Love Their Children

"to love their children"

If you stop and think about it, you wouldn't imagine that you would have to teach a young mother to love her children. Don't we all know the expression, "mother's love"? Don't mothers automatically love their children? Doesn't it come as part of the "motherhood package"? The short answer is no. Most feel drawn to their children when they are born. Babies are so helpless; most of us understand the need to protect them from the world and anyone or anything that would try to hurt them. And most probably continue to show that kind of love through the early years but as our children grow, and start to think on their own, we lose that protective love and suddenly we don't know if we even like our children anymore, must less love them.

This is why mother's need to be taught to love their children. Loving our children is more than just a mushy, "oh, he or she is so cute and cuddly" feeling, although that is a part of the love we are talking about. But more importantly, we need to learn to love them, in what I would call, a constructive way. You have to know how to look beyond what seems good when you are exhausted and just want quiet. You have to be committed one hundred percent to what God would have you to do with your children, before you have them because once the come, boy is it easy to compromise and bend those rules and change them on a whim until the next thing you know, you have no rules or worse yet the children don't know what they are because they have changed so many times. Then you find yourself wanting to be away from your children as much as possible, searching for excuses not to spend time with them. No longer do you love them and want to do what is best for them, you just want them to leave you alone.

We should love to be with our children; they should be a joy for us to spend time with. We should be able to see them as people, who if given the choice, we would befriend just to have their company. If we do not seek to have our children with us, because we do not take pleasure in their company, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We mold the character of our children, whether by determination or by default. We either make them what we want them to become or we simply allow them to be influenced by who ever will take the time to do so for us.

I pray that we will take the time to train our children, as the Bible tells us to, so we would desire their presence and their companionship all their lives. I hope that we will learn to love our children more and more each day!

To read the previous post in the series to love their husbands, you can click on the link here.