KIDS....love em or....love em more!

I was the teenager who declared OFTEN, " I do NOT want children!" I was so happy being the Aunt that adored (and still do) my sisters children so much. What could be better? They were well behaved children who unconditionally loved me and we had great relationships.

Then one day - God got a hold of me and I found out that my desire was not that I didn't WANT children but that I was AFRAID to be a bad mother. Life lessons are hard when they are learned at the expense of our hearts being broken. My heart was so torn and so desparate to heal. It took a LONG time for God to finish the work in me. It took much longer for the pain of miscarriage after miscarriage to even sink in as real. However, once Jacob was born my sweet little man become so much fun. Even in his skillful deconstruction of things I was amazed at how much more I could love him.

Children require us to be parents with the type of love that grows stronger when their wills get in the way of right. I know that there are times when my children have completed a giant mess and felt so proud of themselves while all I felt was the anxiety of HOW to clean it! Yet, even in the nature of a childs imagination their desires to create must be somehow nurtured and sculpted. They MUST be disciplined when they know they are doing something wrong, but we have to give them an outlet to express all that creative energy.

Hopefully, your child will be creative with playdo instead of poop....or learn how to color with crayons and paper - not lipstick on the couch as mine did. Any way you slice child rearing you come up with the same solution....JUST Love them more. The bigger the problem, the more love you need. Sometimes that love is tough and demands boundaries. That's ok - keeping the boundaries will require lots of love anyway.

May you find joy and peace!