Love Begins at Home

“You are the bows from which your children, as living arrows, are sent forth.” --Kahlil Gibran

We often wonder how we are supposed to raise our children in this era, when there are so many demands on our time and our energy. After all, we’re not superhuman. So how do we instill our children with good things…love, compassion, patience, perseverance?

It begins with a decision.

What are your priorities? Where do your children fall in your life?

Children are a blessing from God, and we are entrusted with their care and their rendering. Below our relationship with God, our family should be the most important thing in our life, whether male or female.

So the first step is to decide to put your family first. This decision naturally leads into the second step.

Make time.

For a typical day, right down everything that you do—anything requirements on your time. As a busy mom myself, I understand that much of this list cannot be shaved any shorter than it already is. However, you can work in time with your children.

- Car ride to and from school/sports/activities

- Nightly dinners

- Have children help with cleaning, talk while you work together

- Family Night

- Take a half an hour to do something with them—help them with their homework, read them a bedtime story, paint a girl’s fingernails or help a boy with a model car.

- The overall idea is to show the children that they are important enough to devote your precious time to.

“Be the change you want to see in the world.”

This quote sums up the next step. If you want to teach your children the type of people to be, model these traits yourself. Of course, no one is perfect, we’re going to mess up. We will lose our temper instead of exercising patience. We will give in at times when we should hold our ground. We will say things out of hurt or anger, instead of out of love. But if we make the conscious effort to be the person we want our children to be, they will take notice, even if they don’t seem to.

When we get our priorities straight, spend time with our children, and exemplify the traits we want to teach our children, we’ve taken three major steps to raising good and loving children. Of course, they won’t always model good behavior or make the right choices, but that’s part of learning. They still look to us and trust our guidance. If we show them from the beginning that we are there for them, that trust will remain and grow. Before we know it, the loving and compassionate adults we have raised become parents themselves.

Love begins at home.

A Choice and an Emotion

Over the years, I have heard much discussion as to whether love is an emotion or a choice. Many of the arguments for and against both sides are valid points. I happen to agree with both sides. Love is both an emotion AND a choice.

The word “love” is a concept that is so enormous that, like God, it can’t be limited to what it is, and what it can do. We are called to love—at all times, and in all circumstances.

When man and woman are joined in holy matrimony, they make promises to love each other for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. These vows are a great example of what it means to love—and why it is a choice. In any relationship, no matter how fleeting, to choose to love that person where they are, is the epitome of love.

After seeing a commercial for a small child starving in Africa, a person donates one hundred dollars to a world hunger charity, in spite of the envelopes on the table marked “FINAL NOTICE”. That small contribution to better the world is another powerful example of love—and why it is an emotion. Like other emotions, it can fill us with such passion and wields a power that is hard to control.

A mother and father spend their nights awake, praying for their wayward child. They live in constant fear during the late nights, and shake their heads in pain and confusion when they get a call from the police department to pick up their child for possession of an illegal substance. Still, they pray…and love. And even when everything comes to a head, and they have to put their foot down to make the child see…there is a thick layer of love around it all. These situations are the best examples of what makes love a choice…and an emotion.

Sometimes, we want for love to be one or the other. To make it bend to our needs, to fit it in that proverbial box. But we can’t do that. We can’t take the emotion out of love, or it lacks passion and purpose. Neither can we take out the choice, because…let’s face it, love is never easy. And in a world where everything is so temporary, and we are given to our desire to runaway when times are tough—the ability to say, “I am going to love…” takes resolution and a strong will.

A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Cathy Bryant, author of Texas Roads. In her novel, the heroine has a rocky relationship with her mother that goes from strained to all out war over the course of the story. In the end, with no attempt to make ammends on her mother's part, the heroine forgives her and they work out their differences. I had to think long and hard about whether or not that felt realistic to me. By society’s standards, this woman would have every right to despise her mother, possibly cut her out of her life for good. No one would blame her, they would probably think she’s better off.

It took awhile for me to realize the bigger picture. Love is both a choice and an emotion. The emotional side told the heroine that this is her mother—the woman who raised her and gave her everything she thought her daughter needed. She may not have done everything right, but her mother loved her in her own way. It also gave the heroine permission to hurt, to feel the pain of her mother’s betrayal.

The choice to love her mother would have been much harder. Her mother was cruel and catty, a very disagreeable character. But she chose to love her all the same. The heroine chose to be the bigger person and take the first step…a step that would lead to forgiveness and healing.

While this relationship is not the overall plot of the story, it was definitely a strong subplot that is a wonderful demonstration of love.

As we walk through life, we run into all sorts of people. Some are easy to love, some are not. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matt 22:39) God calls us to love anyway. Why? Because nothing is more powerful than love.