Motherhood and discipleship

What Are We Intentionally Sending Them With?

The ordinary rhythms we create today help form the men and women our children are becoming.

Sometimes I wonder how many things we do simply because they have become familiar traditions. First day of school pictures are worth keeping, but they also made me consider what I want to build into the ordinary days of our family beyond the photographs.

Last year, I tried to pray over my children before they left for school. Some mornings I caught them individually, and some mornings I prayed after they were already gone. This year, I wanted to do something different. Instead of only praying over them, I wanted to pray with them.

We got up a little earlier. Everyone dressed and prepared. Before anyone walked out the door, we gathered, held hands, and prayed.

Before they entered different classrooms, conversations, challenges, and experiences, we stood together and surrendered the day to God. We asked for His protection, for help showing His love, and for guarded hearts that would respond through Christ rather than hurt or fear.

Our children will hear truth and lies, encounter kindness and cruelty, and receive words that build up as well as words that tear down. I cannot control everything they hear, see, or experience, but I can pray. More importantly, I can teach them to bring those things before God themselves.

There comes a point when children need more than a mother who prays for them. They need to learn how to pray. They need more than our faith surrounding them. They need opportunities to develop their own.

Scripture teaches that where we direct our minds matters. God is not asking us to pretend difficult things do not exist. He is teaching us where to direct our attention in the middle of them.

If someone hurts you, you do not have to hand that hurt to the next person. If someone speaks something untrue about you, you do not have to absorb it as your identity. If fear enters your mind, you do not have to build your day around it. Bring it to God, let Him tell you what is true, and then go love the next person.

Hurt can become second hand hurt when we pass it onward. The love of Christ can interrupt that pattern. Instead of giving another person what wounded us, we can bring it to Jesus and allow Him to change what comes through us.

As mothers and as women, we have opportunities to nurture unity. We can teach children to include one another, love one another well, and turn toward Christ together. The ordinary rhythms we create while they are children help teach them how to live when they become adults.

I want to raise children who create time instead of always trying to find it. We create time to pray, listen, be still, and remember what matters before the day's noise fills every available space.

While I was thinking about our prayer circle, an image helped me see the moment from another perspective. I saw little arms that will someday become the arms of grown men and women. Arms that will carry responsibility, serve, comfort, and perhaps hold children of their own.

I do not only want to teach my children to be strong. I want them to know where their strength comes from, where they can safely rest, how to stand beside one another, and Whose hand they should ultimately learn to hold.

Someday I will not be standing there holding their hands before they walk out the door. While I still have that privilege, I want to teach them where to reach when mine is no longer there.

I have not always known how to do this, but this is where we are now. We can begin building differently from wherever God shows us something better.

“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely... think on these things.”

Philippians 4:8 KJV

“Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.”

John 2:5 KJV

“We love him, because he first loved us.”

1 John 4:19 KJV