When our Josiah (Joey) started high school a few years ago, we chose a school with a very strict uniform policy. So that involved purchasing an expensive day hat and blazer for Joey that he was told by us to guard with his life. Of course the day came when he returned home without his hat. It was lost and he was very anxious knowing that we would not be very impressed. As this was a school that doesn’t really accept ‘lost property’ as an excuse we hurriedly found a second hand replacement (which Josiah had to pay for!) and all was well. Until.... it was discovered that the family who sold the hat was not the owner of the hat. The owner of the hat (his name could still be seen faintly) was a mate of Joey’s and he suddenly believed Joey had stolen the hat. Thankfully, emails with teachers and screenshots of the online sale made it quickly clear that the hat was not stolen by Josiah but it still felt like his name was tarnished. That’s the first part of my story. The next part is that about a week later Joey walked in from school WEARING TWO BLAZERS!! WHAT!!!!????? He grinned at me as he removed the blazers and said, “yeah ………….. left his blazer behind in the last lesson so I grabbed it for him. I’ll give it to him tomorrow”. Noooooooooooooo! You see the owner of the ‘lost’ blazer, was the original owner of the hat!!! So now it looked like Joey has taken his hat AND his blazer! Needless to say I grabbed Joey FAST and we drove to the school immediately and gave the blazer in at reception. Sigh! After the initial “YOU DID WHAT!!??” our words to Josiah were along the lines of…. “That was SUCH a bad decision Josiah!!!!” Obviously Josiah was innocent in all of his intentions but we were able to see how it could look really really bad! We laugh about it now, but boy it was mind boggling at the time! I think we would all agree that our kids are not always good at making good choices and we have to help them learn this process! But Christian parents must go one step further and teach kids how to make Godly choices. The BEST way of doing this is to lead by example, and then also explaining our decision making process to our kids is really very powerful. We did this just the other day with our kids when we made our pledge to the church BEYOND fund recently. It was actually quite special because it made it more of a family pledge rather than just from Matt and I.
The point is though, that if we want our kids to make Godly choices, we parents must be part of learning process too. In the article attached there is an action step at the end of the content to help with this. It includes a list of questions kids can ask themselves which help them to make a Godly choice. I will be writing these down at home and putting them on my fridge for our family to ponder! Have a look for yourself!
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