When you think about it, there are so many things in our life that we don’t want to do, yet really only take about 15 minutes to accomplish.
Unloading and reloading the dishwasher, reading one more story to your child, collecting all the trash around the house and taking it outside the night before trash day, writing a handwritten note to a friend, praying for your family, doing a job search online…
So many things only takes 15 minutes.
Most days, we act like the thing in front of us is some huge mountain that will take away more of our time and energy than in reality of what it will actually take.
It’s so nice to wake up in the morning to an empty kitchen sink.
It’s a precious thing to sit with our kids for one more story or just watching them follow sleep, because those days don’t last forever. In all honesty, I totally tried to skip pages while I read those stories!
I can still remember that time period, being so exhausted and didn’t feel like I could be needed by one more person for one more thing, and all I wanted to do was to get my children settled in their bed and asleep so that I could, do what? Really important things like veg out on the couch with a bowl of ice cream! I would give all that ice cream, all those TV shows, and all of “my“ time back, to be more patients with my kids.
Especially at bedtime.
That is the time of day that would be the time my kids would open up the most about what was going on in their life. Usually, when they had been having an extremely rough attitude day, it would all spill out after we would finish prayers, about how they had had their feelings hurt by a friend for found out they didn’t do it well on the test or an essay they thought they did. I would finally connect the dots and realize why they had been having a difficult afternoon. It didn’t really have anything to do with it them wanting to be rude or disobedient to me, they were trying to figure out how to deal with their emotions.
For goodness sake, we are the adults don’t handle our emotions properly some of the time.
But we expect our young children and teenagers to handle every emotional so perfectly. When I’d slow down, I could take myself and my own emotions out of the equation and ask questions of my kids then we could more easily and much quicker, and get to the bottom of why they were there acting up.
If we want our children to be able to know how to deal appropriately with their emotions, then we have to do the hard work while they are living in our home. We cannot leave it up to teachers at school or church, or the latest podcast, or self-help book.
Teaching our kids to deal with their emotions is as important as how we teach them to use the toilet, brush their teeth, and put their dirty clothes where they belong. They will not “get it right“ on the first try or the second or the 10th time. But if we do not give up on teaching our kids how to have healthy habits at home, we need to be that much more vigilant in sticking with teaching them how to do the hard things of life.
We are created in God’s image and we know through scripture that the Lord has all of the emotions and all of the feelings, but He knows how to deal with ALL of them. We have this opportunity to live a life full of emotion, securely gleaning from God’s Word how to live our best life in the midst of all of those areas of emotions. Dealing with our emotions on our own is absolutely exhausting and it’s not how the Lord intended for us to live. We are called into community with each other, and the first community that our children become familiar with is the one within the four walls of our home.
There will be days where everything goes haywire but then you wake up the next day and as Scripture says, His mercies are new every morning {Lamentations 3:23}.
Start your day with prayer, not simply between you and the Lord but with all of your children too. Especially when morning’s are hectic, pray on the way to school. You can designate a certain point in your drive to school where the conversation stop, the radio turns off, and prayer begins. If you have never done this before, you can start by being the one to pray over your children, but as time goes by, what a beautiful safe space to teach your children how to pray out loud for each other as well as for the people in their circle.
Those are the parts of the morning drive to school that I miss the most. The older my daughters grew, the more meaningful and specific their prayers became. It’s a beautifully humbling thing to learn how to love and serve the Lord better by listening to how your kids pray. I still smile at the memory of praying one morning as we were careening into carline to get the girls to class on time, another parent suddenly stopped in the middle of car line to let their child out and I immediately complained and chastised that parent for “doing car line wrong.” In unison, my three girls said, “MOM! Stop it. Weren’t you just praying that God would give you patience today and a heart to see others they way He does.” Bam! Right between the eyes! Yikes….they were right!!
The Lord gave me a perfect opportunity to show my girls the power of confession and asking forgiveness…me to them, not the other way around. It was also then that I took a moment to look at the kid who’d jumped out of his mom’s car, head down and clearly frustrated. After I dropped my girls off, I knew God was giving me an assignment to pray for that family. I never knew who it was, and that wasn’t the important thing. What was vital for me was to see that family the way God did ~ people He loved, cared for, and wanted to see reconciliation with.
No matter what happens between those morning prayers and getting into bed for the night, prayer is the key to unlocking peace. In the evening, praying over your children at the end of the day is an amazing way to help prayer be the last things they hear before falling asleep. Sometimes you will feel drawn to going into your child’s room well after they’ve been asleep and pray for them again. God is calling you to battle for your kiddos ~ don’t miss it!!
Remember, it usually does not take very long. And even if it takes an extra 15 minutes {or more!}, it will be the best spent minutes of your day!
Blessings,
René
Broken & Blessed~Adventures in Gratutide! 