Our month of family home evenings: faith and testimony

This month we chose to focus on Faith and Testimony.  I already posted what we did the first week.  It was on building faith.  The second week was on building our testimonies.  We discussed how our faith can help us build our testimonies.  We cut out rectangle pieces of paper and on each paper wrote different aspects of the Gospel (Joseph Smith, prayer, scriptures, Word of Wisdom, etc.).  Then we colored them like bricks and the boys each chose a brick to tape to the wall.  They each chose until all the bricks were on our wall and we had "built" a structure.  We talked about how the foundation of our structure was Jesus Christ and all the other bricks build from him up.  We discussed the different things we could know about each brick and talked about examples (Will talked about how he has a testimony of prayer because when he prays to find something he always finds it, etc)  Then we went and "built" an banana split for our treat.

This final week we talked about how faith and testimony protect us.  Mike and I chose stories from the scriptures of individuals that had faith and as a result were protected.  We chose the Strippling Warriors, Esther, Elisha, Nephi and Lehi, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.  Then we found pictures of each of these stories and printed them off along with each of their names.  We cut the pictures and names up and then placed them face down on the ground.  We played a matching game where the boys would choose a name and a picture.  When they got a correct match we told them about the story.  Then we discussed how each story showed someone being protected by the Lord because of their faith.  At the end we talked about Abinidi and how in the end he was not saved and protected, even though he had faith.  We asked the boys why they thought this was and then told them that sometimes even when we have faith, we can't be protected from bad things happening because the Lord had a different plan.  We discussed that we still needed to have faith because there were some things the Lord wanted to protect us from and that even if bad things happened to us, we could still have faith in the future and the eternal promises of the Lord.