Our Children are Arrows

When I consider God's calling on mothers, I'm both encouraged and overwhelmed. There are so many things that God desires and commands of mothers, but for we who are fragile and forgetful, that's a good thing! Scripture truly is sufficient to provide us with every proper tool to be good parents, but it is so easy to become fearful of "messing up" our children.

We're called to be faithful Christian women first. How can we expect to be good Christian mothers if we are not obedient to this foundational principle?

We're called to be good Christian wives--we were wives before we were mothers, after all.

We're called to discipline sin in our children out of love--but when? How do I know if Eli disobeyed by stepping in the road or just missed a step and stumbled into it? How do I know when he can understand the command not to throw a temper tantrum? How do I know when it's an act of disobedience that he doesn't "Come here!" when I ask him to?

We're called to teach the Word of God to our children "when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up" (Deut 6:6). This means that our whole lives ought to conform to the Word of God, and our children should see that--by the way we treat our husbands, by the way we treat other people, by the way we treat them. What if Eli remembers that fight we had in front of him? What if he hears me lashing out at the slow driver in front of me? As we teach him the Word of God in small ways--begging him to repeat the one word answer to "Who made you?"--it's easy to worry that we're not doing something right. How can I know that Eli is being transformed by worship, even at 16 months old?

Covenantal parenting can sometimes be overwhelming. As I was meditating on this yesterday in the car, watching Eli crane his neck to see the school buses and trucks, I thought to myself, "So much of how Eli 'turns out' depends on me."

And yet so little.

Psalm 127:1 says, "Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it." It's interesting to note that two verses later, the psalmist tells us that children are a "heritage from the Lord." Perhaps the psalmist wants to emphasize the importance of trusting God in raising our children. So much of what we do as covenant parents is based on faith, believing God's promises that our children will be like "arrows in the hand of a warrior." This, of course, requires obedience--the kind of exhausting, endless obedience that is extraordinarily hard when our little ones don't behave the way we want them to. As we're told in James 2, faith without works is dead. I can love and believe fully all of God's promises to His people, but unless I use this knowledge to affect my behavior (specifically as I train Eli), it's of no profit.

At the root of it all, though, is a firm faith in God's promises--He is the only One who has the power to make our children "arrows..." It's the kind of faith that starts within us and works itself out to our fingertips, in our everyday actions. Oh, what an encouragement that is, and how often I forget it! We have story after story in Scripture of God keeping His promises to His people, in spite of their disobedience. I ought to remember this more as I spend my days disciplining, loving, feeding, changing, reading to, and praying for little man.