Get hammered by Evil,
And rescued by the miracles of Goodness.
Thursday, September 14, 2023
Do we pick up the hammer of evil and hand it to our children?
Psalm 103:13
As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him.
Matthew 7:11
If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
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Words of Grace For Today
Giving good gifts to one’s children does not mean giving them everything they ask for, not at all. It takes some great courage, wisdom, and empathy to understand what a child finds interesting, challenging, and overwhelming, and then to give what helps the child find her/his way the next step in life.
Living aware of one’s children’s interests, challenges, and roadblocks takes time and focused attention … and kindness, in order that one has compassion for them.
All children have goodness in them, as well as evil. Always one works to reward and develop the goodness. Every generation on earth needs all the goodness it can muster. There are severe challenges to goodness, always something evil tries to hammer goodness back into the ground as dust. It’s a miracle any goodness survives among us at all. It is a miracle we depend on, many times each day.
When the evil in children starts to take over and wipe out the goodness, it breaks one’s heart, especially as the children’s parent. The best a parent can do then is offer the best support, opportunities, and resets — in the form of forgiveness, second chances, or sometimes as developing ignorance of the evil, and sometimes as harsh punishment of the evil, but most often letting the evil run it’s course so the children experience natural consequences for their choices. With the proviso that a parent does try to protect a child from permanent damage or death.
So God deals with us, we pray also this day.