“Train up a child in the way he should go, Even when he is old he will not depart from it,” Proverbs 22:6.

Sometimes I find myself getting melancholy when I listen to certain music – somehow it propels me to consider life’s circumstances, and people.

I’m sure that many of us can relate to this. It’s been said, “Music can calm the savage beast, “and it also is the sound of the beating heart.

Earlier as I listened, I considered a young child who is now growing-up so rapidly, and soon to enter into adulthood. We as parents perhaps always find ourselves getting melancholy when children are ready to leave the nest. I’ve experienced this before, and yet, one is not always prepared for it when it comes.

The saying is true that the best things that we can give our children are roots and wings. For these two things, at seemingly opposite sides of the spectrum, are like cousins sometimes.

For certainly the roots that we would teach to our children will serve them well in this life. But without wings, the young eaglet will never learn how to fly. Otherwise, those very roots, which can be everlasting, might cling so firmly to the ground that one could never learn to move.

We can’t live our lives for our children; they are like arrows that are sent out from our quivers. In time we pray that they will indeed, hit the mark, but the mark that they would hit would not be perhaps the target that we think they should hit. It is their path that they must take, and it is intrinsically their own.

While they are our children, they are God’s own creations that are meant to fulfill their own destinies. Those destinies are formed in the caverns of God’s wisdom and nurtured and taught in the furnace of affliction and love both alike.

We would train a child in the way that they should go, and yet we should know that they must find that way on their own. This would be through dangers and mistakes alike – through sorrow and joy, and through frustration and turmoil. In time the gift of experience will teach more than the wisest sage ever could.

This is the way it always has been through countless centuries, as generations of children and adults live out their lives. And yet, our own history and family is seen through glasses that only we would know and see.

“You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; for even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable,”

Extract from “On Children” by Kahil Gibran^©

Selah,
~ Stephen Hanson

Stephen Hanson of In His Truth Ministries came to the LORD is a special way in 1975 and has prophesied regularly since. In these end-time birthing pangs we are reminded that judgment must first begin with the household of God. Will we be prepared and ready?

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