I am forever telling my kids stories about my life. The things I did as a kid for fun, where I went to college and my crazy roommates, how I met their dad and how we fell in love. I want them to know the things I loved and experienced which means that any time we are near I place that I lived or have a memory, I stop and show them. If we’re at the grocery store and I see the ice cream I was obsessed with as a 10 year old, we buy it so they can try it. It’s summer and one of my favorite things to do is to sit down with them and watch the movies I loved watching in the summers as a kid. Parent Trap (the Hayley Mills and Lindsey Lohan versions), Cool Runnings, and You’ve Got Mail have played in our living room movie theatre this summer. I love to hear their reactions to everything from the “nineteen hundreds” and early 2000s. It’s so fun when they love one of my stories or think something is as cool as I thought it was. And it cracks me up when they can’t relate to it at all and compare my childhood to Wagon Trail.
Those stories so naturally just roll out but I wonder if I so easily share my spiritual history. The moments when I first learned about God. The day I called Jesus the Savior of my life as a little girl and then the day 7 years later when I finally surrendered to Him as Lord of my life. The moments where He spoke to me in the mountains, saved my life on the highway, told me clearly who I was supposed to marry. I need to tell them. They need to hear the stories of God’s faithfulness in my life. And I need to share with them the stories of God’s faithfulness to His people throughout generations.
Because, the truth is, if we don’t tell them, they are in danger of forgetting. Psalm 78 says:
He established a testimony in Jacob
and appointed a law in Israel,
which he commanded our fathers
to teach to their children,
that the next generation might know them,
the children yet unborn,
and arise and tell them to their children,
so that they should set their hope in God
and not forget the works of God,
but keep his commandments;
It says in this psalm that God commanded them to teach their children about Him. We find it in Deuteronomy 6:6-7 where it says: And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.
We talk to our children about so many things but are we talking to them about the most important things? Your children know the story of your life but do they know the story of your faith? In truth, it’s the most important story you’ll ever tell.
Today, would you take a moment to remember God’s goodness and faithfulness in your own life and, as those memories come up, take a moment to share them with your children. As you’re tucking them in tonight or driving down the road or siting down for dinner, tell them.
This is the story worth passing down.
Love,