and intentional.

Clayton Greene: I remember when I lived in Wilmington—I live in Durham now, lived in Wilmington before. The location doesn't matter. What matters is the location of the gym that I was going to. I'd drop my girls off at preschool and then about two miles away was where my office was. About halfway between where the preschool was and where my office was was a gym. I got a membership at this gym and I went regularly. I mean, all the time because it's so hard to drive by something and be like, "Well, I'm not going to do that."

The next year, they were in that preschool for one year. The next year, they're at a different preschool, which was on the other side of my workplace from the gym. Same subscription to the gym, same amount of money I was paying, same amount of intention in my life to go to the gym. Do you know how often I went to the gym? Hardly ever. Why? Because I would have had to drive past my work in order to get to the gym. We're talking about very small distances.

Where you are and when you're trying to do something has an incredible impact on your ability to do it. Chris has a friend. His friend was having a hard time reading the Bible. He had for a long time read his Bible at night and at this point in his life was falling asleep while he was trying to read his Bible. Chris says, "Hey, maybe read your Bible in the morning because you're really tired at night." Shifts to the morning, so much more consistency.

Timing of things and the positioning of things matters a lot in terms of the consistency of which you'll do it. If you don't pay attention to that, what ends up happening is you get really down on yourself. You start feeling like there's something in me that doesn't love God enough. That's a conversation we could have. Did anything in me and my desire to exercise change between one year and the next or was it just the location of the preschool?

We have to pay attention to these things. In scripture, there's the temple, there's the mountain, there are these places where you know God is. God's people would look and they would be like, "That's where God is." Now God is with us, but our environment doesn't remind us that God is around. Churches are in strip malls and I'm not necessarily advocating for a certain shape of a church. But our world teaches us to shop at Target, not to pay attention to God. How we craft our homes, the things that we do have the ability to architect our environment can really impact how our families are posturing ourselves towards a relationship with God and the spiritual nature of life.

The same thing with timing. God made morning and evening the way that He did because it was good for us rhythmically. We know we have to sleep. He says in the morning to do certain things and then the evening. He created seasons. There are so many things in timing that God put us in time and we have to respect and pay attention to and our willingness to pay attention to that can greatly impact our ability to do the spiritual practices that we're trying to.

Chris Pappalardo: This may be old news for your listeners and obvious, but one of the biggest killers is the fact that we have the capacity to be digitally anywhere we want at any moment. Wake-up call for me: my daughter now has an Apple Watch. This came home to me just a few weeks ago. We were sitting down to dinner and she was trying to respond to somebody. I said, "Lottie, that's not what we're doing right now. We're having our family meal. We want to talk, we want to hear about your day." She was like, "Yeah, well, why don't you guys do that?"

We were like, "Oh, you are 100% correct." If I'm going to insist that this is a screen-free dinner table, we've been breaking that rule long before you had this little device. You don't have to go full Amish and get rid of the screens everywhere, but it's really important to keep that in mind. If I want to have a meaningful connection, the number of things that will pull us away from the curiosity required to have a connection with another person is very, very high. My phone is going to get in the way of that sort of thing. It's vital that there be some spaces in our home or moments in our home when that's gone and we say, "Look, I'm not going to be interruptible right now because I am 100% engaged with the flesh-and-blood person who is right in front of me."

Dr. Danny Huerta: Something you guys call out in the book that I think is key to pull out here is you guys say, "This is what we do here." You want to establish that. In this place, this is what we do. As you guys are talking about place and timing, there's some trial and error there to figure out what works for our family. Is it at the dinner table, is it in the car, is it in a certain room? But it's something that you're saying, "We're prioritizing this as a family. We do that here in this home and this is what we do in this place."

Then the timing, this is something parents have got to kind of figure out and have trial and error. It's going to be imperfect as you're figuring all these things out. But the fact that you're trying, man, that's amazing. Let's talk about the real fun one here, making it playful. We've had Tim Shoemaker on the show here. He blows things up and does all kinds of creative things in devotions. He doesn't just blow things up, but he uses all kinds of things to create a fun, scientific type of lesson with that. But you guys talk about making it playful. What does that look like for a family to do that with the different stages in their home?

Chris Pappalardo: First of all, it entails a paradigm shift for most parents to just be okay with engaging in spiritual things at a three- or four-year-old level and for that to be a win. This was hard particularly for me because my preschool kid would ask, "Well, how big are God's hands?" I'm like, "What am I supposed to do with a question like that?" But he had sung in church that God has the whole world in His hands. So he was trying to calculate how big is the world? God's hands must be this big.

There's a sort of person who would receive a question like that and be like, "Well, clearly you don't understand. This is a metaphor. God is immaterial. God is spirit." But you've got to lean into that and be like, "Well, goodness, here's my hand. Put your hand next to mine. Wow, mine is much bigger than yours. What if His hand was as big as the wall? What if His hand was as big as that building?"

Your kids are going to pull you into the playful, silly, fun moment. Be open to that and roll with it. The other thing is to realize, as we mentioned in the book, we think play by itself, even without a religious element to it, is a spiritual practice. You can read study after study that talks about all of the benefits of play and fun. It makes you more connected to other people, it leads to greater vulnerability, it makes you more empathetic, it makes you more patient. When you start listing them out, it begins to sound a little bit like the fruit of the spirit. I don't think it does all of the work for you. But if we've got something that makes people more present, connected, humble, and patient, why would we not say, "Hey, that sounds like a really good spiritual habit you should do in its own right?"

The older we get with responsibilities and a mortgage and whatever is going on, we need to be reminded that playing with our kids does tremendous spiritual good, not just for them but also for us to shape us into the sorts of people that God wants us to be.

Clayton Greene: You think about your life and the things you remember as a kid, the things that are the best memories that you're now trying to implement in your life. You're trying to keep those things in your life. Almost certainly, those memories are really fun memories: sport memories, camp memories, Christmas memories, game memories. We also have memories of really hard things. But there's this trajectory in adulthood, it seems, towards seriousness that if we try to map our seriousness onto our kids, we are in some ways limiting their memories by not making the things we're doing with them playful and fun.

Wouldn't it be a disaster if our kids left our homes and the primary fun things they remember are not the Christian things we were doing? The fun things they remember are going to the state fair and going to that basketball game. Those are great things. The fun things they remember don't have anything to do with worship. The fun things they remember don't have anything to do with reading their Bible or understanding the stories from scripture.

Then they leave with all these memories of things that they want to replicate, but they're not the things that have to do with our faith. I think if we're not paying attention to that, we're missing something. Rebecca, you said earlier about the Gratitude Cube—you're right. One of the key pieces is that the kid is the one who asks for it. Now they're asking for it because of that tangible piece and it's really, really fun in that moment, playful. But what you've done there is rather than them responding to you, they're the one initiating the moment of gratitude. That's going to more likely stick with them than you being the one that asks them over and over and over again. They might take that habit with them.

But as soon as you're not at the table, I ask the question, are they going to do it? Here's what happens if you have a Gratitude Cube on your table: you have a babysitter at their house and all of a sudden that night the babysitter says, "What's up with this Gratitude Cube thing the kids made me do?" Oh wow. They're the ones initiating it now and that comes from the playfulness.

Dr. Danny Huerta: That's key. I do think the key piece here is that you're giving something to your child that maybe they will begin to do on their own as they get older. I know watching teens as they go into the later teen years, they long for those playful moments if they've happened.

What I can picture right now is that parent that is overwhelmed, tired, stressed, thinking, "Man, this one seems a little bit too much because now you're trying to make something fun for someone else and each child could define fun differently." You have different ages and one goes, "Man, this is boring." The other one's going, "Man, this is so much fun." The other one's going, "Well, it's all right." Now you're going, "Okay, I was trying to make it fun for you guys."

The idea that you guys are talking about here is the playfulness of you as a parent. Kids long for that. You don't have to make it the most amazingly fun thing. It's about your playfulness being there, your ability to bring silliness to the table in that curiosity with your eyes just going wide open and you're going, "Oh my goodness, I wonder," and just using those words, you begin to take the conversation into a different place of imagination and playfulness.

I picture you both as dads being playful differently. You guys are different personalities, different temperaments. There's no right way to be the playful one. It's your playful part of who you are as a parent. If you are listening to this and you're going, "Yeah, I think I'm kind of a boring one. I'm not playful at all," dig deep. There's a playfulness piece to who you are and it's there. Maybe ask your friends, ask some people, "Hey, when do I look playful? Does my face ever look playful? What do I need to do to begin to bring that type of momentum into the house?"

I know that this may feel to you as kind of overwhelming or another thing on the checkbox if that's just not naturally your temperament. Play around with this one. The pun intended there. Play around, and there's no perfection to this. You'll make mistakes with this, you may get eye rolls with the teens and preteens. That's okay. They will love that piece of who you are and it'll create connectedness.

Rebecca St. James: While you're on that, I was just thinking even dancing a little bit in the kitchen or the living room to a worship song, a fun worship song that your kids like. I mean, there's just some really fun—I'm probably saying this because I'm in Christian music, but I just think kids respond to music and to dance in a very playful way. It literally could be as simple as that, just having the music on and you're watching your three-year-old jump around. That's the kind of playfulness. Who would be the dancer? If you guys had a dance party, who would be the dancer of your home?

Clayton Greene: Oh, I tell you what, Hubbie, my husband, is such a natural dancer. He just feels it and goes with it. I like swing dancing and stuff like that where it's you're learning these steps and you're told what to do. Yes, exactly. I was super into swing dancing in my late teens, early 20s. So that's me, the difference in the personalities there.

Dr. Danny Huerta: I love that you brought that up. We did dance parties at our house. I'm not natural at that. I grew up Baptist and it just was a bad thing to do. So it's pretty clunky for me, but then my wife's fantastic. She was a dancer early on and our kids love that. For you guys, who would be the dancers in your home?

Clayton Greene: I'm 100% the dancer and I bring my kids along with it. With Advent Blocks, there's a song called "The King is Coming" that comes along with it and there's this kind of triumphant moment of it in the chorus, "The King is coming, the King is coming." I've taught my girls when we listen to that song to jump on the couch and pump their fists. So I'm definitely the dancer. Chris, you have any dancers?

Chris Pappalardo: Yeah, I dance a lot. I think you're smoother than I am. Almost immediately as I start dancing, my kids will start mocking me. I just lean into it because I'm like, "You know what? I don't need to be cool because they're now locked in." If they're dancing the way I am and I'm like, "Is that really what I look like?" at this point, we're all laughing and I'm not going to win any awards. but we're playing. In terms of playfulness and scripture, there are certain songs—I'll just dive right into it. "Go and Sin No More."

I literally did not know that that phrase from your song, Rebecca, from the 90s, was it '96? I love that song. I screamed it at the top of my lungs as a teenager. I heard it, I loved it, I was locked in. We went to this thing called Creation Fest in the sticks in Pennsylvania, which was just muddy and gross and sweaty and so much fun. That song was in my head and in my heart before I realized, oh, that's a phrase that Jesus said in John 8. That's what music can do for you. It has a shortcut past the brain into the heart.

It can just lodge in there and then later on, you build around it the rest of the mental structure that needs to be there, but the heartbeat of like, "I love this story," was already there. So thank you, is all I just wanted to say.

Rebecca St. James: Thanks, Chris. I was picturing you screaming at the top of your lungs "Go and Sin No More." I mean, if you don't mind replaying that for us, that'd be great. I don't know if you could do that real quick.

Chris Pappalardo: Go and sin no more. Let me remind you it is I who lead and guide you as you go.

Rebecca St. James: Wow, he still got it after all these years. Chris, that is amazing. I'll tell you what, that is as good as it was when I was 15. The ceiling is the same. I don't know if it's very high, but it's unchanged. I'm impressed that you brought that up.

In our final few minutes that we have, can you just speak very quickly to what I would consider the accountability piece, this "Find Your Friends," find other people in your community that are being intentional with their habits as a family like you are?

Chris Pappalardo: I think you need to do some investigation for yourself when you look at these six steps and say, "Which of these is most vital for you?" For me, the friendship one is king out of all of them because if I tell Clayton, for instance, "Hey, let's read through Matthew next month, one chapter a day," I am so much more likely to do that than if I just resolve that that's what I'm going to do and I don't tell anybody. Maybe that's my temperament, but I think a lot of us are wired that way.

When we say, "All right, let's do this together. We're going to read the Bible in a year, I'm going to fast once a month," you pick whatever the discipline is, the moment you say it out loud and enlist somebody else to do it with you, the chances of doing it go way up.

Now the word you used there for that is accountability, which is a good thing. I think a lot of us in the Baptist world, whatever, accountability feels kind of rough, like punitive and heavy. In the book, we talk about how having this community around you does more than just provide accountability. It makes it more fun, it gives it more meaning. It does a lot of positive things to encourage you along the way. It provides help.

Clayton and I consider each other peers when it comes to understanding the Bible. It's easier for us to say to each other, "Hey, I've been reading Job. I don't really like it." I said that to him. That was me saying that to Chris. We will get help from each other in a way that is a lot more fruitful and organic than if each time we have trouble, we need to go to somebody who we think is an authority and I'm sheepish about the way I don't understand the Bible, whatever. Peers will provide that kind of help in a safe space. It's so much bigger than accountability, even though it will actually make you more likely to do whatever spiritual habit is on your plate.

Dr. Danny Huerta: When you learn and grow together, you can laugh together. Seven out of 10 parents say that they are lonely. And this is a solution to that: having community and having your kids be able to see that other families are also in this habit of pursuing a life with Christ. To see moms and dads having community, praying for one another, they begin to emulate that and begin to have their own Bible study groups into the teen years and maybe into college.

That's what we want to see, that they grow in community. I love seeing my son and my daughter do that now in adulthood, having their community of adults around them as they pray for one another. That's that last one of finding your friends and then growing together, sharpening one another, crying with each other, laughing with each other, playing games with each other. That's what God created within His body of Christ, that we get to grow with one another.

Rebecca St. James: Chris and Clayton today have reminded us that faith isn't formed through perfect routines but through small repeated moments—habits, conversations at the table, prayers that are a little messy, and rhythms that grow over time.

That community component, finding a place, finding a time, being intentional—I've just loved this conversation. This is a very big topic and such a needed one, these habits that we're forming in our families. We're making this resource available to you as a listener for a gift of any amount to Focus on the Family. You can just look at our show notes so that you can get your copy. We love what you guys are doing and so appreciate you being on our show today.

Dr. Danny Huerta: This book would make a great gift for anyone in your church family, too. Think about getting a copy for your youth pastor or friends, family, people you know that may benefit from this *Building Spiritual Habits in Your Home* type of book.

Another resource that's available to you in the show notes is we're inviting you to our Built for Resilience webinar. This is an opportunity to learn about one of the new resources here at Focus on the Family. It's really for churches and Christian schools. It's a train-the-trainer type of resource where we are providing training for you to build intentional family rhythms in your home.

There are five of those and then there are 40 developmental assets that you build in your child's life. If you're curious about this, join the webinar. Once you have that training, you get to lead 13-week parenting classes. You don't have to be a pro or any kind of expert. All you have to do is show up for that training and then you get to lead and facilitate the growth in community. That's one of the habits we were talking about here, about growing in community, and you get to do that through Built for Resilience. So be sure to join us on that webinar. Information on that will be in the show notes. Be sure to check this out again. Join us in that webinar and we can answer any questions you have on whether this is a good fit for the spiritual development goals of your leadership and your organization or church.

Rebecca St. James: Which I'm sure it will be. Absolutely. Here we are once again. It's our Q&A time in this episode of Practice Makes Parent. Pastor Chris and Clayton, we want to invite you to participate in our Q&A segment from a listener. Are you good with that?

Chris Pappalardo: Let's do it.

Rebecca St. James: Great. Today's question is an email that comes from Liana, who writes: "My strong-willed teenager has turned away from the faith and his father and I think he's deliberately rebelling as a part of the teenage individuation phase. He's a good kid. He professed Jesus as his savior when he was 10. He went to church all his life and has been baptized, but now at 14, he makes it a point to tell us that Christianity is our belief, not his. He tells us that he's looked into other religions and we can see that he's waiting for our reaction. As of now, we're encouraging him to think critically in all he's learning, but inside our hearts are breaking. What advice would you give to parents who are helping their teenager grow through this defiant stage when it comes to their faith? And how can we also guide his younger brother so that he won't do this when he gets to the teen years?"

I love the vulnerability and the honesty of Liana because I think other parents that are listening right now are going to be relating to this. We're very, very grateful for your question. What would you guys say, Chris and Clayton?

Chris Pappalardo: I would need to just lead with sympathy for this listener. Let's assume you've done everything right. You have laid this foundation, you've poured in, and to not get the outcome you want with your kid, it just feels like such a betrayal. It's painful, it's hard. Even if you're confident that you're taking the right approach, even if you know you're doing the right thing, it's not going to remove the heartbreak. You're going to have those difficult conversations with your spouse, there's going to be a lot of tears. Just recognizing and leaving space for that, that there's no shortcut through the tough element of this.

Curiosity, I think, is probably going to be the leader of the day. I'll be candid here. My oldest daughter is 11, so we're just beginning to get into that phase. So I'm not speaking from any experience personally. An older mentor of mine once said that once you get to that phase, it's important to switch your mentality from that of a mechanic to that of a gardener and maybe even start by thinking that way. When something goes wrong with your car, you want to take it apart and find the piece that's busted and replace it. The belt is making a weird noise. I'm going to get in there, I can fix it. It's very hands-on, very micro.

But it's better to think of your kid's life as a plant that's growing up. When you're gardening and you see something wrong, if you try to pull it up out of the soil and see what's going on with the roots, you will kill the plant. The approach needs to be much gentler and it's going to be much slower. That is so hard because we want to control. But recognizing that we cannot actually control the actions, beliefs, feelings of our children is a hard thing for us to get our minds around, but it is an important first step.

Clayton Greene: It is incredibly hard. The first thing that comes to my mind is prayer. I think we can sometimes get an inappropriate view of what faith of our kids looks like and to think that if we do, as Chris says, all the right things, that it's a formula. Faith is not a formula. It's so much more complex than that. Faith is what we can't see.

I think there's an amount with which we as parents have to consider all the options that our kids are considering legitimately in order to actually—Brené Brown would say—get in the pit with them, to understand the perspective from where they're coming. If your teenager is considering other religions, I think you should as well. I'm sorry if that was not the right thing to say, but I think what I'm saying is you have to be able to go from their perspective and say, "You know, suffering is really, really bad and there are a lot of really hard things in life. Is God really the answer?"

I think you have to be able to say that convictionally for yourself from the perspective of somebody who is doubting in order to be able to help someone who is doubting be able to find their way back. Picture being in a home and it's very dark outside and you're talking to someone who is outside in the dark and you're saying, "Come back to the home." You can't really do that well unless you're out there in the dark with them.

I'm not saying that you question your faith, but I do think you have to have a certain amount of empathy. There are books that you can read by skeptics who came to faith would be a great way in order to—there are books on suffering because that probably has some aspect to do with what's going on here. Reading those things and getting to the place that you are in the mindset of someone who has doubted, if you have never yourself as a parent or never in the same way as your kid, get into their space to be able to show them back. Because if you're just trying to call them back, you actually can't show them the path unless you've walked that path with them.

Dr. Danny Huerta: A couple good authors: J. Warner Wallace and Lee Strobel are fantastic ones that talk about that factual side of things and helping lead that conversation. All you guys brought some fantastic points and I think it rotates around this idea of curiosity and asking our teen questions.

Liana, you asked about both your teen and the younger brother. What I want to point out here is that you'll be asking lots of questions to them. Maybe it could look like, "I wonder" or "Help me understand" or "Tell me more about." What you're doing is you're pausing your own intent of wanting to lead the conversation. You're saying, "Hey, let's walk this road together for a little while."

That's what you were talking about, Clayton. Let's walk this road for a little while. I want to talk with you about this and you're showing interest in what they're finding out. It is normal for an adolescent to want to begin to define their own belief system. It's developmentally appropriate. You mentioned him being strong-willed, which means he's going to want to emphasize even more, articulate even more, that he believes different than. That's naturally what strong-willed kids do.

It may feel as a threat, but just know in that relational place, they will explore different places just like a strong-willed child touches the burner and says, "Oh my goodness, that is hot," and you've already said many times that that burner is hot. They feel it and they figure it out themselves. This teenager, same thing. They get into this developmental phase and they start to go opposite of parents just to articulate their autonomy from their parents. It's a normal developmental phase.

The more you just continue to pursue them without hitting the panic button, the more you're going to begin to see that in the adult years to differentiate themselves from their peers—again, that strong-will—they go back to their parents and they go back to that faith piece, especially if you've maintained that relationship.

The younger brother will see that. I'd encourage you to also ask your other son, "What do you think about this? And what do you believe about?" Start asking those questions so that that younger brother can begin to articulate their own faith.

I remember when I doubted early on in my teen years, 14, 15, 16, and having to go through that time of figuring out, is this really real? I mean, are we praying? I'm spending all this time praying. Sometimes they're answered this way, sometimes they're answered that way. As a teen, you're making sense of that, that there's a correlation between "I asked God and if He loves me, He would answer it this way" and there's a sense of wanting to control the relationship with God. As they mature in that relationship, they begin to see that there's a trust piece to that relationship that is so key.

What I'd encourage you to also think about that was mentioned was that prayer time. That is something you can do every day. There's a verse in Thessalonians that says "Pray without ceasing." Whenever you're thinking about that, when you're driving, just say, "Man, can you be with my son today as he's wrestling through all these beliefs? It's got to be a tough place for him. Lord, I trust in You. Speak to him today."

Rebecca St. James: Such great wisdom. Thank you so much for your wonderful question, Liana. We're going to send you Danny's great book, *Seven Traits of Effective Parenting*, as our way of saying thanks for participating in the show. If you are listening right now and you have a question, please click the link in our show notes. We could be answering your question on our next episode.

Pastor Chris and Clayton, you've given us a lot to think about. These are very practical tools for parents. Thank you so much for your work and for the passion that you guys have to serve families.

Chris Pappalardo: Oh man, we're so thankful we got to be here. This was a blast. Thanks for having us.

Rebecca St. James: Next week, we'll be talking about how a father quietly shapes the way his daughter sees herself. That's a really, really big deal. It'll be all about the daddy-daughter connection and I can't wait to hear more of the stories you share, Danny, as you raised your daughter, Lexi, who's so wonderful.

Dr. Danny Huerta: Yes, that's going to be fun. Until then, I'm Dr. Danny Huerta.

Rebecca St. James: And I'm Rebecca St. James. Join us next time for more tips for transforming your parenting on Practice Makes Parent.

Guest (Male): Live your truth. A lot of people say that, don't they? But truth isn't something we decide. God has decided it for us and it's our job as believers to share His truth with a world in need. I'll encourage you to do that through my podcast, Refocus with Jim Daly. I visit with fascinating guests about important topics like gender confusion, cancel culture, and more while helping you share God's love with others. Listen at refocuswithjimdaly.com.