Yesterday our pastor preached from 1 Thessalonians, and one thought followed me home and wouldn't leave.
He talked about fathers — comforting their children, exhorting them, finally giving them a charge.
That last point…
Giving them a charge.
A father isn't just raising a child up to adulthood.
He's aiming a soul somewhere.
The corrections, the prayers, the offhand example at the dinner table — all of it points a child toward the direction he'll one day walk on his own.
Then another verse slipped in while the pastor was still talking. "Train up a child in the way he should go."
I've read it a hundred times.
Yesterday I got stuck on the first word.
Not entertain.
Not merely supervise.
Not simply provide for.
Train.
When I think about training, I think about intentionality.
I think about repetition.
I think about daily instruction given so consistently that it slowly shapes the instincts, habits, thinking, and character of another person.
No one accidentally trains a soldier.
No one accidentally trains a musician.
No one accidentally trains an athlete.
And yet many Christian parents seem surprised when children arrive at adulthood possessing little understanding of Scripture, little discernment, little spiritual discipline, and little hunger for God despite having spent eighteen years under their roof.
The reality is that many children are being raised, but very few are being trained.
The distinction matters more than we may realize.
We all love our kids — we feed them, clothe them, drive them everywhere, hand them every opportunity we can scrape together.
But somewhere in all that good intention, a lot of us quietly let the culture do the actual training.
The kids wake up, go to school, put in the earbuds, pick up the phone, and soak up a few thousand messages a day about who they are and what their life is for.
Then we give God an hour on Sunday and hope it somehow outweighs all the rest.
Here's what I keep coming back to: somebody is always training our children.
The world knows it.
There are whole industries built on shaping what a child wants — every show, every song, every influencer is preaching something.
The only real question is whether we're in the room doing some of the preaching too.
Genesis 18 has become one of my favorite parenting verses, and not for the obvious reason.
God says of Abraham, "For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him."
What gets me is the timing.
Isaac wasn't born yet.
No little feet in the tent, no bedtime stories, no father-son talks.
And God already knew the kind of father Abraham would be.
"For I know him."
He saw a man who would teach before there was anyone to teach.
The longer I parent, the more I'm convinced most of it happens in moments too ordinary to notice while you're living them.
A child hears his father pray.
She watches her mother open a Bible before the coffee's even poured.
A dinner conversation drifts back to Scripture without anyone planning it.
You explain why one kind of music plays in this house and another doesn't.
They watch you take bad news with faith instead of falling apart, watch you forgive after a fight, watch you say you're sorry.
Half of what kids learn, they learn because they are watching, paying attention, mimicking.
When mine were small I thought training only meant lessons.
Memory verses, family devotions, a plan.
Those matter more than I can say.
But looking back, most of it happened while they watched us struggle and pray and repent and keep showing up when life got hard.
That did more than any lesson I ever organized.
I know this subject makes a lot of parents wince, because the second it comes up we start tallying everything we got wrong.
Maybe your kids are grown now.
Maybe it feels like the window closed while you were busy.
But if you're still breathing, you still have influence over the people you love.
You can still pray, still open the Book, still have the conversation you've been putting off, still become the kind of parent or grandparent whose ordinary life keeps pointing toward Christ.
Seeds you plant today still grow — that's one of the kindest things about how God set this up.
A farmer doesn't stand over the dirt demanding fruit by morning.
He plants, he waters, and he leaves the growing to God.
Parenting runs on that same patience.
We teach and pray and model the same things over and over, and years later — sometimes long after we've forgotten planting them — something comes up green.
Our children are arrows.
Sooner than we think they leave our hands and fly out into a world that badly wants their hearts.
We get less time to aim than we imagine.
God help us use it well.
Aiming intentionally,
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