Secrets To Raising Wholehearted KidsSample

 IMMERSING THEM IN REAL THINGS

Every age loses the path of life, and every age is tasked with its recovery. And every age carries with it both an unprecedented challenge and also an unprecedented provision to find it in full. 

Our children are being raised in an unparalleled age of exponential progress and change. The result of accelerating progress is more and more, faster and faster. 

Of everything. 

At the epicenter of this change is the way that technology is infusing every aspect and dimension of our human experience: our homes, our vehicles, our calendars, our entertainment, our relationships. Human culture by and large is gravitating more and more rapidly toward the artificial. As John Eldredge points out in Get Your Life Back, recent studies reveal that 97 percent of First World lives are spent in artificial environments. From our lighting to our air, from our entertainment to our education, very little is left that is not artificially infused. 

But the soul was made for real. Real textures, real smells, real experiences in our body, real soul-to-soul connection with real humans. Nature, it’s been said, is God’s first incarnation. As our lives become increasingly constructed with the artificial, it becomes all the more imperative that we introduce our children to the real, giving them daily access to the natural world in order to increase their appetite for God. We must get ourselves and our kids outside, every day. We must get real things in their hands and in their hearts—and ours as well. Real aligns. Real orients. Real sustains. Get dirty and dream. It matters more than you might think. 

REFLECTION QUESTIONS 

1. What’s one accessible thing you can do this week to shepherd your children in immersing themselves in things that are real? 
2. What’s an artificial reality in your home that you can replace with something real? 
3. What is something real you could you make with your own hands alongside your child this week?

Friends, well done. It is the rare and brave parent who is willing to engage the deeper waters of the human heart. It is an even more rare and more heroic soul who is willing to do the work, slowly and steadily, by day and by decade, to become the kind of person they want their children to become. 

You are not alone. There are a few others. And it has always been so. 

This is only the introduction. 

For those that want to go even deeper, welcome. 

You can find more at BecomingAKing.com. 

For the Kingdom, 

Morgan