Direct Your Children...

Direct your children onto the right path, and when they are older, they will not leave it. [Proverbs 22.6]

Based on my own experience with this, and, in consideration of the lives my adult children now live, I can tell you what "directing your children onto the right path" looks like...

It's a mess.

As I survey my parenting skills, I can only feel insufficient. Even today. But with all that I feel like I did wrong, there is one thing, that for years and years, my wife and I did faithfully (in the midst of all the chaos) and that was, at night, before bed, we submitted our children to the blessing of the LORD. We literally put our hands on our children and quoted these words over them:

“The LORD bless you and keep you; The LORD make His face shine upon you, And be gracious to you; The LORD lift up His countenance upon you, And give you peace.” [Numbers 6.24-26 NKJV]

You see, directing your children on the right path does not mean directing them onto your path. As much as we tried that, it did not work. But, at the end of the day, I can see that it was the LORD's blessing on their lives that was indeed the right path. 

It was as more a spiritual exercise of releasing our children to God each night than it was an exercise of actually coercing them in any direction. (If only we could have figured that out all day long too!)

Raising kids is not easy. With each passing year, the task seems more daunting. I can with all confidence say I don't know that anything I did really benefited my children much except turning them over to the LORD each night. If my children saw nothing whatsoever of value in my parenting of them, I hope they at least saw that I turned them over to the blessing of the LORD each night. I trusted God to keep my kids, ...and He has been faithful. My children are not on my path, but I am confident they are on the right path.

Father, thank You for Your faithfulness to Your written Word spoken over my children.