An encouragement for parents

Being a parent can be overwhelming. Lets be real...just when you think you have it sorted, another challenge arises. But if you think its about your children, you could possibly be wrong. The challenge is more often than not, within yourself. You are your biggest challenge. From your thoughts, to your attitude, to what comes out of your mouth and followed up with your actions. Every one of these signposts have a myriad of challenges awaiting you. Ready to test, challenge, teach and grow YOU. Parenthood is just another opportunity for YOU to be better, and to encourage your children to do likewise. If they are acting up you need to look at yourself first. This is the painful truth of the matter. We miss so much of what God is trying to teach us and accomplish in our lives when we skip the internal audit and go straight to judgement mode toward our children. Because in our minds; it MUST be them. It must be their hormones, it must be their friends, it must be ‘that’ age, it must be their problem. Maybe it is…..maybe you have done everything humanly and spiritually possible to raise your children the right way. But did you begin by looking at yourself with all humility first? Regardless of who’s problem it actually is, this is a posture we should always take first and foremost.  

Challenging times will come, but they are not an opportunity for you to abdicate your responsibility on any level, including, and especially, that ground zero level where God is doing a work in you personally. That’s just another form of escapism, where you can be one thing to one person, and another “thing” in the privacy of your own home toward your family. Newsflash, God doesn’t stop watching just because you close the curtains. He is interested in every little thing in your life, right down to the hidden things you can’t even see about yourself. 

To be continued....

Arguably, our greatest challenge as parents, and therein our greatest responsibility, is to raise His children right. The first thing to remember is that they are not “our” children, they were briefly loaned to us so that we could play an active part in reproducing Christ in the earth. We are stewards of His greatest treasure – responsible for taking care of the smallest to the largest detail. Its in this detail that we begin to see the magnitude of possibility, its also in the detail that we often fall short. Its easy to dream big for our children, to have vision, hope and faith – that their lives will meet the mark. What mark? The Christ in you the hope of glory mark - and everything that hope represents. Big picture stuff that we know intrinsically, but knowing and doing are two separate things. Eventually that thing needs to be walked out. From the start to the finish, and everything in between. Its the everything in between part that contains the most challenge.