HAPPY CHRISTMAS MORNING!! If you are having half as much fun as we are, you don’t have time to read this! If your house is one tenth as messy as mine is, you have a lot to do. But don’t do it. Just walk on the torn paper for a while. Walk around the strewn presents. Don’t take the tree down for at least three more days. Drink hot cocoa and eat warm cinnamon rolls. Don’t count calories or weight watcher points today. Take an afternoon nap and then get up and play games. Savor the day with your family. Your time together will be over all too quickly.
I hope you caught the twinkle in your kids’ eyes when they opened their presents. Mine are both in their twenties, but surprises still bring the desired reaction. The giving is still as much fun (well, almost) as when they were toddlers. When I think about giving them gifts, though, I know that it’s not the ones under the tree that are ultimately important. In the last post, I wrote about one of the most enduring gifts you can give them. It’s a tool box with just a some very practical warranted tools to help them one day build a great marriage and a happy home to His glory. If you can help them, early on, to make wise choices when they choose spouses, you have given them something money can’t buy. Here are just two of those tools:
1. When your child is old enough to talk at all, begin making this statement to him/her: “When I marry, I’m going to marry a ________________.” Do this daily with even your two-year old. Elicit the response “Christian”.
As your child matures, accompany the statement with an elicited definition of what a true Christian is. A Christian, by definition is a follower of Christ. This means more than being a member of some church. This means patterning his/her life after Christ in all practical areas.
2. Then, well before your child begins to date, come up with a list of characteristics or qualifications for which to search in finding this Christian. When we did this at our house we made little wallet sized cards, laminated them and called them our “dating check cards”. They look like this:
Remember, it’s too late to say or do any of these things once your son or daughter has fallen in love and decided whom to marry. While you should still do all you can to help your child avoid marrying someone who will endanger his/her eternal salvation, the time to begin is well in advance of the teen years. If your child can walk and talk (even a little), get busy!
