Direct your children onto the right path,
and when they are older, they will not leave it. Proverbs 22:6 (NLT)
For I know the plans I have for you,” says the Lord. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. Jeremiah 29:11 (NLT)
I have a friend who is a weaver. She does an amazing job of taking clothes that appear to be ruined and fixing them so that they look as if they’ve never been damaged in the first place. I was in her shop a couple of weeks ago when she received a package from a client. In it was a beautiful pair of suit pants — very expensive suit pants. To me, it looked like the pants were beyond repair. My friend’s expert eyes saw something completely different. Within a matter of minutes she knew exactly what she would do to repair the pants. She started to explain it to me. I’ll spare you the details of the conversation, but as I realized what she planned to do I looked at her and said, “You’re going to love it back into place.” And that is excatly what she skillfully did with the help of her needle and thread.
It got me thinking. God tells us to raise our children the same way. . . loving them into place. Tailoring them to the people He needs in the tapestry of His plan. Had my friend been too rough with the delicate fibers she would have distressed the fabric and ruined the suit. Had she not been firm enough with her repairs the suit would not stay together. As parents, we too walk the delicate balance of being firm without being destructive. It is a precarious walk at times. It is a walk that may cause us to stumble more often than we would choose. It is a walk that we must finish if we are to raise our kids the way God commands.
A few days later, she showed me the mended pants. If you hadn’t known where to look, you would have been hard pressed to see any difference between undamaged parts of the garment and the area she’d fixed. The irony was, the repaired part of the garment was now stronger than the rest of the garment.
That’s exactly what God does with us when we as His children have a rip in our lives. To our unskilled eyes all may seem hopeless. Beyond repair. Trash. In His eyes, however, nothing is totally lost. With His help, we can be loved back into place. And we will be that much stronger when He mends us.
