My wife and I want to be great parents. We desire to point our son in the right direction and set him up to live a good and wise life. We want to equip him with the skills, habits, and character necessary to navigate this world, but more than anything we want to make Christ attractive to him. While good grades, polite behavior, and sound morals are good, right, and necessary we would trade them all for our son to know and follow Jesus. If at the end of our days, we can look back knowing we did our best to introduce him to the truth of who Jesus is, we will have done our job.
Our job is much more than passing along a religion or strongly held belief. It is to introduce him to the truth. Truth makes sense of reality and tells you how to live. It provides a path forward and way through the darkness. In short, trusting in Christ aligns you with the way things actually are and enables you to live in the path of the wise.
To this end, we are reading Revolutionary Parenting by George Barna with our community group. As helpful as the book’s content is, we have found the accompanying workbook to be of even greater help. I usually find workbooks or discussion guides unhelpful wastes of time. This one is different. It sets us up for deeper thinking and application of the concepts of Revolutionary Patenting to daily life.
A recent chapter reminded me of something I read in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The second principle Covey introduces in his classic handbook is to “begin with the end in mind.”
“Beginning with the end in mind,” Covey said, “means to start with a clear understanding of your destination. It means to know where you’re going so that you better understand where you are now and so that the steps you take are always in the right direction.”
How applicable is that idea to the role of parenting?
You can’t impart something to a child, or guide them in the path of wisdom without clearly defining what that looks like. If you want to raise a child to exhibit particular personality or character traits, you must first clarify what they are and create a plan to execute them.
That means setting aside time to think things through as a team and decide how you plan to help each kid become who they’re meant to be. It means paying attention to where they are and setting goals for each area of their lives.
Plans will look differently for each child, but the end goal will remain the same. To get there, however, we must have a destination from the onset. Wandering around without aim might lead to movement, but it leads in a scattered meandering path to nowhere.
How sad would it be to reach the end of all your efforts and painstaking toil only to realize that your ladder rested against the wrong wall from the beginning? Avoiding this sad end is why we begin with the end in mind. It is why we set a course and destination from the start.