“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up” (Deuteronomy 6:5-7).
Whenever our extended family gathers for vacations, we get out the scrapbooks and photos, and we talk well past midnight about the works of God all of us have experienced in our lives. We are blessed to have such a rich Christian heritage. Stuart and I often tell stories about the youth work we were involved with in Liverpool and Manchester. Our children still remember those days. They remember many of the street kids being converted.
Once David (our oldest) chipped in to remind us about a character called “Grotty Bob,” who was a drug dealer in Manchester. Stuart was working among the unchurched young people in the cities at that time and brought him home to stay with us awhile. David, then six, still remembers Grotty Bob’s conversion and the dramatic change in his life and behavior. Our son had been part of it all—giving up his own bed so Grotty Bob could sleep comfortably for a change. We all learned about life in another culture through that experience.
All of our kids have been involved in reaching out to people in need. Our oldest has been involved in a pastoral role caring for the many outsiders, visitors, and strangers coming through the church doors. Our daughter and her husband spend time helping such organizations as Habitat for Humanity and one of our son’s wives had an endless stream of broken, bruised, and battered people that they took into their her family home growing up.
It was Stuart’s faith in a God who has the power to transform that nudged him to bring that lost young man into our home and as a result influence our adult kids to do the same. And thanks to the Lord that with all our faults as parents, we were able to practice enough faith in action to make our own kids hunger for that same reality themselves and their children. The heritage is passed along!
PRAYER
Lord, thank You for the opportunities You give me daily to live my faith out loud in front of my kids. Help me to make the most of every opportunity—at meal times, in the car, shopping, watching TV, and everything in between. With all my heart, I want to raise mighty kids for Your kingdom who will love and serve You. Make their heart fertile ground for receiving Your Word and then desiring to follow it in a sold-out faith. And for those kids that have chosen a different path even though I have done my very best to point them to You, keep me on my knees filled with hope, knowing that Your Word never returns void. Continue to pursue them and bring them to Yourself. Amen.
