Encouraging Our Children

Parents are given the awesome privilege and undeniable responsibility of demonstrating God's love to their children. With the loving support of family and friends, Mom and Dad can help their kids discover the joy and satisfaction of a personal relationship with Jesus.

In our fragility, however, we can become a stumbling block for our children, rather than a bridge to God. For example, it's important to use wisdom in responding to their efforts. Out of a desire for our kids to be successful, some of us parents continue to "raise the bar." If my daughter brings home an A, do I look for and A+ next time? When my son comes in third, do I ignore his effort and push him to place second in the next race?

Unless we're careful, children may mistake their age-appropriate efforts as substandard and disappointing to Mom and Dad. There's a danger of them later on assuming the same is true of God. Kids might ask, "If I can't meet my earthly parents' standards, how can I possibly ever meet my heavenly Father's.

As we encourage our children to achieve, as we ought to do, we must be balanced and affirm who they are, separate and apart from their performances. When we do, they'll know we appreciate them and find it believable that God values them too.

Of course, the desire of all Christian parents is for their children to acknowledge their dependency on God and to receive Jesus Christ as their Savior. Parental acceptance and appreciation will help them embrace God's unconditional love along with the amazing truth that they are forgiven of all their sins. He has erased all condemnation (Rom 8:1).

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Running late again. I set my alarm but then shut it off and went back to sleep. That's getting to be a really bad habit! I best stop doing that or I'll end up doing it sometime when I have an appointment or something and really NEED to get up early. I'm treading on thin ice here. Best I buck up and face the day with a smile when the alarm goes off. It's just that the house is cold and getting out of a nice warm bed isn't even on my list of things I want to do today. I want my cake and I want to eat it too. (Have you ever stopped to think about just how stupid that saying is? What good is having a piece of cake if you aren't supposed to eat it? When I have cake, I have it for the sole purpose of eating it! Make sense? Does to me!) I've been reading how to quiet my life and find the solitude to commune with my heavenly Father. Joseph Bentz, author of Silent God: Finding Him When You Can't Hear His Voice, says, "Perhaps there's an activity that once served a purpose but now merely sucks time and energy from what you'd be better off doing." I read that and immediately thought about my blog. Uh-oh.

We have an inch of rain out in the rain gauge so we got significant precipitation through the night. I dumped it last night and recorded yesterday's measurement. Yesterday we got .32 so this has been a nice storm. I can't tell if it's still raining at this time but I can tell you that it still looks a lot like rain. I don't think the storm is over by any stretch of the imagination. It will probably be pouring when I go out this afternoon to go to Evelyn's house. We're going to go over the church directory and she's going to see if she can help me out with who need cards and who doesn't. But anyway it will probably be raining buckets when I need to go out. Hope not.

For those of you who are praying, Michael's neck is a little better but he still needs lots of prayer. He has a doctor appointment Friday afternoon so maybe they'll be able to tell him something or at least be able to give him more pills to get through the day. I've been keeping up with http://womanoffaith.com/. Her blog is always so much fun to read. She just has a zest for life that makes you feel good all over when you read her almost-daily blogs. She's pretty good about keeping regular with her blog. If you haven't already, check her out.

I just realized I don't have even one of my morning chores done. If I made writing my blog one of my chores I wouldn't have to feel so bad because I'd at least be working on them. I just have a small handful of things to do each morning. You'd think I would remember to do them. I'm tired of winter. It's dark and cold and is depressing. Although that kind of depression is okay. It's okay to be depressed if you're depressed about something. It's when you're depressed and you have nothing to be depressed over that you're in trouble. That's where prozac comes in. Well my friend Mario just walked across my computer keyboard and I lost an entire paragraph. I haven't the slightest idea where it went. I can't find it. I hate it when that happens! I wish he would go away! Actually he is away right the very minute but like a bad penny he always keeps turning up. Have you ever had a bad penny?

Well, I guess this will about do it. The only vital information in the lost paragraph that I can still remember is the fact that we forgot to put out the garbage cans last night so we missed the pickup this morning! Now that's VITAL! Our company has recently gone to recycling most of the trash and what that did is it opened up our regular trash so we have plenty of room in the real trash. It's like getting half your trash picked up for free! Works for us and I get to feel good about it too because we're saving the earth from global warming and all that other bad stuff. See you tomorrow...