Every week our family has a Family Home Evening night. It is something asked of us by our Church, and we find that it is a great way to strengthen our family. We generally have a treat and a lesson. You’ll see instructions at the bottom on how to morph it for your own spirituality. For links to other Family Home Evening Lesson Plans, please go here.

Remember that I promised to be pretty transparent with you, right? So let me use this Family Home Evening plan as an opportunity to show you how everything may not work AS planned, but perhaps that is OK!

I had the lesson planned this week and thought it was pretty awesome (err, yes, I guess next week’s lesson should be on humility).

I was kinda sneaky this week. I am tired of picking up a bunch of toys that are just thrown out of the toy box and never used, and with daughter’s birthday this week, I figure our toy issue will only get worse because of presents. So I tried to center an activity around us getting rid of some toys that we don’t use.

But I wanted her to learn a lesson from it and show how important it is to give to others. So we shared the story of The Good Samaritan. I decided to play this video (warning, it’s kinda cheesy):

When it ended, daughter had no idea what the video was about (husband didn’t either), so in the middle of me explaining things…husband put on this:

OK, he got a lot of GLARES when he did this, because I didn’t know what he was doing, I thought he was just interrupting our lesson to watch an episode of Sesame Street. But overall we just laughed. How perfect that our treat tonight was COOKIES!

It actually worked out, as he then started to explain sharing and how it’s important. We talked about things that we could give to others to help them. Daughter said her clothes. We talked about how many extra toys and clothes we have that we could give to people. We talked about how it is important to help others, because if Christ were here, he’d do the same.

For our activity, I jumped up and with an announcer’s voice, said that we were doing the “PORTER FAMILY TELETHON!” I held up two bags and said that by the end of the night, we wanted to get BOTH bags filled and that it’s for a great cause of helping those who may be in need. I had grand plans of having “live entertainment” of one kid goofing off and dancing….but that didn’t work! We all went through the box, but daughter kept saying, “No, I want to play with that.” It was pretty tough on her.So we picked a few things, but didn’t fill our bags. Soon family night ended with hubby and I in the bedroom going through some of their toys in the closet, little man running around the house with his stroller, and daughter playing a game on the Kindle Fire. Again, things don’t ALWAYS work out as you expected.

BUT, the activity got some adrenaline going through hubby and he ended up cleaning most of the house, so I’d say that’s a success, right?

Here is how to morph it for your spirituality:

Talk about how giving to others is very important. There are people in need. You may take a second to talk about people in different places that are in need. I read a story in this book last night about how some women made dresses out of tshirts for some girls in a third world country. They later found out that it was decided who got the dresses by lining up the girls and seeing whose dress had more than 10 holes in them–those with more than 10 got the dresses. That is so sad!

You can talk about people in history who gave to the needy, like Mother Theresa.

You could talk about how our country put on telethons to help those who suffered in Hurrican Katrina.