A Rant

I've had a couple of rants lately, and here's one of them: Why is it that we expect our children to learn things on their own? They can't! We must train them!!

This always seems to come up when we are potty training. We have potty trained all 4 of our girls in a day (or less). Seriously. When we trained Hannah, some friends said to me, "Just you wait until the next one!" And we waited, and then Abby was trained in less than a day....as was Molly....and now Ellie Mae. People will say to me, "You are so lucky! They trained easy!" Let me tell you something, friends. It wasn't easy. It was intense. But it was a day. And we TRAINED them. It's not called potty TRAINING for nothing....They must be TRAINED! It's like anything else in their lives. Children (or adults, for that matter) aren't naturally sweet and gentle and kind and sensitive to others....these are qualities we think are important, and so we TRAIN them up in these things....

Proverbs 22:6 says, "TRAIN a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.". That's what we must do, as parents. We need to not only discipline them, but also, we need to TRAIN them. These are 2 very different, very separate things. Proverbs 23:13 says, "Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you punish him with the rod, he will not die.". First of all, let's talk about this wording. "...if you punish him with the rod, he will NOT die." So what this verse tells us is that if we do not punish them with the rod, they will die. Yikes! Those are pretty high stakes, if you ask me! I want my children to live...eternally, with Jesus. So that means, the Bible tells us, that I need to discipline them. I also want my children to walk with the Lord all the days of their lives. So, I need to train them. I need to be both proactive (training) and reactive (discipline) with them!

Don't you think that the Lord deals with us, His children, in these ways? We have times of both training and discipline. Both can be hard and uncomfortable and not fun, yet both are necessary for our growth. First of all, God trains us in new areas, and then the testing comes, and we see where we fall short, and if necessary, God disciplines us. Again, training and discipline. How merciful He is to give us the training first....and that is what we must do with our children....train first, then discipline. How cool that God gives us a road map for how to deal with our little ones!

So, there you have it, my rant for the day...