By David ReayTuesday 9 Sep 2014LifeWords DevotionalsCultureReading Time: 0 minutes
Transcript:
Read Proverbs 10:1
A wise child brings joy to a father;
a foolish child brings grief to a mother. (NLT)
Any parent with a beating human heart longs for their children to grow to be generally happy and responsible adults. Any parent with a reasonably functioning brain knows that this may not always happen. Our children stubbornly remain themselves and we can only nurture,warn,embrace and challenge. We cannot ultimately control them.
This means,as our biblical writer says here,that there are both risks and rewards in parenting. Our children can give us a warm inner glow as we see them making a good fist of life,see them even achieving things we were unable to achieve. We may even,in a presumably modest way,take just a little bit of credit for all this.
Then again,our children can make decisions which grieve us and cost us. We struggle to maintain our love as we confront their unloving behaviour. And at such times we wonder if we must take a little blame for it all.
There is no magic formula to guarantee our children will reward us for all our hard work of parenting. If we enter the world of parenting to seek only heartwarming rewards we will be disappointed. We will get our rewards,but these come to us amidst the risks. We don’t have one without the other.
Children,just like their parents,are only human.
Blessings
David Reay