The Guiding Path Of Footprints

As a father and grandfather many times over, I find myself these days increasingly concerned about something that I think some might understand...

"Direct your children onto the right path, and when they are older, they will not leave it." Proverbs 22:6 (NLT)

What we do or fail to do as parents may one day have the opportunity to either bless us or grieve our hearts deeply, based on our thoughtful planning and true, constant efforts ... in what little time that they allow us.

"Now I lay me down to sleep" - the opening of a child's prayer taught to so many innocents in their youth. I'm not going to cast shade on the innocence of a simple prayer for safety here. Instead, my aim is only to encourage the teaching of a different acknowledgment and deeper conversation...

"Now I lay me down to sleep. 
I pray the Lord my soul to keep. 
If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take."

In the heart and mind of some loving parents this may seem a comforting little prayer that gives peaceful thought and security. For a parent intentionally following Christ in earnest on the other hand, it may more likely appear to be nothing more ... than settling for less. 

To allow our children to merely recite a combination of words to an abstract being and leave it at that could be setting a very sad life precedent and a very low bar for relationship. If you'll bear with me, I think I can clarify what I mean here. What we labor with intention to teach our children is critically important and what we fail to teach them is just as critical to the development of their core structure and being. Some experts say that a child's brain develops the most during the first three years of life. Others say it occurs from birth to five. It's also been said that 50% of a person's knowledge is gained in the first five years and that the other 50% takes the rest of one's life to acquire. Whatever the numbers and ages, the important thing to gain from this is how important it is that we empower our kids with true knowledge, wisdom and understanding while we have the opportunity - to build their core on the truth and to prepare them for later years inhabiting a world less hospitable to the truth than the comfort and security of home and to the purpose for life that God's given us. 

Our God's enemy knows the statistics and numbers better than the experts and since he's our enemy also,  he'll use every opportunity to distract us from one of our most important God-given responsibilities - teaching our children how to respond to God. Satan knows that if we don't teach them, the world will ... and in this world we're living in, the odds are very good that they'll be learning the world's version of wisdom and knowledge and not what they need to live a Godly and purpose fulfilling life in preparation for facing Him in the coming end. 

The longer we wait, the harder it is to instill the truth as it becomes necessary to compete with conflicting information they may have already gathered from other sources - sources less ultimately endowed with the God given responsibility to guide them than the parents they were entrusted to. If we fail to take up the responsibility to teach them the truth about our Creator and His desire to have relationship with us in those early years, as parents we may find ourselves with deep regret that leaves us spending the rest of our lives trying to correct that mistake and to overcome it. We live in a world of disinformation that's becoming ever more deeply steeped in pop culture, self gratification, methods of obtaining secular popularity, ... and farther away from the God who gave us life for one simple but incredibly powerful purpose - intimate relationship with Himself.

Having been created in God's image for His own pleasure, our having true relationship with Him and the way that we respond to him are the most important things in all of life - those are things that need to be established in the hearts and minds of our children at the soonest opportunity. There's nothing more important. None of man's wisdom or knowledge will save our children, but if we're true Jesus followers, we know without any doubt what will. But the longer we wait and the more we neglect the fertile gardens we were given by God to tend, the more opportunity satan has to plant them full of weeds - and left untended, our children's hearts and minds are that fertile ground demanding to be tended.

"If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take"...

... No, I pray the Lord my soul forever to embrace. To settle to be taken alone cannot appease my desire to be so close kindred to the God who wove into the fabric of my being such a longing to know and love Him fully. To gain from His wisdom, to learn from His knowledge and to forever be a favored love - hosted by the pure sweetness of His perfect love and character ... could leave nothing left to want in all that exists. But unless He is truly known and understood as the most precious Father that He is  - not something gained by partial information from a distance, leading to deceived assumptions, one will never know for how much less they've settled.

My heart's desire in what remains of this life is for all of my loved ones and those within my reach to be overcome with that same desperate goal of intimate relationship - to truly know and be known by the most majestic, wise, powerful and loving Father in all of what exists. 

Our God isn't a robot limited to understanding only certain well rehearsed phrases and He isn't some nebulous being to be addressed somewhere in "the great beyond". He's closer and more intimately available to us than any human being could ever be - and our lives, not only here, but for eternity are of deep concern to Him. He's the ultimate of royal majesty - to be respected and revered as such, but He's also endowed with an unmatched fatherly tenderness in His heart for His children. How we regard Him, how we address Him, how we speak to Him from our hearts, how we interact with Him more intimately than any other, and how we obey Him - teach these things and our children will have the keys to life. 

Those prayers at night will be different and will become powerful because they'll be offered in sincerity to their most precious friend in a relationship made in Heaven - the one they were created for. These things far beyond any other will matter one day and we'll have fulfilled the responsibility were given - one we'll account for before God for the blessings that He's given us in allowing us children.

To find not only ourselves, but our children and their children, inextricably interwoven in the company of precious Christ Himself, is the marker we will have to gauge how we have succeeded in our parenting efforts. In the end, nothing else will bring us comfort while accounting for that sacred responsibility one day. 

I'm following closely a path of footprints once shown me by my mother, one traveled by so many others before, and one that led me straight to Christ. I have to admit that my own footprints in life wandered to and fro along the way for a time since. It was an unfortunate time, an uncomfortable time, and a time that may one day prove to be the source of unimaginable parental grief - because others could feel compelled to follow my sad wanderings. Don't create the potential for regret - for yourself or your children. As a parent, you teach them about the potential dangers in life and worry for their safety every moment ... don't neglect to teach them why they live and the real danger of settling for less than the purpose they were created for. Give them strong guiding footprints to follow - yours in Christs. And remember that your living example ... may at times speak louder to them than anything you might say...

"No, O people, the LORD has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God." Micah 6:8 (NLT)