Write It Down Where They Can See It

In a blog I just read, written by Amanda Bennett, she wrote this tip:

" Put the ideas, scripture, or passages that you would like [your children] to learn right where they can see it. For years, I’ve been printing off these items and posting them on the doors of the kitchen cupboard, over the kitchen telephone, and in other conspicuous places that the children face several times a day. Exposure is key -- curiosity takes care of the rest!"

It should have occured to me to post these things for my children....

When I was 10-years-old, our family moved to Papua New Guinea to be missionaries. Our first house in the jungle was a temporary house, with dirt floors (until the natives wove some bamboo for it) and open windows (the natives would stare in the window screens at us all day long, as if we were in a museum). We didn't have running water or electricity. In the mornings, someone would build a fire to heat up water for the day. We used an outhouse as our bathroom.

On the interior of the outhouse door, my mother stapled different snippets of Scriptures and poems that she had torn out of magazines like Our Daily Bread. As I would sit on the plywood toilet seat, I'd read those papers she had posted. Reading the words helped keep my mind off the snakes and spiders that I imagined lived in the outhouse.

Eventually, it was time for us four kids to go off to missionary boarding school, far away from our parents and their bush house. They didn't have a phone or a two-way radio, so while at school, we didn't have communication with them. It was hard for me to adjust, after having spent my first ten years with my adoring parents.

There were many teary nights at school, when I missed my parents. We had many fun times at the boarding school, but the tears still came at unexpected moments. Sometimes the dorm parents, too overloaded with 20 kids to raise, were uncaring. When I became sick and wanted my mama to be there, the tears would come. Over the years, there were sad times when I wanted to just be with my family.

But every time I cried, God would bring comfort to me, in the words of a poem that I had accidentally memorized in that jungle outhouse:

"Regardless of the circumstance,
Regardless of the fears.
Regardless of the pain we bear,
Regardless of the tears.

Our God is always in control
Performing as He would
And He has promised in His Word
To work things for our good.

But as a loving Father should
He sometimes lets us cry,
To cleanse the hurt out of our hearts,
To wash it from our eyes.

Yet gently gathers He the tears
Within His hands to stay
Until He turns them into pearls
And gives them back some day. "

Those words were balm to my hurting ten-year-old soul.

How many times have you had a Scripture pop into your head just when you needed it most? Or a poem, or a famous saying? Only what you have memorized can come to mind! We need to give our children the gift that these memorized words bring. When they are in a tough time, it will be comforting to them to have those words.

Now, excuse me while I write down a few Scripture verses to place around the house. Maybe by the toilet is not such a bad spot.

by Lori Seaborg