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One windy day, I was on a walk with Lilian, my sweet almost two year old toddling companion. As we were crossing a church yard near her home, on the way to buy a few groceries, I said, “Why don’t we go into this church for a few minutes and see what it is like inside.
I had read that the church was established in the late 1085 and I knew it would be a sight to behold.
As we held hands and walked into the sanctuary, little Lily, very confidently and purposefully toddler-marched up to the altar, knelt and held her little hands toward the cross hanging by the vibrant, glowing stain glass that had captured the imagination of believers for hundreds of years.
In a flash, I realized that her mama and daddy had held her many times in their arms, had gone up to the altar for communion and prayer and blessing, and had whispered of God’s deep love for her. They pointed to the cross and the window and said, “Because we love Him, we worship and bow our knee before him each week.”
From the many times this sacred act had been performed in her young life, Lilian knew that she had a place at the altar of her beloved Christ. She knew, already, even though she could not fully understand, that it was right to lift our hands to Him. And so she led me to the front, without. thought, and did what was her habit.
Young children are watching, imitating, learning from us every moment of their early life. The attitude we have when we change diapers, the way we talk to our friends, neighbors, husbands, becomes their models for how to speak to others, whether or not we value other human beings.
You are the picture of holiness where your child will learn to be Holy—set apart for God’s purposes.
What you practice every day is the message your little ones are inhaling into the recesses of their hearts and minds. The ways you pray, worship God become for them a pattern of stability, security, grace and peace.
“This is what our family does. We worship together. We pray together. We love to be quiet and still in the peaceful beauty of church. I am a part of the life we practice together here.”
It is in the secret places of your life, the way you live when you may think no one is noticing where the shaping of values, worship, reverence are being learned.
It is the times when you are alone in your bedroom, that holiness is determined. You have to be the one who decides priorities, commitments, faith, your choices, your actions.
And in the quiet moments of your life, God is with you in that place and God is writing faith on the heart of those watching you have faith. When we choose to seek Him every day and arrange our lives so that we can hear from Him and read His word, He sees and blesses—and our children also see and store it up in their hearts.. No one else really knows our personal integrity, but God who sees in secret, and our children who are with us all the time, will see. When we seek to turn the moments of our lives towards Him, we are not by ourselves, the Holy Spirit is present, taking the sacrifice of our fragile lives and making it into a beautiful story of faith in the hearts, minds and lives of those who are watching us every day..
It is a lifetime of taking one holy step at a time, day by day, moment by moment, choice by choice, that gives one a "set apart" life. It is the secret life, not the public life, that creates this eternal service of worship. Yet, after years of such holy choosing, the spirit of Christ reflects more and more so that all who come to the soul of one so committed will be fed and such a soul will naturally produce what it has been sowing and it will ultimately give and pour out Him.
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