Category: Encouragement

Dream with me for a moment. You and your husband are in your late seventies. You are still healthy, vibrant and way too young looking for your age (we are dreaming right?!). You spot your now adult kids and people who must be your adult grandchildren. What are they like?

Are your children godly men and women? Are they baptized believers? Are they active members in a congregation of Bible following Christians? Do they love God and cherish His words? Do they serve others and share their faith while they serve? Have they brought others to Christ? Have they kept Christian brothers and sisters from falling away? Did they train their children to love and obey God? Do they live the fruits of the Spirit?

Continue reading Visionary Christian Parenting

Schools use report cards to keep parents informed about how well their child is mastering required material. Companies have reviews or use sales or production numbers to give employees guidance on their job performance.

Whether we like it or not, grades and reviews give us necessary feedback. They help us know if we are mastering new material or providing value to a company. Yet for parenting, there is no report card. Your kids don’t give you annual reviews. There are no real numbers to “prove” you are parenting well.

So, we just keep on doing what we are doing and hope it all works out in the end. Oh, we may occasionally read a parenting book or attend a seminar, but for the most part, we parent without any constructive feedback.

Wouldn’t you hate to learn if you had just changed one or two things, your child’s life would be richer, fuller, even happier? What if tweaking something or adding something to your parenting meant your child was a faithful Christian instead of rejecting God? Would you want to know what those things were? Would you be willing to change?

Continue reading Assessing Your Parenting

A friend of mine has started choosing a theme word for each year. Instead of having to keep up with resolutions, she constantly reminds herself of her theme word. It helps her remember what was important for her to work on for the year.

Whether you make resolutions, choose a theme word or do nothing at all, I want to make a suggestion for you as a parent for this year. Make your parenting theme for the year “FOCUS”.

Why “focus”? Parenting like Hannah means we are striving to dedicate our children to God. We want to proactively parent our children towards God in hopes they will grow to become involved, faithful Christians with a strong biblical worldview.

“FOCUS” as your parenting theme word should help you remember:

Continue reading The Most Important Parenting Goal for 2014 (Or Any Year)

From what my friends with adult children tell me, you never finish parenting. Evidently, we will always worry about and be involved in the lives of our children. That’s probably a good thing. For Christian parents, our finish line is getting to Heaven and having our children there with us. The longer we are involved in the lives of our children, the more opportunities we have of pointing them towards God.

If you have been working with your children this year on our plan to live more like Jesus, you may feel as if you are running a marathon. Like most of us, you have had good days and bad days. Weeks when you felt like you really were actively parenting your children towards God. And weeks where if everyone was still breathing by the end of the day, you considered it a major victory.

Continue reading Crossing the Parenting Finish Line