Not infrequently, husband John and I will be part of conversations with our daughters like the following one. It’s about Maggie’s summer internship in Northern Uganda where the Lord’s Resistance Army has forced children to be soldiers. She’ll be working with those who have been brutalized but have escaped…
The other day after he read this husband John asked me (rhetorically), “How does this keep HAPPENING??!”
Others also ask us this too (although it sounds more like: “How did you raise your daughters?”) The primary answer is: “With a LOT of mistakes and loads of God’s GRACE.”
Both our daughters, and we, will continue to mess up as we try to follow Jesus, but we also trust that God will pick us up when we stumble, Here’s what we tried to teach them as they were growing up…
- The kingdom of God is ginormous – much bigger than the place where you live, and you need to see it first-hand (To that end we set a goal of taking our kids one-on-one to a developing world country when they turned 10)
- God’s world is beautiful but broken. There is a battle going on and a lot of it is heart-breaking but…
- We serve a faithful, powerful, and trustworthy King
- Before you decide what the battle is, listen carefully for the voice of your King.
- And He has created you to be a brave knight, equipping you with unique gifts to help restore good in His kingdom.
This is where we are incredibly blessed. Our kids have grown up surrounded by people who are brave knights modeling heroic courage. If you’re a young parent, my suggestion is that you find those people for your kids – either in person or in real life.
What other things do you think are important to parenting?
