Time and the Family
In our family I like to get on the same level as my grandchildren. I want to make each one feel as though they are the only person in the world that I am thinking about.
This one was getting his slobbery hands onto my face & glasses. I tried angling my head up away from his reach. He just pulled my beard to bring my head down. When he pulled the sideburns of my beard, that hurt!
I have always had a similar policy with all of my own young children & my grandchildren. I get down on their level, treat them as though they are the ONLY person I’m concerned about and spend lots of TIME with them.
When our own sons were young school children, they used to go for after-school skiing with their friends. I was ALWAYS the driver. That’s because I had a policy of spending LOTS of time with them.
The payoff
It took lots of dedication to spending so much time with my children. I could have made more money if I had worked harder & spent less time with them. And it was emotionally challenging to give them unconditional love.
There were other important things we did. Kids learn mainly by observation.
We took them to church together with us since before they could crawl. They saw us reading the Bible together. We’d pray out loud together every day.
Those things became the model for the value system they developed. And now that they are husbands & fathers, they’ve blessed us with incredibly unified, loving families.
All of that hard work paid off.
The Legacy
When I was much younger, I met an old man who said he’d been married for 30 wonderful years. Then he added that he had been married 38 years altogether.
That sort of sums up the environment one can expect when one gets married and has children. There are times that are not so wonderful to put it mildly.
But, when there is a conflict, you figure out a solution.
To have even a minute of stress in our marriage is rare. We seem to have figured out how to treat each other with consideration & respect at all times.
Our children absorbed our example & passed it on to their children. I feel like one of the most blessed patriarchs around.
Creating Your Absolutely Delightful Marriage
This video expresses the theme of this website. So, it has been posted on most of the pages here. If you have not watched yet, do so now.
