It's been a while.....

Well, I'm afraid that my dear husband just might have a heart attack when he sees that I've posted something on my blog again after a VERY long hiatus. But he's a blogging machine and I am most definitely not.

Since I last posted I have completed 2 introductory courses on chaplaincy. This fall I'm just starting on a class called "The Spiritual Formation of Children". I'm using one of my electives to take this class and I must admit that I'm intrigued by the topic. Spiritual formation is something that I've been reading about and experimenting with. A lot of the work Kevin and I have done on Emotionally Healthy Spirituality relates to spiritual disciplines. But interestingly I hadn't really made the connection between spiritual formation and children.

I had a bit of an 'aha' moment a couple of weeks ago, before I even started into this course. Kevin and I had decided that at the beginning of the school year that we would allow our oldest daughter to change her school night bed time to a half an hour later than last year. The stipulation we put on that change was that for the extra half hour each night that she needed to spend it in her room either reading, writing, or drawing. She is the kind of kid that would never spend any time alone if she could help it. She liked the idea of staying up later but was completely disgusted with the thought of having to spend that time alone. To be honest, before making this decision I really hadn't thought out why it was important for her to spend time alone. I can think of a hundred good reasons why I should have some alone time but it took a bit of thought for me to come up with some good reasons why she should learn how to be silent and how to enjoy solitude. We had quite the battle about this issue and in the end she chose to go to bed at her regular time rather than be alone for a half an hour.

The next day my text books for this course arrived and lo and behold as I flipped through the first one I came upon some thoughts about the spiritual discipline of solitude and how it relates to children. Interesting. I know that this course will provide the mother in me with all kinds of food for thought. Maybe I'll quit procrastinating and actually do some blogging about what I learn;)