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I have discovered as my children as grown older, that our life is like that saying on Forrest Gump....Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get! Well I am beginning to see that families are the same way. You raise your chocolates up, they leave the box and then bring other chocolates back to the box and each new chocolate is a surprise! Sometimes a good surprise sometimes...well...you get the picture. Then they take those chocolates away and bring a different flavor of chocolate back to the box! (especially in the dating stages and sometimes after marriage for various reasons.)

As parents Chris and I have had a really hard time with this part of our life. As I was praying the other day for my children (which are all grown and have flown the coop), I got to thinking about the love walk. Part of being a parent is having a heart to see your children make right decisions and when they don't we have a tendency of letting our mouth fly to the child before we let our mouth fly in the prayer closet! So as I was praying the Lord showed me that each family is like a mini-church. Looking at how a church is suppose to function, I started applying it to family and this is what I discovered.

Pastors responsibility is to teach the sheep, guide as the sheep will allow, counsel when called upon, pray all the time for the sheep and at all times keep what is best for the sheep at the forefront of their counsel, prayer, teaching, etc..... How do they do this? Through walking in unconditional love no matter what. Pastors can be hurt quicker than most people think because of their close attachment to their sheep. With parents it is the same! They are like pastors in their home. How do we do it? Through walking in unconditional love! As parents we need to be mature enough in the Lord to look past the hurts our children cause and do what is best for them when what we want to do is tan their hide no matter how grown they are!

Kenneth Hagin once talked about when he was a pastor, God led him to take a church that no other pastor wanted. It was a really bad church. He said in order to pastor that church, he had to learn how to crucify his flesh and keep his body under. He said he would preach one Sunday on love and the next on Heaven when what he really wanted to do is take the deacon board on down to the Sunday school teachers and skin them alive, salt their hides and nail them to the wal!. He said if you can get everyone loving one another and everyone excited about their eternal hope in Heaven, many circumstances in the natural will just straighten thenselves out. He said it will help them rise to their full potential if you will tell them how God sees them instead of how the devil sees them. God's love working in and through us never fails! So we have to respond to our children with the love of God.

No matter what age your children are they should be treated with the love of God. God shows mercy, kindness, gentleness and compassion. Now I'm not saying they shouldn't be corrected if they are under your roof, but if they are grown you need to respond to them with the same kind of love God has shown you through your failures, tests, trials and mess-ups. So think about this....If you were a pastor and that child were your sheep or you were Jesus and that child was His....How would you respond?

To walk in the true love of God you have to be mature enough to hold your tongue and your flesh under. This comes by practicing God's word and learning to walk in the fruit of the Spirt. Determine today to start on a new course of action with your children. Especially the ones that are grown and maybe not being what they have the potiential to be or not walking with God the way they should. Only God's love will change them. God said repentence comes by his goodness!!!

"Bible verse and quote" from Jan Couns

Bible and Quote - March 4-8