“Who is the Iron in Your Life?”

Let’s just be honest fellow parents, we have a lot of pride when it comes to our babies. Don’t agree? Well, think about the pictures she used to draw for you when she was four years old. Would you have hung anyone else’s picture of a blue and purple…uhm... whatever that was on the fridge? How about the first time he actually hit the ball with the bat? Of coarse, these are proud moments in our lives, and they should be. Its not a bad thing.

But, very often this innocent pride in our young children transforms into something else that isn’t healthy for us or our kids. We all seem to form a blindness to our own kid’s mistakes. Instead of dealing with them we justify them. Instead of helping them, we make excuses in our minds and to others.

This is where we need to change, we need to admit that our daughter is too interested in boys or our son is just plain lazy. Sometimes we don’t know what to do about it though, so we do nothing. We ignore it and hope it changes; we hope it is just a phase and that they will grow out of it.

When we face situations with our children that we don’t know how to deal with we are NOT alone! God has given us great resource that we can tap into at anytime. Its not professional counseling or some deep spiritual truth, it is very simple. God gave us friends.

One of the greatest resources that parents have is their Church Family! Listen to them! There will always be people around you who have been doing this longer and know more about raising children than you do. The problem is that we don’t want to let anyone tell us how to raise our kids… that is sinful pride. (different from the pride we talked about earlier)

The Bible says that true friends will sharpen you, they will make you better like “iron sharpening iron” - that is the kind of friend you need and the type of friend that you need to listen to.