Taking those chances

Being a Mom means you wear so many hats. You are nurse and chauffeur, referee and finder of lost things, budget master, master chef and so many other things. First and foremost, though, you are a teacher. You may not have a teacher's degree, or any sort of compensation (at least in the form of $), but you are a teacher nonetheless. You teach your children to eat, to walk, to talk, to play, to share, to potty, to read, to respect others, and an infinite number of things. Sometimes a Mom feels like she's doing a reasonable job of teaching, and sometimes she doesn't, but it's an important job, and not one we can neglect. Because sometimes you teach them without even knowing you're doing it ... no matter what you do, they're always watching.

One of the things that's always been at the top of my list to teach my children is a love and respect for God and his word. I want them to grow up to be happy and healthy and successful, but above all I want them to grow up to be the kind of men that are pleasing to God. And one of the best ways I have found to try and teach them these things is to make it a part of their everyday lives.

I don't mean that I just take them to church "when I'm supposed to", and be sure they have their Bible lessons done. Yes, we do that. But what I mean is that I work at trying to incorporate something Biblical into what we're doing whenever the opportunity presents itself.

For instance, today I have been trying to make homemade bread. I've attempted it a time or two before, but not had much luck. This is a new recipe, and a full-fledged "knead-it-for-10-minutes" type, at that. It's baking now, and I'm on pins and needles waiting to see how it turns out.

As I worked on the bread, my four-year-old was watching me knead the dough. Pushing and folding it ... over and over and over. And we talked. We talked about the bread I was making, and how yummy we hoped it would be. We talked about the different ingredients I was using, and what they were for. And we talked about yeast, or what the Bible calls "leaven". We talked about what it was and what it's job was, and we talked about making bread with and without leaven. And we talked about when the Bible talked about unleavened bread ... at the first Passover (he's studied the plagues in Egypt in the recent past), and how we have unleavened bread now, when we have the Lord's Supper. It was a simple conversation, and a fairly short one, but it put the information out there for him to think about. And he DOES think about it. Sometimes he will come up with questions that, for a four-year-old, absolutely amaze me.

And there is an added benefit to trying to inject these things into conversations with my children when I can. In order to keep the things of God in the front of their minds, it means I must also always have the things of God in the front of my own mind. Something we should always do, but something that sometimes gets lost in the shuffle of every day life for many adults. I strive to teach my children, and by extension, learn things myself ... and hopefully we will all be able to share in the same reward one day.