Tear-Filled Flasks

From today’s reading…

Raising seven kids has provided countless flask-filling (tears and maybe some brown liquid) wanderings for my wife and me.

In these nearly 23 years of child-rearing and teaching, there have been tears shed over math lessons and science projects, driving lessons and sports, boyfriends, girlfriends, and friends who turned out not to be friends.

While every tear ever shed by every child has cut my wife and me to the bone, I wouldn’t change a single thing because—as long as we’re engaged, observant, available, and supportive—we have used those tears of pain as teaching moments that support our mission as parents, which is not to coddle our children and protect them from the world, but to prepare them to handle what the world will throw at them and to get to heaven.

But if our children suffer in silence, without us knowing, or if we ignore their pain, they still learn from their tearful experiences. It’s just a more painful lesson that teaches them that they are unloved: that nobody cares about them, their pain, their struggles, their lives.

They’re wrong…but at that moment there is too much not right, so that negativity, doubt, and fear takes root.

That’s why we have to be there for them.

Sometimes to lift them up.

Sometimes to simply encourage them and remind them that they are loved.

If a stitch in time saves nine, how many hopeless thoughts are saved by one encouraging word, one supportive nod, one shoulder on which to cry?

You’ve seen your enemies turned back during your life, so you know that’s God at work.

He’s using you as an instrument of His peace to remind others that they are loved, that they are seen, that they are not alone.

The interesting thing about this symbiotic relationship is that the teacher learns more than the student, so as you’re helping them, they are helping you to…

Stay the course. Keep the faith. Endure.

Market like you mean it. Now go sell something.