Uncategorized Archives - Page 23 of 37

30 Days to Enjoying Your Children More: Teach {Day 28}

Thank you for joining us! You can find Day 1 here.

One of my earliest memories is of watching my dad weave a heavy nylon cord, the kind he used to tie down planes at the hangar. He had one end of the yellow rope tied to his big red Craftsman toolbox, and with his free hands, he worked the smaller strands into one very strong cable.

As he worked, he talked to me, explaining what he was doing and why. He taught me the pattern and let me have a turn. My three-year-old hands were too small and the weaving was complicated, but I liked being near him and watching him work. He smelled like metal and grease and bit of Old Spice, and I thought he was very handsome.

He was always teaching, always explaining, and always demonstrating something to me. When he took me up in the airplane by myself, and I got to sit in the co-pilot’s seat, he made sure I knew exactly what he was doing. He taught me how to make cookies and how to play Risk and showed me how to remove stamps from envelopes so I could start a collection just like his. Teaching was just something he did, like breathing.

My dad died only three days after Christmas the year I turned eleven. He pulled out onto a snowy Ohio road and never came back. They said he died instantly in the crash, that he never felt a thing. But we felt it.

The wake was held just a few days later, and then the funeral, when everything was hazy but real enough to be horrible. People came up and said things to me that seemed to make them feel better, about how it was all so tragic and how there hadn’t been enough time.

It seemed the right thing to say. His death was unexpected and heartbreaking. He was so young. We were so young. There was a gaping wound where once he had been.

But in another sense, it was not tragic, and it was not too soon. Many other people had lived much longer lives and done much less with them. It seemed that was a greater tragedy.

In the years that followed, I have known many friends and family members who have died, but no one has ever said there was enough time. Death always comes too soon. I remember talking to my grandpa the summer before he died from prostate cancer. He had lived over eighty full, fruitful years, but even he was struggling with the idea that life was closing in. There was still so much he wanted to do, so much he wanted to say, and the living part of him could not help but grieve the fact that the dying part of him was winning.

Life is a precious thing. Even a full, long life is over in a blink.

The tragedy comes when life is over before it ever really began, when a person fills his life with nothing but small stuff and never gets around to the things that really matter. For parents, the tragedy comes when they save for tomorrow what should have been started today, when they bother over enjoying their children today with little regard to whether or not they will enjoy them for eternity.

That is a tragic.

But in my home, teaching us about faith was the priority. I do not remember a time when my family did not pray around the dinner table. I don’t remember when we started reading a chapter from the thick children’s story Bible after dinner. I don’t remember when we started going to church or memorizing Scripture or reading missionary biographies. I don’t remember because it always was.

My parents took seriously the charge to care for our eternal well-being by teaching us God’s Word and demonstrating real-life faith in flesh and blood right before our very eyes. From a very young age, I understood that all of eternity hinges on matters of faith.

Keeping the commitment to godly instruction was not always easy, I’m sure. I stomped my way into church more than once, and the busyness of life threatened the quite times with God. But absolutely no temporal sacrifice could compare with the eternal enjoyment of each other that was born out of that faithful work.

Because of the way my parents taught me, I was able to see the hand of God even in the sorrow of my dad’s untimely death. I remember opening my Bible on the night he died, seeking comfort in the Psalms. His legacy, shortened though it was, carried me through the early years without him, the firsts of college and marriage and children, the uncertainty of childhood transitions and adult decisions.

The things he taught me governed how I lived, helped to determine whom I married, and even today, gives me a pattern for how I raise my kids. My dad’s priority has had generational impact. Even though he has never met them, his grandchildren are following in his footsteps.

He had enough time because he did not take his time for granted.

I want to parent like that. Whether I die today or fifty years from now, I want my kids to say I had enough time, that I kept my priorities straight and I did not neglect the big things because the small things were more immediate and more demanding. I want them to know that I did the hard things, the less enjoyable things, so that we could enjoy each other forever.

What is life, but a breath? Yet all of eternity stretches out before us. May we make decisions today that will ensure we can enjoy it with all of our children and the many generations to come.

In happier times.

Please join us tomorrow for Day 29!

Start today…

1) Take time today to explain to your children why you believe what you do. Do they know your testimony?

2) If you have not been faithful to teach your children, confess it. Tell them that you have not done something you should and tell them that you are going to start today.

3) Pray with them today. Even a very short prayer at dinner or bedtime leaves a lasting impression.

4) If your children are small, get an age-appropriate children’s Bible and read a chapter a day. One Bible storybook we love for the littles is The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name. Older children can be read to from The New Living Translation (a very well-done modern paraphrase) or any Bible you have in the home.

5) Find a Bible-believing church and go!

30 Days to Enjoying Your Children More: Affirmation {Day 13}

New here? Click here to start at the beginning of the series.

If you missed Friday’s post, you may want to start here with our conversation on looking for the good.

Nicolas was a first-grader with a rap sheet. His teacher, who had insisted on giving me the inside track on her problem student, told me he was stubborn, defiant, reclusive, impulsive, dangerous, and uncontrollable. His Asperger’s often manifested in aggressive behavior that resulted in calls to the principal. I was told to leave my door open whenever Nicolas was in my room.

Nicolas did not like me. That’s what he told me every time I came to get him for our tutoring sessions. He did not like coming to my classroom. He said I was stupid. He did not like to sit in his chair so I let him stand beside it, but I wouldn’t let him stand on it, and he didn’t like that either.

“You’re really good at standing,” I observed one day.

Nicolas frowned at me.

“You’re probably the best stander in the entire first grade.”

“No I’m not,” Nicolas retorted and sat down.

The next time I saw Nicolas, he sat right down in his chair and did not tell me he hated me first. He was hiding something in his lap.

“What did you bring, Nicolas?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Okay,” I shrugged and pretended to be busy getting our math game ready.

Slowly, Nicolas unfolded his fingers and smoothed a crumpled paper. It was a drawing of a Lego pirate ship, full of sails and rigging and pirates peeking out behind cannons. Nicolas had tried to draw every single brick.

No one had told me Nicolas could draw.

“Yes, but the problem is, he wants to draw before he finishes copying his sentences,” his teacher said when I asked her about it. “He never follows directions.”

Oh.

“Nicolas,” I said when I saw him next, “I didn’t know you could draw.”

Nicolas shrugged and kicked his feet against the table leg. Thump…thump…thump…It drove me nuts.

“I need some pictures for my wall,” I continued. “Do you think you could make some for me?”

“Do I have to write about them?” he asked.

“Nope. Not here. I just like your pictures.”

Nicolas stared at me while he thumped. Suddenly, he exclaimed, “You have green eyes!”

Talk to Nicolas was like talking in circles, I thought. But I smiled instead.

“I didn’t know you had green eyes.” He said it like it changed something between us.

The next week, Nicolas brought me a paper. “Here,” he said, dropping it on the table like it didn’t matter to him at all. It was a portrait. Nicolas had drawn my eyes first, I could tell. He had even made the orange rays coming out from the centers that you can’t even see unless the light is just right. Nicolas had noticed.

He sat down.

“It’s very good,” I said. “You are very good.”

“It’s just a stupid drawing.”

“No, it’s not a stupid drawing. Drawing is not stupid. It’s a very special thing you can do. Not everybody can do that. Most people can’t do that.”

Nicolas shrugged. But the corners of his lip betrayed something of a smile.

Nicolas came to my class twice a week. After that, he almost always brought pictures. Sometimes, he remembered he hated me. Sometimes, he remembered I have green eyes. But every time he came to my class, I tried to find something special about Nicolas. Something that was his. Something that the quirks of his brain and his personality could not take away.

He did not make it easy for me, especially on the days when Nicolas screamed at me and tore his “stupid pictures” off the walls because he thought I’d moved them, or threw the math cards at me or banged his head on the table until I was afraid he’d get a concussion.

I didn’t always feel like trying so hard. Sometimes, I didn’t think he deserved it, quite honestly, because the bad outweighed the good so heavily. I wanted to hold on to any sort of praise I found because it seemed like affirming the good also affirmed the bad, or made the bad less grievous.

I had to remind myself that every good and perfect gift is from above, even little gifts, like a day with Nicolas in which he didn’t call me names. Every good thing of God deserves to be praised, even if it comes wrapped in six years of blond-haired and blue-eyed brokenness. The good is worth noticing even when it comes with a whole lot of bad.

An unexpected thing began to happen. The more I began to speak words of affirmation to Nicolas, the more I began to enjoy him. The more I began to enjoy him, the more I began to truly love him. I began to see in Nicolas the same things that were in me: stubbornness, fear, and the need to control my environment. But I also saw creativity, intuition, and sensitivity. The deep things of Nicolas called to the deep things in me, and I realized we had a lot more in common than I first thought.

The same thing happens when I affirm my children.

We hear a lot about how children need affirmation, and it is true. But it is also true that giving them affirmation meets a need in me. I need to hear my mouth speak what God is doing in the silence. I need to bring it to light, call it to my attention, to notice. When I notice what God is doing in my children, and speak it to them, it is powerful, like praise. My heart is drawn to the beauty I have discovered in them, the way my hands are drawn to sea-washed pebbles along the shore. I delight in them. I rejoice in their growth! I enjoy discovering new good things of God in them.

Some of the sweetest times we have had as a family have come from the very simple act of speaking affirmations to each other. We explain to the children that the Holy Spirit causes good things to grow, things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. Anytime we see those things in each other, it means the Holy Spirit is doing a good thing, and we need to affirm it! We speak it to each other. “Kya, you were so kind to your brothers today when they wanted you to read them a story. Faith, you showed a lot of self-control when Jonathan barged into your room without knocking.”

Do you see God working in your children?

Tell them.

Maybe you have to look very, very hard or start with something very, very small, like noticing how well they can stand beside a table. Speak that one thing. Speak it, and listen to the words your lips utter. Be encouraged by the good thing you found—however small—and trust God to make more good things to grow. You will find that as you affirm your children, you affirm your love for them as well. You remind yourself how much you enjoy them, even on the days when it is hard. The affirmations you speak create an expectation of goodness in your home. Who wouldn’t enjoy living in a place like that?

When I began to affirm Nicolas, his heart, which had a hard time feeling emotions, began to beat a little more warmly. He found out I was expecting a baby, and came by my room every day to check to see how the baby was growing. I put a little chart on my door just for him, with a little weighted baby so he could feel how big the baby was getting. He was convinced I was going to have a boy and made frequent spontaneous visits to my classroom to offer a name suggestion or to bring me a picture for the nursery.

Then one day, Nicolas came with deep bruises around his neck. “My dad tried to kill me,” he said flatly.

Nicolas’s dad was a retired cop. He married late in life, and when he found out he was having a son at fifty, he couldn’t have been any prouder. Except that Nicolas was not the kind of son he had expected. Waif-like Nicolas with the blond hair and too-big eyes would not play ball or wrestle or even hug.

Earlier that week, Nicolas had refused to get out of bed. Once he was out of bed, he refused to get dressed. Once his dad wrestled him into his school clothes, Nicolas threw himself on the floor and screamed because the seams in his socks rubbed his toes wrong. He screamed so loud, he woke up his baby sister, who started screaming too. He called his dad bad names in his loudest voice and kicked him in the leg until his dad tried to strangle him while his mom called 9-1-1.

When his mom came to my class to explain that Nicolas would be moving to a new school, she saw the baby chart on the door. She had heard Nicolas talking about Mrs. Glover’s baby “boy” and was surprised to find that I was barely showing. He loved that baby because it was safer than loving me.

She also saw the pictures all over my wall. Nicolas’s mom did not know he could draw. But there in my room was something beautiful about her boy that she had missed. She had missed it because life with Nicolas was hard. It took everything she had and more just to get through the day.

“Nicolas has a talent,” I said, and she began to cry. No one had ever seen anything praiseworthy in her boy before. How she had longed to see something—anything—in him to give her hope. That very large woman gave me a very big hug and left in tears.

I never saw Nicolas again. But there is a little piece of my heart that is connected to a little piece of his because the good things of God bound us together. The simple act of affirming the good in Nicolas made the good more evident to me, to the point that his irritable or aggressive behaviors didn’t matter as much. Affirming him did something I never expected: it made me enjoy him more.

God causes the good things to GROW!
1 Corinthians 3:6-7

Please join us tomorrow for Day 14: Tattling

For further thought:

1) Think about your child(ren). What makes it difficult to affirm him or her?

2) Write each of your children’s names on a piece of paper. List as many godly traits you can think of. Add to the list throughout the day as others come to mind. Do you feel how your heart changes toward each child as you begin to focus on the good things? Now, speak those things to your child, either with the family or one-on-one. What happened as you spoke those affirmations to your child?

3) Review the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23. Be on the lookout for these things in your children! Discipline them toward producing more good fruit by affirming these traits when you see them.

30 Days to Enjoying Your Children More: Discipline {Day 6}

New here? Click on the photo to begin at Day 1.

When we purchased our first home four years ago, we inherited a renegade grapevine that sprawled across an insufficient arbor in the backyard. It had become wild, consuming the trees along our property line and devouring at least three different fences in neighboring yards.

The grape clusters were sparse and grew so high up in the trees, my husband had to borrow an extension ladder from a neighbor just to reach them. Worse, the vine was in danger of killing itself. The roots couldn’t produce enough energy to support the out-of-control branches. Without drastic intervention, it would slowly die.

This was a shame because the grapes on this vine are particularly tasty. The person who planted the vine and built the arbor probably knew that. He had great intentions of harvesting bountiful fruit. But that’s where his interest in the plant ended. He did not care to prune or fertilize it, and he never trained its willful vines to grow where they could be strongest.

Whoever planted the vine did not love it enough to help it reach its potential. As a result, the undisciplined vine was not healthy, productive, or even enjoyable. In fact, it was downright annoying. It was growing all over the neighborhood in a tangled mess, and I didn’t know how to begin to bring it under control.

So I did the only reasonable thing: I ignored it and planted two new grape vines. The first year, the little whips needed little attention. But the second year, things started to happen and I had to do something. It had not occurred to me before that I knew nothing about growing grapes. I searched the Internet, read books, and consulted diagrams. My shoots don’t look like the diagrams. So I evaluated each one, looking for strengths and weaknesses. Finally, I had to clip things that might or might not grow back and tried to compensate with an extra layer of compost.

I began to understand why the first grapevine was left to nature. Discipline is tricky business.

It is true of grapes, and it is true of children, only more so. You cannot have truly healthy, productive, and enjoyable children if you do not practice discipline. Notice, I didn’t say “if you do not practice punishment.” Discipline and punishment are two different things. Punishment is one aspect of discipline, but so is praise and encouragement! Proper discipline includes both.

We are accustomed in our society to interchange the terms discipline and punishment, which is unfortunate. Because of this, “discipline” often has a negative connotation. You may even have felt angry, defensive, or anxious when you read the word.

But discipline is anything but negative. It means to teach or train with the intention of developing or improving a desired character or skill. Discipline is the process of weeding out weaknesses and encouraging strengths. It always keeps the best interests of the object in mind. The result of discipline is that a child is able to become more fully himself. That’s something you don’t always see in the books on discipline, but it is a vital truth.

Imagine how different our homes would be if every child was considered a unique and special member of God’s creation. What would happen if each mother and father looked at each child and thought, “I wonder what treasures God has given you that I can help to polish and cut? I wonder what kind of light you can shine if I help you?”

And instead of corralling behaviors and doling out punishments and rewards, as necessary as those things are, each parent made it his or her first intention to seek out the gifts and calling of that child so that the child could pursue it, become equipped to do it, and then delight in it for the glory of God?

What a rich and beautiful world it would be! Instead of rows and rows of perfectly cultivated apple trees growing along perfectly tidy streets, ours would be a world of winding paths through glorious orchards bursting with every kind of exotic specimen ever created. Each and every plant would be grown and trained to reach its fullest potential, each one disciplined to achieve its best, each one trained to be beautiful and productive. Not a single tree would be made to fulfill a purpose for which it was not intended.

How delightful it would be to live in a world like that! How delightful it would be to raise children like that!

If the cultivator of my overgrown grapevine had loved the vine enough to discipline in that way, it would have been pruned so the best vines could strengthen and grow. Instead of wasting energy on unproductive greenery, the roots could have produced and sustained glorious fruit. It would have been trained to grow over the arbor where the beauty of the plant and the abundance of the fruit could be enjoyed. A vine like that would be more fully itself than the one that was left to die in my backyard.

Isn’t the same true of our children? When we seek to cultivate our children in the way they were created, they are healthier, happier, and more enjoyable for it. They get to be the best them they can be.

Our world was formed by an infinitely creative God to be rich and varied, and so were our families. Disciplining our children allows the spectacular individualism of their God-given natures to shine through. If we fail to train them in the way God intended them to grow, or attempt to train them to be something they are not, they will suffer, and we will miss out on the joy of God’s workmanship.

My grandparents raised eight children. Four became missionaries or dedicated themselves to full-time ministry. One became a chiropractor, another a fireman, and another a businessman. And one became a race car driver.

The last one is not like the others, and that is the fun of it. If you ever watch my uncle race, you will see that he is most fully himself when he is out on the track or under the hood of a car. His passions, which have been disciplined into a life-long pursuit, are the part of him that most clearly communicates who he is and what he was made to do. They are the part that shouts out to God’s infinite creativity.

When we discipline our children to pursue the passions put in their hearts by God, they become more fully who they were intended to be. They get to be themselves, only better. And we get to enjoy them as they were meant to be.

Discipline produces good fruit!

Join us tomorrow for Day 7: Constancy

For further thought

1) How is discipline a loving act toward your children?

2) The Bible says God disciplines those He loves (Hebrews 12:6). How is God’s discipline of you a loving act? How does it show His father-heart toward you?

3) Think about each of your children. Write down the good and godly qualities you see in them. How can you discipline those things to bear more fruit in their lives?

« Previous Page