Wiggling, talking, whining, disobeying, the struggle is real. What struggle? The difficult task of sitting everyone down for family devotions. Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes the effort doesn’t seem worth the payoff. My husband and I are always on a quest to find engaging ways to interact with our daughters about spiritual things. Usually we can incorporate these conversations into everyday life, but we also like to strive for some semblance of a family devotional time. Enter Little Visits with God. No devotional is perfect, but this one comes close.

Little Visits with God is packed with 200 short devotional thoughts for you and your family to read together. Each entry features a story that illustrates the biblical truth being presented. Engaging and memorable, these little tales encourage children to personalize the lesson without being too preachy. Also included in each lesson is a Scripture passage (with a reference to a longer passage for older children), and discussion questions. The devotionals end with a prayer. There is a special entry for Christmas and one for Easter, and an index is included at the back of the book in case you need to reference a certain topic.

Our family enjoys this devotional. We often use the lesson to lead us into other topics of life and faith. These devotional times are not well ordered and chaos free. In fact, once my husband and I let go of the idea of an unattainable ideal of a family devotional time, we found that our times together became so much richer. We started focusing more on engaging our children in conversation than in making sure they had fully assimilated the specific lesson we read together. (Be forewarned, this can take you unexpected places. We once began a devotional on obedience and ended up talking about King David’s adultery for far longer than any of us ever anticipated!) Little Visits with God is a great jumping off place for these kinds of conversations. 

One final note: Little Visits is designed with kids aged five to ten in mind. Our daughters are a little older than that. I would say a range from five to twelve could easily be accommodated by this devotional.