As you know, if you’ve been reading, for quite some time, I’ve occasionally been running little installments called “Mama’s K.I.S.S.” I know that lots of readers could give many more and far more creative ideas than I can offer, but these installments are just a few tried and true and mostly old-fashioned ideas for putting service hearts in our kids. This is number 71 of a list of one hundred ways we train our kids to serve. K.I.S.S. is an acronym for “Kids In Service Suggestions”.
There are few places that bring smiles to young servants in a more eternally fulfilling way than the hallways of hospitals. Truly!
There are a few hospitals here and there that still allow teens to deliver the mail to the residents in volunteer programs. Mostly, though, in our post-modern and post covid world, though, the “candy-stripers” have been replaced by corporate systems that are touted as efficient and safe.
But smart parents are always on the look out for ways to incorporate the sick and hurting into the monthly service regimes of their teen (and even younger) children. Enlist the help of your youth group or church service group to do some or all of the following:
1. Fill little dollar store plastic bins with snack crackers and cookies and water bottles and deliver them to the waiting areas in hospitals with notes of encouragement from your local congregation. Be sure you include directions to your building and contact information with the open offer of meeting with families for prayer.
2. Have your children adopt a floor or wing of the hospital for weekly visiting, room by room. Choose as safely as possible, but this limited risk is so worth it for your kids. There are areas of non-infection in most larger hospitals. Consider the NICU or the cancer patients.
3. Have your children make little “laundry lines” with clothes-pins to attach to the walls of patients who will be staying for a few days, so that they can display their cards. Be sure to have the children go in and attach the first card on the little yarn “clothes-lines” they have made. Of course, the way your children find out who is staying for a few days is by visiting their floor or wing and conversing.
(Today’s privacy rules will not allow the hospital to divulge that information, but many patients are so happy to have visitors and talk about their diagnoses.)
4. Have your children take a couple of friends with them (or your family) and choose a hymn to sing in three of their rooms, monthly, to those who would like to listen or sing along. You can even take the words to the hymn and let the patients read along, but be sure to identify the church and give contact information on the lyrics sheet that you leave.
5. During the Christmas holidays, take a small gift ( a lotion, a candy cane, a little pop-up greeting card, or a little strand of lights for the bedside table–just any little happy gift) to the patients in which your children are “investing”.
The receivers will evolve and the faces will look different monthly, but the givers will respond consistently and their faces will turn ever more heavenward!
Those who look to him are radiant,
and their faces shall never be ashamed. Psalm 34:5