It’s Digging Deep Writing week! It’s busy and it’s kind of a sleep-deprived study marathon, but it’s fun. Here’s a short excerpt from the lesson I worked on yesterday. Most portions are full of questions and scriptures. This was just one little part in which I was on a small soapbox:
- Mothers must be joyful home-keepers. We really need to return to loving to cook, loving a well-ordered home, loving to hold and cuddle babies and loving to read to our children. We need to love the home-crafts that make our homes pretty and fun. But even more importantly, we need to love the showing of beautiful attitudes to our children. To think we cannot have those attitudes of joy in interacting with our children is to accept defeat before we have begun. No wonder our girls grow up in a hurry to get out of our homes and to be with whoever comes along, if we have made our homes situations of stress and power-clutching.
- Boys need to see their daddies be serious students of the word and your son needs to be 100 percent sure that Dad loves to be with him, throwing the ball or hunting the buck. Girls need to be with their moms in the kitchen and that kitchen needs to be a place of laughter. Girls need to see their moms loving daily Bible study and prayer.
- Ironically, I have found that the manipulative/abusive men are generally not the men who want quiet women at home.They are most generally men who want the immodest, boisterous women and they most often want them to bring home their half of the family funding. Teach your girls to reject this mentality and you will be halfway to victory.
- Teach your boys and girls to wait on the Lord. That’s the hardest part. Tell them these things: “Take a relatively long time for the courtship, even if you think one day, you’d like a short engagement. Don’t be afraid of red flags. Look for them. If he wants you to carry your own bags when you come to visit his parents, see the flag waving. If she cannot keep her hands to herself or if she cannot cover her cleavage and thighs, see the flag waving.”
- I did not say the list would be a quick and easy fix. But, if some of us do not decide to break the maddening cycle of stress and work and money/power chasing, and take time for the important quality time that occurs in the middle of quantity time with our kids, then we will continue to inflict marriage angst on our kids.
I hope you are thinking about doing the study that begins next September with us. It’s the Word! It’s already blessing me. And it’s already making me very sleepy! =)
