Episode 66 – Table Time

Welcome to the Mentor 4 Moms Podcast!

On this episode:

After sharing with some friends about daily table time with my girls, they requested that I do a podcast episode on how we do that. Every morning we have time together at the table with our Bibles, our journals, our planners, and my tower of pens.

For Bible time, everybody has their Bible. We have several different versions of the Bible to read and compare. We may read Jesus Every Day, by Mary DeMuth or look up common Bible stories the girls may be familiar with in scripture. I mix it up. We’re not always doing the same thing. Sometimes we’re doing a Bible study, sometimes we read a devotional, and sometimes we just read scripture.

Once we close out our Bible time, we get our our journals. In the journal they do some copy-work – copying down the scripture – write a prayer, whatever creative means they want to use to interact with the Word they just read. I pull out my phone and set a timer for five minutes for just journaling in our notebooks. This is about us connecting with the Word of God and allowing the Word to renew our minds.

After we do the journaling we move in to prayer requests. I ask who they want to pray for. They bring up their friends and neighbors, anyone they know who’s going through things. We bring up things going on in our city, our state, our nation, and the world. It’s our moment to call out those things and pray for them.

I ask them to be specific, rather than just a general prayer. For example, instead of something general like, “the homeless,” a more specific prayer would be for the homeless to be warm, to be cared for, and to know that they matter. It’s a more intentional way of praying.

Once we wrap up our prayer time, we move on to planner time. We all pull out our planners – yes, all my girls have their own planner. I took them to the office supply section of Marshall’s and they each picked out a planner. They are not expensive. We’re just building the habit now and learning how to use these tools.

I often ask my girls, “How often should you look at your planner.” They initially would say, “Every day!” No, that’s not the answer. It’s multiple times a day.

“Your brain is best at creating ideas, not holding them.” ~David Allen

The planner is there to hold your ideas so your brain is free to think up new ideas and to solve problems as you encounter them. While you’re going through your day, you’re not also saying, “Oh, I need to remember . . .” You don’t want your brain to be so taxed trying to hold ideas. Free your brain up to learn and to be creative and problem solve. Let your planner do the hard work of holding your ideas. Write those things down.

We all have the same formatting in our planners, even though we have completely different styles. We each have the monthly view and weekly view sheets. We review the month together and add any new events that have come up. Then we flip over to that day of the week. On that day everybody writes down all the things they need to do that day. We spend about 5-6 minutes on that.

As they’re doing theirs, I’m working on mine, too. I also check on each of theirs and ask questions like, “when was the last time you had a shower?” Sometimes I need to tell them to add things to their list like, “empty your trash can,” or “gather the library books.”

Now what do we do with our lists? We all go through and identify our top three. We do this by putting a little star by the top three or circle it, whatever works to identify the three most important items from our list. Go back to episode 53 if you need help with how to identify your top three.

By identifying the three most important items on our list, we know if we don’t get anything else done, we’ve done the three most important things for our day. We can know we spent our time on what matters even if we didn’t get through our whole list.

I like to close our planner time by saying, “Lord, we submit these plans to your master plan.” I need to put my mind and my heart back in the right place. This reminds us that God knows the master plan and he’s in charge of it all. I want to be flexible enough to follow what God leads us to do.

After our planner time, we shift over to current events with CNN 10. This is a current event news resource geared toward school age kids. They share news stories from around the US and the world that I’ve found to be great discussion starters, not to mention geography searches. It’s just ten minutes.

Lately we’ve been doing the current event times at dinner, but it has also worked well during our table time in the mornings. Wrapping up, sometimes we’ll have other short conversations about homeschool, family business or other things before breaking up to do individual work.

All of this is helping us learn and practice being intentional in all that we’re doing every day. If you can’t do this in the mornings, what if you did it in the evenings or on the weekends? Where can this fit in your schedule? It’s about practicing the habit and having the time to check in together and build connection with your children.

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