One Just Like You!

Home alone, Day 4.

My kids are 1500 miles away and right now I wish I could fold time and space to reach out to them. My wife left our 17 year old daughter in charge of my two boys while her and my in-laws attended a Christmas party… and the fighting has begun!

Did your parents ever tell you; “be careful how you act or God will give you a child just like you”?

Well my parents did… and now I am living out that prediction. I somehow thought I would do it better. It is hard to not to point the finger inward and say: “You could have done better”! Mostly because no matter how good you do it there is always a way you could have done it better. Hindsight makes this painfully clear. I blame myself when my children make wrong choices. I wish there was a way I could deposit all of the experiences from so many wrong choices in my life as well as the pain of their outcome into my children’s head so that they would not repeat my mistakes. I want so much for them to have the best of everything life can bring… as does any parent. But as parents we are only 50% of the equation. The response our children have to us and their environment can only be influenced by us for so long. We can only control their world for a little while. Thankfully mine are still young enough that I can take away their freedom to continue making mistakes and do my best to alter their course before it’s too late. But what if they don’t change… what if they just bide their time until they pop out from under your thumb? What do you do? What if after pouring all of your love and life into them they still reject right for wrong, good for bad, God for selfish desire? What then?

Truthfully, I was way worse than most children. SHHHHhhhhhh… don’t let them hear that! Yet, I survived to make it here. In the process I know I wore out a whole host of Gods angels trying to keep up with me. In all seriousness, my parents and many of my parent’s friends did not expect me to live past twenty, and by all rights I shouldn’t have. There are not many things one can think of as it relates to danger or trouble that I was not completely immersed in. So if I made it maybe they can too. They certainly have a better start than I did. But the world has changed since we were kids, and that’s what worries me most. The world I grew up in was a Disney movie compared the X rated life we live today.

Ultimately it is between them and God. All we can do is train them in the way they should go and leave the rest to our Father in heaven.

And when they are old (hopefully) they will not depart from it.