This week I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to actually lead my family spiritually. Saying grace out loud instead of waiting for someone else to start it. Leaving little markers of the faith around the house so a kid eventually notices and asks about them. All of it has felt like effort, like something I’m trying to get right.

Then I read a line from John’s third letter that stopped me. He writes, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.” Not that they’d arrived somewhere, or that his teaching had landed perfectly. Just that they were walking in it. Still moving. Still on the road.

That’s actually what I want too, underneath all the effort. Not a house that runs like a well tuned machine, not kids who can recite the catechism back to me on command, just this. My kids walking, even imperfectly, toward God.

So today, instead of asking myself whether I led well this week, I’m asking something simpler. Am I walking in the truth myself? Because that’s probably the only way they ever will.

Today’s Bible Study

Paul describes his own ministry the same way. Like a father with his children, he writes to the Thessalonians, he exhorted and encouraged and charged each one of them to walk in a manner worthy of God. He didn’t hand them correct information once and move on. He stayed with it, the slow and repeated work, the way a father keeps steadying a kid who’s still learning to walk. Leading a family spiritually isn’t a single conversation done right. It’s walking alongside someone long enough that the stride becomes their own, not just something borrowed from you.

Recommended Reading

If this is a prayer you find yourself praying more than you’d like, for a child who’s wandering rather than walking, the Resources page points to St. Monica, patron of mothers and of exactly that kind of patient, long haul prayer. Her own son wandered for years before he became St. Augustine.