When Kathie Lee Gifford, morning television legend and former co-host of the fourth hour of TODAY, returned to Studio 1A last week, she promoted her new book, delightfully heckled Hoda Kotb for only reading “two pages” of it and talked about the role of God in her life and in the lives of her two children and three grandchildren.
“I didn’t want to raise religious children. I don’t like religion,” Gifford explains to TODAY.com backstage between her show appearances. Instead, Gifford wanted her children, Cody and Cassidy, to have a “relationship with the living God.”
That relationship does not necessarily involve going to church on Sundays.
“I don’t want to go visit ‘God’ someplace once a week. I don’t want to do that. I want to teach my children that in Jesus and in the Holy Spirit, we live and move and have our very being every moment of our day,” she explains.
Gifford has some simple, practical tips to model this behavior for children.
“Teach your children friendship with God on a daily basis,” she says. “Say your prayers before every meal, acknowledge that this is a gift from Him and say, ‘I love you’ all the time. Say, ‘Bless you, instead of, ‘Good luck.’”
She adds, “Just have fun. They’ll learn by watching and they’ll learn by doing with you. If I were you, I wouldn’t teach my children to be ‘religious.’”
Gifford’s exploration of the Bible and the Holy Land led her to co-author a new book, “Herod and Mary: The True Story of the Tyrant King and the Mother of the Risen Savior,” which combines historical fact with compelling narrative.
According to Gifford, the story of Herod, an “evil, perverted” king and Mary, “the mother of Jesus” who is “just a teenage girl from Nazareth,” feels as though it could have been “ripped from the headlines today.” She adds, “Nothing’s really changed in terms of human behavior, but the thing that never changes is Jehovah God.”
Gifford says that the whole point of everything she does is to “give people hope.”
“I can make people laugh, but at the end, I want them to think. I want them to think, ‘What’s important?’”
This book is the first of a series called “Ancient Evil, Living Hope.” In the future, Gifford may reexamine the story of the birth of Jesus because “our Western story about the Nativity is completely wrong, but we’ll do that for another book. People don’t want me to mess with their manger.”
