As long as you are implementing the 5-Steps and 5 Keys to Success, then you should just figure out what works best for you or your family. However, we have found that for most families with children—Sunday or Monday works best. Many families have made this a part of their home-centered family worship. If you are single or a couple without children, we would recommend going through the process daily or whenever you feel you’ve had an experience. We have found that if we wait several days before recording that even those experiences fade quickly and can be forgotten.

With regards to time, it generally takes around 15 minutes for a family to share and record experiences. The time can obviously be shorter or longer depending on the number of experiences and the depth of conversation around them.

The answer to this is a resounding no. My Witness Tree can be a transformative tool for people of any age—but perhaps even more for adults. Our efforts to improve our understanding of God and relationship with Him should be an unending, lifelong process. We should be diligently seeking to have experiences with Him all our lives and, My Witness Tree strongly supports those efforts.

Anything that someone feels came from God, the Spirit, or when they felt like they saw the hand of God manifest in their life could be recorded. In short, recognizing any experience that has divinity woven through it is the purpose of My Witness Tree. It can be big and overwhelming or small and quiet. It may be in the mind, heart or soul. It may be something you only recognized later and not in the moment. It may be something you see or something that happens to you. Most experiences will probably be gentle and quiet. Just because something isn’t grand, doesn’t mean it isn’t significant. This is one of the core purposes of My Witness Tree—to give people a purposeful way to practice recognizing God in the multitude of ways He manifests Himself. In the resources menu, there is a link to a list of possible reasons for which you might put a leaf on your tree.

When deciding upon the name for My Witness Tree, we felt strongly that it needed to begin with the word , “My”. While we go through life with the support of others, ultimately our personal relationship with God is what matters most. A mother or father cannot have sacred experiences for their child. We cannot transfer our faith and spiritual knowledge to another—nor can we survive spiritually by trying to stand in the light of another. We must have our own roots of faith deep in the Gospel soil. One of the core purposes of My Witness Tree is to help individuals to become spiritually self-reliant and an individual tree symbolically represents that very purpose.

This is a great opportunity to teach and learn. It is also a great opportunity to discuss ways to increase our ability to have spiritual experiences. If someone genuinely feels like they don’t have any, it cannot be forced. If they have a desire to continue and seek them, that is all that can be done with a hope and faith that experiences will come. One suggestion would be to look at the world around them and begin by finding things that witness that there is a God—in nature, art, and especially in the goodness in the world around them. If someone has eyes to see, they will find the hand of God everywhere.

Anything that is uplifting, edifying, encouraging, strengthening, enlightening, freeing, guiding, loving, etc, comes from Him. The source of all goodness and truth is from God. If someone isn’t sure, this is where sharing with others can be powerful. We can help one another in this incredible process of coming to recognize God in our life. We are confident that by persistently applying the process of seeking, recognizing, reflecting, sharing, and recording, each person will more fully develop their ability to understand how God speaks to them through the Spirit–that it will become easier and easier to see and feel God working in their life.

This is one of the most common questions we hear from people. The short answer is that if you feel this is very important, we encourage you to be creative and find a solution that works for you. One idea is to write a small number next to each leaf that matches a numbered entry in your journal. Ultimately, the logistics of doing this were quite complicated without taking away from the aesthetics of the tree or your ability to create a tree that was unique to you.

Through our experiences, we don’t think it is unreasonable to start with kids as young as 3. Young children certainly have the ability to have incredible spiritual experiences or be the means by which others can experience them. Young children are just beginning to recognize the fundamentals of how God and the Holy Ghost communicate with them. However, children understand feelings. They know when they feel happy, sad, safe, or scared. Helping them to recognize the good feelings they have that are from God is important as they grow and eventually receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. Young children also have the capacity to receive specific answers to prayers, which can/should be recorded

Through this website you will be able to purchase any individual piece of the My Witness Tree kit. If you lose your leaves or your print gets damaged, simply buy another bag of leaves or a replacement print. It’s cheap and easy.