One more word about Katie's post

If you haven't had a chance, I highly encourage you to take a minute and read Katie's blog post here or you can read it below in my previous post.

So many of her words in this post struck me deeply, but I want to mention one more paragraph that has profound meaning.

Taken from www.kissesfromkatie.blogspot.com written by Katie Davis

Our family sits on the street corner down town sharing ice cream and laughter. My daughter bends low to offer a homeless man her popsicle and as he cries that no one cares about him she looks straight into his face. “We will be your family,” she asserts, and she means it. We kneel on the pavement and we pray and people stop to look but we hardly notice because we were made for this.

We bend.

When I read this paragraph, so many thoughts swirled through my mind, but the main implication that I thought about is this...if we want our children to have the character of God, we have to model those behaviors for them. Katie's daughter has seen her mom welcome countless strangers into their family and home for seasons of time. She is learning from the Godly example of her mother. Isn't it true that we learn so much by watching others, not just by hearing what they teach.

I always felt a profound responsibility to my students. As a kindergarten teacher, my students arrived in my classroom at 7:30 and left at 2:30. That is 7 hours together everyday for 181 days. I knew that my students would learn so much just by watching me. (the respect I show them, the way I talk to other teachers, the way I handle problems that arise, etc, etc) What a bold challenge we have as adults. The next generation is watching us. Whether we have children or not, almost every adult I know has children in their sphere of influence....a friend's child, a neighbor, a niece or nephew, a cousin, a student, or your own child.

As Raleigh and I are preparing our hearts for Beau, I pray that my actions will speak loudly for the glory of God. I pray that Beau will grow up watching us love each other well, so that he will know how to love well in the context of marriage one day. I pray that Beau sees us love others well too so that he will learn from example about how to love others well!

Now...hop on over to Katie's blog and check it out!