More on Love and Relationships

After a 6 month break and major crazy life chaos, I am returning to my challenge to help myself - and hopefully you - learn to love like the bible commands in I Corinthians 13.  I urge you to reread my January post On Love and Relationships.  I had to reread it myself.  

In the first post, I challenged us to pray for God to show us ways to show patience to our loved ones.  I must admit, that though I daily feel like I am failing, as I look back I see overall progress.  I feel as though I am I offering my children more grace when they frustrate me, hurrying them less and in general losing my temper less.  If you have been working on patience in relation to the I Corinthians model of love, please comment below on your successes.  Encourage one another, you may well find it encourages you.

After "Love is patient", we find that "Love is kind."  What does that mean? I honestly can't say I know.  Today's challenge is to seek God in how He wants us to show kindness to the person you have challenged yourself to show more love toward. (If you feel lost, you really want to read or reread the previous article.  Go to the Archive button in the left column and click January.)

According to an online dictionary, the following are synonyms for kindness: benignity, benevolence, humanity, generosity, charity, sympathy, compassion, tenderness,  good turn.  A person who is kind is described as being of a good or benevolent nature or disposition.  Reading the synonyms still didn't help me a lot, so I looked up the antonyms.  The opposite of kindness is malevolence or cruelty.  Malevolence is defined as hatred.  So the opposite of kindness is essentially hatred. 

 

Wow.  Now THAT spoke to me.  So I began to wonder, is there a middle ground, a neutral?  Something between kindness and hatred?  The best I can find as a word that is neutral, somewhere between kindness and hatred is indifferent.  

I'm not sure being indifferent toward your loved one isn't equally as bad as hating them.  Honestly, who among us want to think our parents, our spouse or even our best friend is simply indifferent about us?  Would you care if your parent didn't hate you, but was simply indifferent toward you?  As if your very existence means nothing, good or bad, to them?

That may sound really harsh, but it seems to me you have 3 choices as to how you behave toward this person you have chosen to love better:  with kindness, with hatred, or with indifference.  Looking at it that way, I pray please Lord help me show kindness to my children each day.  Help me to never cause them to feel as though I either hate them or that I am indifferent about their existence.  Help me, today, to be the mom they need and You have created me to be.

Helping Your Kids Build Healthy Relationships

It really annoys me when people ask my small children, even my four and five year-olds (oops, six year-old) if they have a boyfriend/girlfriend. Why do they do this? Really. I know older, grandparent types think it's a cute thing to ask them and tease them about growing up, etc.. The problem, which I doubt many grandparent types realize, is that in the world in which my children are maturing and growing, many children at seven, eight and nine years old have "girlfriends" or "boyfriends".

It seems like every year, kids at younger and younger ages begin to talk about the opposite sex as more than friends. What happened to the day of "cooties" and "boys are gross!"? I have become well known, not only with my children but with their friends as well, as the authority on the fact that they are too young for that boy/girl nonsense.

As my two older kids begin to approach that age, the age of hormones and finding some interest in the opposite sex, I have found that it is now important to explain better to my children why I feel that ten year-olds don't need to worry about boyfriends and girlfriends. I was inspired the other day, while driving with my children, with (in my opinion) a good explanation as to why girlfriends and boyfriends are not something God would want them dealing with right now. Here is my explanation to my kids. Maybe it will help some of you, maybe you have better thoughts you can share with us.

I discussed with my children God's view of marriage, that it is forever. We talked about friendships. I asked if they could have a friend now that would still be their friend in 5, 8, 10 or 20 years and they agreed that they could. We talked about how they could be friends with Sally now (names changed to protect the innocent) and in 5 years could meet Sandy and become friends with her. Does that mean that Sally is no longer a friend, of course not. In another 15 years they could meet Sami and become friends. We discussed that, although perhaps things would happen causing Sally to move away or change interests and they may over time lose touch and not be friends, they still COULD be friends even if new friends came along.

Then we discussed boyfriends. If you have a boyfriend named Bob now, is it likely that in 15 years you are really going to marry Bob? No, so in order for you to get a new boyfriend, the relationship with Bob has to end. So, I explained, if you have boyfriends or girlfriends now, you are entering into a relationship planning for it to end. God doesn't want us starting relationships planning to end them. We discussed that some day they would find their future spouse and if they'd had 10 "boyfriends" in elementary school and junior high, then that is 10 relationships that they started, knowing for sure they were going to end. I told them that it was like practising for divorce.

I don't yet know what we will do when they are 16 and 17. I don't feel pressed to make that decision now, but I want my kids to understand that this "harmless" flirtation with relationships isn't harmless. It starts them down a path of looking at relationships as disposable, not lifelong. I want my kids to know that, although things change and friends move on, you should never begin a relationship with the end in mind.

Are those all yours?

I find myself wondering how it is we have come to this place in society. I know the idea was to replace yourself with your children and no more, but really, how did we come to let that idea so over take our world. How did we come to the point of three children is a nice, acceptable number, but four, wow that's A LOT!

People ask me if I always wanted a large family. I'm not really sure. I was the youngest of five, but despite the world even then making it sound so unusual, I didn't really think of us as a large family. Perhaps that is because my father was one of nine children and my mother was one of 11 children. Yes, that's right. I have 18 biological aunts and uncles before you even start counting their spouses. Now that's a big family reunion!

My husband is one of two children. His parents came from families of two and three children. My husband always wanted a lot of kids. When we were dating, he wanted six kids. I wanted two. I don't know that I cared, actually, I just figured two made sense. We agreed upon a nice even four. Now we have five. Who knows, my darling hubby might get his six kids after all!

What really amazes me today is the reaction people have when I am out is public. Why do people think it is perfectly acceptable to make rude comments, in front of my children, about something of no importance to them. I don't go up to people and comment on wearing their pajamas to the store or that perhaps they might want to remember to actually wear more than their underwear in public, yet they will say the most unkind things to us. My favorite is "You know what causes that?" My husband has taken to answering, "Yes, and we are good at it!" If you are going to be rude and crude to us, perhaps we should reply in kind.

You also find the mom with one or two children at the store who says, "I don't know how you do it with five, I can barely handle my two." Usually when that statement is made, it is obvious to all those around that she can barely handle her two. She is usually out of breath from trying to keep them out of things.

Then you get the even more surprising comments like, "What a beautiful family!" "More people should have large families." "You are so blessed." Comments like this are far more frequent than one might believe. Nearly every time I take my children grocery shopping I am stopped by some, usually older, person who admires my children and my family. I am thankful for those people.