Being your child's primary spiritual guide -Part 1
A.K. A. Happy Birthday Kristen, Love Dad
For a long time as a parent I struggled with the fact that I could tell God was calling my heart and telling me that believing parents are meant to be their children's primary spiritual guide as they are growing up, but one thing or another delayed my answering this call until my oldest daughter Kristen was in Middle School. I tried a few different approaches to family devotions with her and her younger sister by two years (Kaiti) until I stumbled across a tape series that encouraged me to have a theme for each month and scripture to memorize that fit the theme. We finally found a comfortable consistency with about 2-3 mornings a week at about 6:10 in the morning, right before breakfast and getting ready for school. When I say comfortable I know that many adults aren't comfortable with listening or interacting with each other at that time of the morning, let alone children. So we didn't always greet each other with smiles, but it felt right and we pushed through until it became an expectation or we all realized it probably wasn't going away =).
At that age no parent gets the affirmation from their kids to keep planning a semi-organized spiritual activity when the sun hasn't come up yet, so there were many days I wondered if what I was exposing us to was going to bring the results I had hoped for, but God kept affirming me by putting people and resources into my life that continued to fuel the fire of not depending on Sunday School teachers, the Church or worse yet their peers be their primary spiritual guides. It's not that they weren't good enough, it's just that they needed to be the supplement to what the parents are called to do for God.
Through hard mornings and easier mornings we took the devotions all the way through Kristen's senior year of HS and it was her freshman year of college at Taylor University when God chose to show me what He had in mind.
It was her first tennis match of her freshman year and her mother and I had come up to take her shopping, get the oil changed in her car, grab a bite to eat and watch the match. Guess who got the job of getting the oil changed? =) So I'm cleaning out the interior of her car so the guys can get in with the vacuums and I come across a poster in her back seat. It was obviously a poster of favorite or valued things that her tennis coach had her and the other players write down on their poster so they could get to know each other better. Like every young girl her age she had written down fun activities and friends, lyrics to songs, movies she had watched, groups that she belonged to (Formally and informally), and books she had read. Then I saw it...written in the corner of the poster were the words "6:10 Dad." Could it be I wondered to myself? That when it came time to tell her teammates about favorite and treasured things in her life that she told them about our morning devotions? I was hoping so and figured I'd ask her about it later in private. Later that day we arrived at the match and I went to shake the coach's hand and re-introduce myself from a quick meeting we had when she recruited Kristen to play on the team during HS, and her reply was...."You're 6:10 Dad aren't you." I was stunned that those words would be the first thing out of her mouth as we greeted. I'm sure my smile was from ear to ear. She went on to tell me that Kristen had shared our devotion time with her and the team as something she was proud of when it came to spiritual things in her life. I held my composure just long enough to finish talking to the coach then gave an excuse to go back to the car because I had forgotten my sunglasses. I really went back to the car to cry.... like a baby. To physically cry, and to cry out to God for affirming my obedience to Him and recognizing my love for my children. My daughter couldn't have blessed me more by telling her coach and teammates about our worship time together on those mornings. It has given me the fuel to continue those kinds of faithful actions with my younger children (One of which you'll hear bout in part II of this blog) and to encourage other parents to do the same with their children. God has given me lots of opportunities to talk about Christian parenting to small group Bible Studies, Sunday School Classes and even from the pulpit occasionally. It is one of my favorite subjects to talk about and favorite stories to tell because I think Parents do struggle with having the energy and guts to be the primary spiritual teacher of their children. We put too much pressure on ourselves to do it perfectly so we keep putting off getting it started or we quit too quickly if our kids aren't telling us they are really getting a lot out of it. God just wants us to be obedient to Him about moving the right direction with our kids, teaching them His ways and Word, to be responsible about the role we play in their spiritual lives and not be depending on others to teach them when we are supposed to. When you are family you all know the worst about each other and sometimes under-appreciate or don't encourage each other enough to do the right things. Much of that pressure is often put on ourselves because we know we have sometimes missed the mark in front of them as a parent in the very areas of life we are trying to teach them to be Godly. God has shown grace to us in those times, and when we can accept it we'll get up, brush off the dirt and try again because we know He wants us to.
Today is Kristen's 24th birthday. She's married now to my awesome son-in-law Ryan, and has grown to become a beautiful woman who I am just as proud of today as I was her freshman year at Taylor.
I love you K-10....more than you'll ever know
Happy Birthday!
Dad
Deuteronomy 6:6-9..."These commandments that I give you today are to be upon YOUR HEARTS. Impress them on YOUR CHILDREN. Talk about them when you sit AT HOME and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.Write them on the doorframes of YOUR HOUSES and on YOUR GATES." Emphasis added =)
Impress them on 
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