There is a lot of brokenness, pain, poverty and suffering in our world. Raising a young family in the midst of it all can be scary, intimidating and challenging—never mind talking to your kids about all of that brokenness. Where would we even start? How could we ever help our children understand when we hardly understand it ourselves?
These tough questions are exactly why Compassion created Step Into My Shoes. At Compassion, we believe that even and especially the littlest people in the Kingdom can have a great impact on our hurting world.
Step Into My Shoes is a 7-step immersive experience designed to help your family understand poverty from a biblical perspective and explore what it means to live with enough.
Here are 8 reasons why we think doing Step Into My Shoes with your family is a great idea.
1. It is free and available online.
The entire experience is available for free at stepintomyshoes.ca. Compassion is so excited to get this resource into the hands of families and churches and we don’t want anything to stand in the way!
2. It is easy to use and adaptable.
The Step Into My Shoes guide is full of videos, stories and activities designed by curriculum experts at Compassion and Fuller Youth Institute to serve you well as you have this conversation about poverty. Beyond that, Step Into My Shoes is designed to be fully adaptable to your family’s context and needs, and we’ve created resources to help you adapt the experience for your family.
3. It is a great way to bring your family together.
Doing devotionals together as a family is a powerful thing. It allows your whole family to collectively centre your lives on Jesus and commit to living for His Kingdom. Step Into My Shoes is a great resource to get you started or help you continue doing devotionals together as a family.
4. It can help bring your family’s faith to life.
We’d all like our faith to exist more and more in our everyday lives—taking a deep look at poverty and how we as Christians can respond is one way for your faith to come to life, for both you and your kids. As kids grow older, they want to believe in something that is lived out and real in their everyday life. Step Into My Shoes is a great place to start.
5. It fosters vital conversations.
Your kids are growing up in a broken world that is full of poverty and injustice. There’s no getting around that. But there’s also beauty and hope. And the good news is that Jesus is in the business restoring the entire world and longs for us to have a part in it! We need to have these conversations as Christians and as the Church, especially with our kids. Step Into My Shoes is designed to bring those vital conversations to the forefront and help us understand that compassion and justice are important to Jesus—and should be important to us, too.
6. It allows you to experience life in another part of the world.
Perhaps one of the most exciting parts of Step Into My Shoes is that you get to take a trip to Uganda and learn from Pastor Tom and his family—all without leaving home! Compassion has developed a stunning and engaging video series that follows Pastor Tom, his wife Nancy and their kids in their everyday activities. Your family will learn from a family whose lives are very different from yours, yet similar in so many ways.
7. It’s fun!
This can be a heavy topic—but that doesn’t mean this experience can’t be fun! Step Into My Shoes is designed to help you talk about poverty in an engaging and educational way and allow your family to apply what you’ve learned in your everyday life.
8. It will inspire your family to live differently.
Fair warning: it’s not easy to step into the shoes of someone living in poverty. It will likely open your family’s eyes to a lot of really tough stuff and challenge you to live differently going forward. That’s not always the easiest path to take, but it is where God calls us. It’s also where we find His hope, His joy and His restoration. And that is a beautiful place to take your family.
So what are you waiting for? Head over to stepintomyshoes.ca now to start your journey! Know that we are praying for you, that this would be an engaging, transformative, Christ-filled experience for you and your family.
Have you done Step Into My Shoes with your family? What was your favourite part? Let us know in the comments below!
