Give What You Have

“Train up a child in the way he should go [teaching him to seek God’s wisdom and will for his abilities and talents], Even when he is old he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6 AMP

Your life experiences are partly influenced by one of these three factors:

• What your parents taught you
• What your parents did not teach you
• The life experiences of your parents

While there are a million other factors that influence how you eventually turn out in life, life starts at home. This is why many of us repeat the cycle of life experiences those before have had.

So I ask: are you grateful for the experiences you have now? Are you happy with how things have turned out for you? Do you feel fulfilled?

You may want the best for your children, but their life experiences will also be influenced by the same factors. In other words, they’ll probably turn out the same way you have. Would you like that?

If you don’t want that, then your responsibility isn’t to change what you teach them or try to hide the truth of your life from them, but to change who you are.

A jar of wine can only give wine, it can’t give water. It can explain the benefits of water to the smaller jar, but until that small jar finds a jar of water, it’ll only always get wine from you.

There was a time I experienced gross unfulfillment at work. I hated everything I did and was always frustrated and angry. My fiancee (now wife) told me point blank that the last thing she wanted was an unhappy husband and father to her children. Our goal was to bring up happy and fulfilled children and to do that, we just had to live it. I quit my job the following month.

To train a child in the way he or she should go, you also need to get trained yourself. To God, you’re still a child and He can start your training if you allow Him.

You may not be able to achieve everything that you desire your children to achieve as well, but do you know what those things are? Are you willing to tell them about your mistakes or do you prefer to lie to them? Can you take them into your dreamland, show them what the future could look like and reveal what you’re doing to get there?

If you want to change the lives of the next generation, change your life. You can only give what you have, not what you don’t.