Previous Challenge Entry (Level 1 – Beginner)
Topic: Fulfillment (04/06/06)
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TITLE: Arrows in the Quiver | Previous Challenge Entry
By Helen Murray
04/08/06 -
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Parents, what an opportunity you have, and also what a responsibility, to help your children to live fulfilled lives!
You marry, and soon a child is born, with such incredible capacity for life. Just think about this tiny creature, unspoilt, undamaged. You have taken care during your pregnancy to eat healthy food and to live in an absence of stress. Any stress can affect the incredibly responsive unborn child. So you have ceased work when it has become too much for you and not tried to persist with it too long. You have avoided the guilt trips people put on you for not working up to the last minute!
The room is prepared and toys are ready. The child is loved and received into a joyful family. As they play with him he responds with those smiles and laughs that demonstrate what a social being s/he is. This socialisation is very important and can’t take place in a child care centre. (It can develop there but can’t be born there)
Socialisation is behind
1. Sharing ideas and getting heard.
2. Communication with all ages. He adores his parents and must have a great deal of their vigorous attention, or suffer the terrible generation gap which cuts out three quarters of his communication channels!
3. Ultimate success in a social world. Those parents who delight in their child’s conversations, and let him know this, are setting him up for the all important communication successes later in life.
Make sure that you are quickly responsive to your child, and s/he will later be quickly responsive to you. After all, what you sow is what you’ll reap!
A sense of shared adventure is essential right from the start. This doesn’t mean you can’t say “no”. At times you will have good reason to say “no”, and that is an extremely important to learning self-discipline. What it does mean is that there are a lot of opportunities to say “yes”. Encourage the child to initiate ideas. Work with him from a young age to see those simple little ideas come to fruition. Let him know the all-important truth, “All things are possible”. His God nature knows this, (yes, God has put eternity into his heart) and he needs to hold that knowing into the future.
Don’t remove all risk from his life. Teach your child to take a calculated risk (you have calculated it already), because life is one big calculated risk. Later you will want him to risk his everything with God. Encourage him to think, plan, and try things out. Share the excitement. Let him climb trees. He needs that sense of exhilaration in order to make a success of his life. I’ve actually seen my seven-year-old daughter fall off a pony that propped, and leap back on its back within ten seconds, terrified that I may want to fuss over her and stop her riding. I was proud of her. This is the spirit that is needed She will not easily be defeated with that attitude. Weep for the over-protected child.
Watch out for your child’s passion. It will show to the discerning parent or teacher at a very early age. Do everything within your power to find an excellent teacher and plenty of opportunities. That passion is very closely related to the child’s purpose.. It’s up to us to discover and nurture this passion. The passion is likely to be something in which the family has expertise, but if you need to buy the expertise, do it! Let us invest in our children. They are our arrows into the future.
The child whose parents pay much attention to these things is a privileged child, bound for success in life. Their life plan will be discovered and fulfilled. It is really up to us.
God insists on contracted marriage as distinct from fornication.. Children of intact, wise families do not suffer great and debilitating traumas of divorce etc, and have all that to deal with. They are holy children, “holy” in the sense of unblemished, un-traumatised and able to function as God intended. (no, they are not without sin, but they are “shalom”, able to prosper and have joy.)
The fulfilment of a child’s future promise is very much up to the sound practices of the previous generation. May God, our Father, who pays such intense and passionate attention to us, indeed turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, in families, and in churches.
The opinions expressed by authors may not necessarily reflect the opinion of FaithWriters.com.
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