Click here to play today’s new podcast episode.
Twice a week, at night fall, I walked the cobbled streets of Oxford to the lovely old stone building housing a gorgeous chapel, library and rooms for hospitality. It was a center of all ages of adults who were earnest in growing deeper in their theology and love of God. I had the privilege of mentoring and encouraging two groups of women there. Sometimes, our meetings lasted for several hours. The walk there and back was about a mile and a half. On some occasions, at the end of a busy day, I had to push myself to keep going.
One dark evening, as I was walking home, I saw the figure of a tall man moving toward me down the dark street. As I got closer, my heart jumped. It was my wonderful son. “Mom, it’s me. I didn’t want you to walk home in the dark by yourself tonight. I came to walk with you, to take care of you.”
Of course, it meant the world to me. Knowing his demanding schedule and many responsibilities made his companionship even more meaningful to me. He honored me with his time, his affectionate demeanor and his thoughtfulness of me in a way that made me feel my worth to him.
My son honored me because he had learned to see me as a person of value, one who deserved his time, attention, and respect. Honor is not just a concept to be memorized, but a whole life commitment to love others unconditionally, to serve and give of ourselves to others with heartfelt generosity and consideration. Honor is expressed through manners, words of life, a total giving of oneself.
Practicing honoring one another meant that our children had a mental pattern for what it would mean to honor God with their time, their hearts, their service. A real life was a practice run for an adult life given to honoring other human beings that God had made.
Honor was one of the foundational values of our home. Honor, recognizing the worth of another human being and treating them as such, was foundational to our children learning to bow their knee before God.
Giving worth to one another and all the people who came across our path was a practice of worshiping God. If God honored the poor, the sick, the lost, the sorrowful, then when we copied Him, we were bringing His light to others in a very tangible way. We taught our children to honor one another with their words, their behavior, their whole heart. In so doing, we were laying foundations in their brains to understand what it meant to honor and obey God.
But for them to learn this concept and for it to become a practice in their lives meant that they had to receive honor and respect from us in our relationship with them. As we listened to them, honored them with our time, served them with a willing, humble heart, they learned the essence of what honor looked like in real life. It became the pattern for learning to serve God with our whole heart by choosing to give Him the respect and worth He deserved.