1989 January/February issue Part 4

A Child Learns Self-Denial - Part 2

Does this training seem hard on the child, impossible for the mother? I don’t think it is. The earlier the parents begin to make the laws of order and beauty and quietness comprehensible to their children, the sooner they will acquire good, strong notions of what is so basic to real godliness: self-denial. A Christian home should be a place of peace, and there can be no peace where there is no self-denial.

  Christian parents are seeking to fit their children for their inheritance in Christ. A sense of the presence of God in the home is instilled by the simple way He is spoken of, by prayer not only at meals but in family devotions and perhaps as each child is tucked into bed. The Bible has a prominent place, and it is a greatly blessed child who grows up, as I did, in a hymn-singing family. Sam and Judy Palpant of Spokane have such a home. “Each of our children had his or her own lullaby which I sing before prayer time and the final tucking into bed,” Judy wrote. “That lullaby is a special part of our bedtime ritual. Whenever we have other children spend the night we sing ‘Jesus loves me’ as their lullaby. What a joy it was on the most recent overnighter to have the three Edminster children announce, ‘We have our own lullabies now!’ Mat, who is twelve and who can be swayed by the world said, ‘Mine is “Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross.”’

  The task of parents is to show by love and by the way they live that they belong to another Kingdom and another Master, and thus to turn their children’s thoughts toward that Kingdom and that Master. The “raw material” with which they begin is thoroughly selfish. They must gently lay the yoke of respect and consideration for others on those little children, for it is their earnest desire to make of them good and faithful servants and, as Janet Erskine Stuart expressed it, “to give saints to God.”

  Surely it was not coincidence that my friend Ann Kiemel Anderson called just as I was finishing the above piece. She has just received William Brandt, her fourth adopted son. The others are four and three years old and ten months. She is thrilled, and not nearly as exhausted as she expected to be, thankful for the gift of the child and for the gift of the needed grace and strength for one day (and one night) at a time.

  “But oh, Elisabeth!” she said in her huskily soft voice, “when I had only one, I thought I knew all the answers. There is nothing so humbling as having two or three or four children.”

  I needed that reminder. Jim and I had hoped for at least four children. God gave us one, and that one gave me hardly any reason for worry, let alone despair. She was malleable. What “worked” for her may not work for another child, but I offer my suggestions anyway- gleaned not only from experience as the child of my parents and the parent of my child, but from observation of others. My husband Add Leitch had three daughters. “If I’d only had two I could’ve written a book on child training,” he told me. One of them proved to him that he couldn’t.