How to Have Kids that Behave...

How do you Swipe 90% of Parenting Problems off the Top÷

There is no greater challenge than to raise children to be positive, productive and successful members of a community.  It is a 24/7 ‘job that takes an immense amount of patience, an unending supply of unconditional love and loads of time.  

There are many philosophies regarding rearing and training children.   Without going into the debate over which is best, let’s consider something that will benefit all:  first time obedience.  It sounds simple, yet if you are a parent you know otherwise.  But, think about it...if your child did what you asked him to when you asked him to, it would make life enjoyable for all.

Whatever method of training you decide fits for your family, employ it faithfully and consistently to teach your children to respond to your requests right away with a positive attitude.  No kidding, it will swipe away many of your parenting troubles.  

It is vital to remember that this training is a process and will take much effort on the part of both parents.  Parenting is never a completed task and your training will need to be retrained and reenforced many times over and throughout your child’s growing years, and perhaps beyond.

Do not lose sight of the importance of relationship building with your child.  While it is necessary to teach obedience, it is most essential to cultivate a positive and loving relationship with your child.  These two things go hand in hand when motivated by a caring, tender heart committed to faithfully train a child out of love for that child.

Give it a shot.  First time obedience.  

True Community

Even though I do not know exactly who I am... I’ve lost myself along the way, I do know who I want to be:  His.  In some ways this is true now, but in others ways I journey on.

Abiding in Him as He is in God and God in Him, He in me...  This is what I long for and only see in part.  To surrender all that I know and think about myself and go bare and naked before God with the want and desire to soak up the truth from Him of who I am in Him.  And to become the outpouring of His plans for me.

There is a giving up of myself in this, yet in the giving I know a rebirth of life and truth will emerge.  Fresh, tender and growing.  Real, valid and a genuine ‘fit’ for me.  It only seems like a ‘giving up’.

Perhaps this is what someone would call a mid-life crisis.  I think that maybe it is more an unveiling of truth; a taking off of the blinders.  This life seems to be full of blindfolds.  A putting on of distractions and life living that creates in us blindness.  We grow dull in our ability to perceive truth and find ourselves drifting in and out of other people’s boxes of who we are supposed to be.  A matrix of sorts.

The pain of life seems so tangible and real, yet I wonder if it is because we are too full of ourselves.  The seeking for some type of personal fulfillment.  Perhaps this fulfillment of the personal type is the great deception.  Temporal vs. eternal.  Exchanging the unseen for the seen - or even the exchanging the personal for the spiritual.  The communal living with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

In that communal living, the abiding with Him, a spiritual co-existence, we would be able to find true fulfillment, not of the personal kind but of the eternal kind - the spiritual dimension kind.  Other worldly.  In His world, being fully who He intended for me to be as a part of Him.  

I am lost without this.  Lost.  Empty.