When What I Want for My Child I Need for Myself

Isn’t it funny that we can be so sure about what character qualities our children need to learn and so deficient in knowing what character qualities we need ourselves?

Our daughter Ashton just started high school and one of the disciplines J.P. and I have been trying to instill in her is the importance of staying with a task to its completion – even if it means friends are texting, your bottom is sore from sitting or you are frustrated when you don’t understand.  Ashton is learning this lesson a lot quicker than her mom.

I am new to blogging and definately new to setting up a blog site.  I have been working on this darn blog off and on for 2 months now without final completion.  What seemed so easy at first has been much more challenging than I bargained for. But yesterday I found myself with a free schedule and a renewed committment to complete my task.  Four uninterupted hours and a sore tush later,  I still had run into too many snags to finish.  “What a waste of a day!”, I thought.  I was seriously discouraged.  Not as much for the fact that the blog wasn’t coming together but more for the (seemingly) wasted hours accomplishing nothing.

Life is a lot like setting up a blog.

It seems easier than it is sometimes.  The truth is that most of us live like accomplishment equals success, which equals feelings of self-worth.  We feel good if we cross off things on our ”To Do” list, discouraged if we don’t.  We are content if circumstances are easy, discontent when circumstances are difficult.

Don’t get me wrong – accomplishments are important.  Achieving goals is a worthy end.  It’s just not the whole story.  Sometimes the goal is more about character and less about achievement.  Sometimes what we really need to learn is to just “stick to it”.  Our grandparents called this perseverance or endurance.  These days “enduring” doesn’t have much of a postive connotation.  When was the last time you heard someone say “Oh goody, I get to endure my day”?  But whether we like it or not, endurance gets us to the other side of something difficult.

Like a rocky season in marriage.

Or a strong willed toddler.

Or a financial set back.

Or a rebellious teenager.

Or a sick parent.

Or the death of a dream.

Other, less tramatic things have to be endured, too.  Mounds of laundry.  Never ending dishes. Work loads more demanding than we think we can bear. But enduring the mundane and persevering in the daily tasks of our lives –  however trivial they may seem – builds something so rare, so precious, few ever develop it.  Character.

And so, sweet Ashton, as we help you develop perseverance in the difficult things of life, may God help me develop perseverance in the difficult things in mine.

“…let us throw off everything that hinders us and the sin which so easily entangles us and let us run with endurance the race marked out for us….” Hebrews 12:1