LifeGIFTS Discipleship Planner

Dear, Precious One-

While homeschooling my four children, I held a mental model of how to view discipleship moments in the life of our family every day. We pictured each child’s heart as a sort of treasure chest, filling it with truth, memories, serving, loving, and receiving love, stories of Christ, and all that we found to be good, acceptable, and true about Him.

We wanted them to be filled with knowledge and reality about God, but we also had a desire for them to live out of full hearts to bring His love and reality to their own worlds. Faith is never to be held in a receptacle, closed and kept inside, but as a living treasure chest, from which to draw in order to send treasures of His love and reality into the world.

I needed a practical plan for each day to know and understand what I wanted to impart in these discipleship moments. We came up with a model that worked for our family called LifeGIFTS. Each letter in the word gifts stood for one of the five areas I held as a grid in my mind to focus on each day: grace, inspiration, faith, training, and service.

In the PDF linked below, I’m going to break down what each of those areas meant to us as we sought to train, instruct, and model those gifts for our children.

For a more in-depth discussion of each of these Life GIFTS, listen to the talks below.