Breakfast - More than Just the Most Important Meal of the Day

I ate a whole lot of cereal for breakfast growing up. Sometimes, I would stick with a favorite brand, but it was probably more often the case that I would quickly tire of one brand midway through the box and feel the urge to start eating a new brand. Fortunately, by that time, cereal manufacturers had developed the concept of selling a variety pack of individual-serving sized boxes of cereals. I’m quite certain that my brother and I consumed quite a few such variety packs of cereal.

Aside from trying lots of different kinds of cereal, though, breakfast time in our house was often a time that my parents used to reinforce in my brother and myself a habit of praying for specific people.

My mom took several index cards, punched holes in one of the corners, tied a piece of yarn through the hole and added a name or picture of extended family members and missionaries. We had at least two such decks of cards, and, I recall each day we would get to flip to a new card in the deck and include them in our prayers as a family that morning.

As Missions Sunday will be tomorrow at my church, my mind drifted this week to thinking about one of the cards we used in our missionary card rotation; this card included a reminder for us to pray for the Harauti people group in India who needed the Bible translated into their own language. In looking up the progress of this work, I was pleased to see that it appears this people group does now have the New Testament in their language, along with an audio recording of the Gospel and the Jesus Film in their language (see here).

The repetition we used to pray for this people group, along with various missionaries and extended family is a practice I have used in my own prayer life, well beyond the time that my parents first introduced this into my life. If you have kiddos, I would heartily encourage you to begin this type of routine with them now, particularly at mealtime.

What better time to instill this type of habit in kids than mealtime? Eating is something that we soon learn we must do to survive. Prayer, God's Word tells us, should be taking place on a recurring basis (1 Thess. 5:17). Coupling mealtime with a discipline that will serve your child well for the rest of their life may take some planning and preparation on your part, but will surely be time well spent.