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This morning someone gave me a secular magazine that had an article about words parents say. The author listed common parental adages and then gave an alternative to show what parents should say. In other words, re-calibrating what comes out of our mouths.
Which started me thinking. As parents/teachers who desire to be spiritual examples to our kids, we can sometimes say crazily, foolish things. Here are the first five I thought of — all worthy of their own blog posts (which you will probably see in the future).
I will start each point with the words we often say, and then talk about what we could say instead.
1. Don’t run in God’s house! Instead, we can say, “Slow down. The lobby has a lot of people walking around including Mrs. Smith who uses her walker. We need to go slowly so we don’t bump into anyone and cause them to fall.” Our bodies, not the church, are the temples of the Holy Spirit. (1 Corinthians 6:19)
2. You can’t go outside and have fun until you learn your memory verse! Instead, we can say, “That verse is long, but it is a great one to know. And, the day is beautiful, so let’s go out to the deck and learn it together? I’ll pour us some lemonade and get us some cookies. I can answer any questions you might have about the word meanings. Working together will be fun.” (Proverbs 22:6)
3. I’m not sure we’ll go to church tomorrow. That game tonight was longer than I expected and I’m tired. Instead we can say, “Yes, we got home late, but we are still attending church tomorrow as we always do. Church is a priority in our family.” (Colossians 3:16)
4. If you do that, God won’t like you! Instead we could say, “God doesn’t always like what we do, but He always, always loves us.” (Jeremiah 31:3)
5. If you pray hard enough, and long enough, and with enough confidence, you’ll get what you’re praying for. Instead we can say, “Prayer is a continual conversation with the Lord. We don’t need to pray in a special place or use special words. God does not play games with us — we don’t get or not get something because we prayed nineteen times instead of twenty. But we can talk to God about anything, anytime, and anywhere. We should pray for God’s will to be done because God knows better than us what we need.”
These were the first five phrases that I thought about. Do you have any others you can think of?
