As the world collapses down around our ears and implodes, remember that behind closed doors, buried in your own little casa, wherever that might be, you CAN have a little “Garden of Eden”, an “Earlier Heaven”, a “Kingdom of Endless Loving”, all built by the golden tone of the mama’s life. She is the conduit of the steady, uninterrupted love of the Heavenly Father.
The Scriptures imply that the woman has a large influence over the whole of her domain. “The wise woman builds her house” (Proverbs 14:1). Since scripture says these exact words, it must be possible that the Creator has delivered this kind of power into a mother’s hands. She accomplishes this, in large measure, by the use of a positive tongue.
Life and death are in the power of the tongue. It happens in every home, in one direction or the other, by degrees. It happened in your own home as you were growing up. And the effect of the total sum of those positives or negatives was recorded in your own psyche. Knowing how important this is, if a mom wants to increase her skill with this primary building tool, she will find that it improves if she can deliberately focus upon it for awhile. As a little private game, she might ask herself after each sentence…“Would there have been a way to say the same thing, or get the same result, but ask it more positively, more upliftingly?” She might even find it helpful to write down her sentences privately after she says them, and then look at them on paper objectively and ask herself, “How could I re-word that, to administer `life’ in my home, by my use of my tongue?”
In the beginning, as with ANY area of self-improvement, it takes some concerted effort to change old patterns. Old habits die hard. John Wesley talked about this kind of daily, detailed self-evaluation. He was tough on himself, going down a checklist every night, because he wanted each change so badly. [You can order Wesley’s daily holiness checklist from us for a dollar.] For every failure in shaping a positive sentence, every instance of having used a negative one instead, turn and instantly look upon the Holy One, rush there in secret prayer, and your next sentence will be right on. It is a miracle on demand, at your disposal, each and every time you need it!
The goal? To hoist far more positive than negative sentences into the air of one’s home.
The “warm-super-loving-home” concept can’t be stressed enough to beginning parents who feel preoccupied with behavioral problems. Get your children obeying, yes, but then go ON to building a NURTURING home. Having a wonderful life-giving, understanding home now is critical to having your ADULT children’s hearts later. This is serious, serious stuff. We’ve known family after family of well-known Christians who have lost their children…as in “left home early in rebellion” because something wasn’t right behind closed doors.
In contrast, there was a mother whose adolescent son often came and sat on the foot of her bed and WOKE her up, just because he wanted to tell her EVERYTHING after he got home. That mother went on to be a grandmother whose fully grown grandson loved to come playfully sit on her lap. Life was just somehow better with this mother/grandmother around. A mother only gets one chance to make these memories—one era in which she can establish a thoroughly encouraging emotional climate in her home. Childhood is a 100-yard dash across time and then it is over. Then the opportunity is gone.
Equip your children by conscientiously educating them, and love them by speaking to them with unremitting kindness, not only in your CHOICE of words, but in the TONE of your voice, and you will HAVE your children’s hearts.
