I feel like I have been a bit neglectful of this blog (and even more neglectful of my other one at skits and scripts 4 Him), but I have an excuse. For the last several weeks, I have been busy with one huge endeavor after another. They have all taken many hours for my family to complete and, I must say, by God's grace, they all turned out rather well. D-NOW was the biggest and most time consuming event. It is now over and I can take a breath for at least a moment. Writing on this blog had to take a back seat, so that I didn't go completely crazy.
With all of that said, I hope you'll forgive me for not keeping up with my posts. I have a lot of topics that I'm hoping to write about and I still hope that this will be a place where we can all find encouragement to be the women God wants us to be.
Today, my encouragement is this: Remember that most of the things our children learn are "caught" not "taught," so in order for them to catch the right things, we have to be heading in the right direction ourselves in order to "expose" them to it. It reminds me of catching a cold...most of us would rather NOT catch one, but if we are exposed to someone with a cold, there would be a chance of us catching it. If we are never around a person with nasty cold germs to share with us, it would be unlikely for us to catch a cold. We might still end up sick with a cold, though, because it is possible to get one without being exposed to one from someone else, but our chances are higher if we are "exposed."
We need to expose our children to the things we hope that they will learn...WE, as in ourselves, need to be the ones that are modeling the behaviors that we hope they will catch. The worst thing that we can do is tell our children to "do as I say, not as I do"...They will resent it and I can almost guarantee that they will grow up learning to "do as you do" instead of the other way around.
If we want our children to serve, then we better be serving. If we want our children to be respectful, then we need to be respectful. If we want our children to have positive attitudes then we better have positive attitudes. The list can go on and on, but those are some of the big ones on my list.
We, as grown ups, need to stop having a double standard about these things. We may want to teach our children to be respectful, but if we really examine ourselves, we fail at being respectful a lot. How many times are you tempted to think that what you have to say is so much more important than what someone else has to say. Isn't that disrespectful to them? I know I am guilty. How many times do you complain about things and then reprimand your children when they whine or complain? I'm guilty again. What about serving? Do you serve others with a happy heart or do you expect others to serve you and meet your needs?
These are just some things that have been on my mind...things that God has been convicting me of and things that I have noticed in others. I hope that these questions don't bring discouragement, but encouragement. Sometimes we need to ask ourselves questions and evaluate where we are in our quest to raise our children into adulthood. If being respectful, servant minded and staying positive were diseases, would our children be in danger of catching them from us? Would they even be "exposed" enough to catch it? Maybe we need to make sure we are "infected" first, before we expect it out of them.
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