Experience...

A young man once asked an older man, “What’s the secret of your success?”
“Good decisions,” the older man replied.
“How do you learn to make good decisions?”
“You get that by experience.”
“How do you get experience?”
“By making bad decisions.”
Although this wouldn’t be the recommended way to learn how to make good decisions, most of us can look back on our lives and see how this little scenario played out for us. For us parents there is nothing more we would like our children to avoid than the same bad decisions we made. Unfortunately, as they get older our influential role decreases and we have to do the thing that parents fear the most: watching. We watch our children succeed (that’s the enjoyable part) but we must also (gulp) watch them fail. We love them, pick them up, dust them off and then the watching starts again!
This is not to say that we cannot, and I must say we should, equip them with all of the wisdom and skills they need for this life journey. The book of Proverbs in our Bible was written for the Hebrew people to be a kind of book of common wisdom (sense) for parents to use to teach their children. While we may have a huge selection of parenting books, manuals, and other helpful materials I find the most encouraging statement to come from that same book of Proverbs. Proverbs 22:6 says this, “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it,” or as the Message Bible puts it, “Point your kids in the right direction- when they’re old they won’t be lost.” I find comfort and encouragement in those words. Yes we have our work cut out for us and sometimes things don't turn out exactly as we had planned, but maybe we need to look at parenting like a gardener would. We are planting seeds. They may not show growth for a while, some may not show fruit for a while either. But when they do, what a beautiful sight it will be, and God will receive the glory!