We don't want to smother you. We don't want to shelter you as if we had a fair shot at completely keeping evil from you. We don't want to live under the illusion that we can use human strength to keep you from seeing or committing sin- because not one of us goes a day without falling.This, babies, is about preservation.
We hope to, with all our hearts, navigate this world and all it's glories and tragedies, together, with you.
Just as careful for our own hearts as yours.
We can never keep you from seeing the things that will harm you, that will disturb you. They are everywhere.
We can't avoid them, so we'll learn what to do with them.
We'll learn that delicate balance of when to look away, when to look and question and talk, when to see and speak a Word at the right time, when to look past to the heart of a person, and when to just plain run.
We'll do that together with you.
But we will not live recklessly, allowing you to see and experience all manner of awful before your time.
It's preservation.
Preservation of your innocence, your childhood, your sweet and precious hearts. Protection for your big beautiful eyes, your tiny ears and your new hearts.
We cannot keep the danger and the pain away from you. They will find us, against our best efforts.
So we will stand together, that's what family is for, and we will guard our hearts and minds together in Christ Jesus.
We will protect and preserve your hearts, so you can make a gradual, natural entrance into adolescence, and then adulthood, knowing the dark and difficult things when you are ready, when they come to us in our lives, lived out, when you can make a choice in each of those new experiences to see the truth for what it is, call it what it is, and have the ability to choose, for yourselves, to look past it, or to turn away, or to look through to the heart, or to just run.
We will preserve your innocence, we will navigate this together, we will work just as hard to guard our own minds and hearts, in Christ.
That is what this family will do.
7 comments:
That was beautiful!
beautifully written and well thought out megan. :)
beautiful. I pray every day that I can preserve my girls innocents for as long as possible.
a beautiful way to describe one of our hearts desires for our kiddos.
kudos to you on my blog today for the gorgeous vase...check it out...there's a photo and everything. :-)
This was great! Exactly how I feel but can't always put into words.
just beautiful friend.
It's so hard, isn't it? I WANT to shelter my girls. I want to never let them by hurt or traumatized by horrible things. I want nothing impure to enter their bodies or minds or hearts. But, that's not life. And that's not the way God has called us to live.
Your post made me think of how sad God must have been when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He has a father's heart. And before that day, He COULD shelter their innocence completely. They were pure and free from everything that could hurt them. And then, in that one minute, their eyes were opened to everything that we as parents want to guard our kids from.
Thank you for your thought-full posts, Megan!
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