Chief Executive Mom

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We only have a short time with our children. We want to give our children eternal treasure that will stick with them. We cannot be here forever for our children, but God will; forever and ever and ever He will be there for them. God centered, powerful traditions are the most powerful things we can do to give our children ways to grasp the greatest treasure Himself. The things we imprint deeply into our children through a labor of love will repeat in their little minds as they journey beyond our reach. In my own life, the traditions that most impacted me were strong Christmas traditions, our yearly celebration of the traditional Jewish Passover, the Nicene Creed and Lord’s prayer I repeated over and over and over while we went to an Episcopalian church, the wordless book I learned year after year at Good News Bible camps, and the songs my mother played and sang at the piano that spoke of God’s faithfulness and love despite the pains of life. These things echo in my mind even while I sleep, they haunted me in times of rebellions and they helped attach the name “Jesus” to the security, love and peace of childhood that we all long to return to. In the darkest times of my sinful misery, God used these traditions, inextricable woven into the fabric of my psyche, to draw me back to Himself. It was the comfort of things securely known and familiar that helped me persevere through the valley of the shadow.

We do not know how soon our children will have a need that we cannot be there to supply. If my child becomes lost, I want God to bring to mind a lullaby about His provision and care that I have sang over her night after night after night so that she might be comforted even when I am not there. In teenage years and beyond when my child is questioning all that she learned and testing the world’s ideas about who God is, I want the precepts of the Nicene Creed to echo through her mind,

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty,

maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,

eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God, begotten, not made,

of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.

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