If you’re raising kids, there comes a moment where you are passing the baton. You do everything you can and raise them as well as you can for 17, 18, or 19 years. You bring them up in your home, but at some point you pass the baton and they go off on their own. That’s where we sit right now inside of our family as we’re getting ready to pass the baton.
Proverbs 21:6 says, “Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will not turn from it.” So this is what we’ve been doing for the last 19 years with our son, Clayton. We’ve been training him in the way that he should go, and now it’s time to release him and let him go. My wife and I have been super intentional about training up our children in the way that they should go and trying to create moments and things inside of our family to lead them in the way they should go.
Eventually Clayton will move out of the house and he’ll meet someone and get married and have kids, and our other kids will follow in that. So we’ve begun with training our child up in the way he should go, and now it’s time to pass the baton and release him. One of the best ways we’ve found to do this over the years is through family meetings.
If you’re interested, shoot me an email at [email protected] and put the words “family impact kit” in the subject. We have put together a program which is basically a family meeting outline for families. It’s about a half a day exercise. We put a whole lot of thought into putting this together because what we realized is not only is it important that we build our traditions, but showing other people how to set up and create their own traditions inside of their family is incredibly powerful. If you want to set up a time to do a family meeting and you want an outline and some ideas and some teachings, this family impact kit is going to give you everything you need to do that.
When you’re intentional, when you raise up a child in the way he should go, when he’s old, he will not fall away from it. So that’s God’s promise-as we’re intentional, even when things look like they’re going off in a different direction, those lessons stay with them. They stay rooted in them.
I want to be spiritually intentional, and I want to be intentional with my family. I want to be intentional with my finances. I want to live a better story. Most people are settling for living a good story. How are you doing? Life’s good. Things are good. But I want to live a better story. A better story starts with being intentional.