During my 10 days being stuck in quarantine, I have barely left my room. Trying to keep the rest of the family from getting sick has gotten me stuck in one room for most of my days. The one awesome break that I get each day is when Jan distracts the kids just long enough for me to slip out the door unseen and go for a daily walk. These walks have been great for a lot of different reasons! Just being outside in the sunshine is great and the neighborhood that Jan’s parents live in (and where we are currently living) has a waterfall and a nice trail in the back of it that has given me an awesome place the be in God’s creation. But one of the coolest things I saw on my walks this week was a man cutting his grass. Nothing about the man particularly stood out, just a normal guy, doing a normal task of cutting his lawn. The thing that made this moment so memorable was the young boy who was just far enough away. He must have been around 5 years old and seemed to not be paying attention to the man. But his actions showed otherwise. While what I assume was his father mowed the lawn on one side of the drive-way, this young man mowed the other side with his plastic toy lawn mower. Although the side the young boy was on was clearly already done, he was taking his job very seriously and doing the best he could to imitate the man.
Although we may not see it, and our children and teens may not show it, they are watching us. Even more than we (or they) realize they will imitate us. They will take the things that we take seriously as seriously as we do. Not what we tell them is important, as much as the things we show them. Our teens and children are watching us to see what’s important, to see how to live rightly, and the see how to love God. What are we showing them?
More than this too though, we are called CHILDREN of God. We in the same way should imitate Him. We shouldn’t be surprised when that doesn’t go too well either…
1 John 3:1 “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.”
The world is constantly changing, but our Father does not. We have to imitate Him and show our children how to do the same, so that when this world turns on them and things are not always easy, they will know how to stand and what to take seriously.