We’re going on a journey
Day trips, visiting family or even going abroad all require some sort of travel. Whether it’s on foot, on a bike, in the car, on a bus, train, or plane, the journey itself can be an opportunity to see new things and ask for God’s blessing too.
Whether you are going for a day out, or somewhere more exotic, the chances are you’ll be doing a bit of travelling. Life is an amazing journey, and the smaller journeys that you make as a family can help you learn all over again to see the world around you in a new way.
Where are we going?
Going to a different place is exciting for little children. What will it be like there? If you are travelling a really long way, the landscape or the weather or the food might be very different, and the people might look different too. This is a great chance to help your child understand the world. It’s a big place, an amazing place, full of new things to discover. Look at some maps together before you set off. Find where you live, and where you’re going. Talk about how you will get there, and how long the journey will be. Look up some pictures on the internet of the place where you will be staying, and some of the things you will be doing.
The Bible tells a story in which Abraham and Sarah set off on a long journey, and wondered whether God would be there when they arrived. They knew God was with them at home, but would God be where they were going?
Every place where they stopped on their journey, they prayed to God and found that God was already there, because God is everywhere.
Blessing for a journey
Travelling with little children isn’t always easy. Why not ask God to bless you on your journey? A simple way to do this is to take out the little card from your luggage label, if you have one, and on the back write the simple prayer, ‘God bless us on our journey’. Replace the card in its holder, and nobody will know the prayer is there except you and God.
Car games
For children, the journey to a holiday destination often starts out quite exciting, but before you know it, there’s an endless round of ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ If you can’t face several hours of ‘I spy’, or your children are too little for it, why not play a treasure hunt game?
Are we nearly there yet?
Even little children can help to spot things like ‘a red car’ or ‘a yellow lorry’, and you can extend the game to include things like ‘something unexpected’ or ‘something new’. This can be a good way of getting to know the landscape if you’re travelling somewhere that’s new to your children, or to all of you, such as hills, or even mountains, if you usually live somewhere flat.
If you live in a city and are driving through the countryside, you can learn to spot animals in fields. If you’re off to the coast, there’s always ‘who will be the first to see the sea!’ And wherever you are, you can look up and spot funny shapes in the clouds…