Passing the Faith Baton

 A rare morning coffee with my neighbor, a relatively new believer, focused on faith transference to our children.

"I find it very disheartening," she said, "that after my years of resisting, wrestling and finally yielding to God, my children may have to go through the same conflicts before their faith is made their own.
It doesn't seem fair, really."

"Yes,  I know," I commiserated. "Why can't our children just learn humbly and sweetly  rather than the hard way like we did?"

There are no grandchildren in the kingdom of God. Only children. In other words, the relationship is one generational.

Heavenly Father to son. Heavenly Father to daughter. No earthly parent go-betweens. It's a 1-point connection. Not 3, 4, 5 or 6 points between God and his kids.

What makes it worse is to think that your parenting methods may have pushed a child farther from God. It's a terrible thing to realize you may have had the wrong tactic when you thought you were doing it right. When the opposite result occurred because of your regulation or rule or limit was placed on a child.

How can that be when you tried and prayed so hard to do the right thing, only to see it backfire?

DID I TOTALLY MISS IT?

We hope and pray our kids learn from our mistakes. But quite often, they don't.

They have to learn the hard way, too.

We introduce them to Jesus and hope and pray and fast and pray some more.

I have to believe that God is bigger than my parenting mistakes.

The faith baton may get dropped. It can easily slip between our fingers and miss the transfer. We watch the runners take the wrong lane and even veer completely off the track.

But I believe, when they are ready, our children will return.

Pick up the baton where it fell, and continue the race.