Jul26
In situation after situation, I saw our daughters learn the lesson of love, and eventually they found it hard to be content with less. Of course, at the same time they were testing God’s word again, for as they loved, they were so whole and happy.
Leanne was very good in high school to take time for the somewhat mentally retarded who had been mainstreamed into the school. She really cared about them, and they knew it. At the end of her junior year, several of these boys asked if they could write a note in her yearbook.
They all wrote sweet entries, but one boy, in particular, really touched her.
He had taken her yearbook to his next class so he would have plenty of time to write. A girl Leanne knew came up to her later and told how the young man sat by her and asked her how to spell every word he wrote in Leanne’s yearbook so that it would be just right. He didn’t want to mess it up.
Leanne will always cherish what it took him so long to write: “Leanne, you are a good person and my best friend.“
Leanne is a school counselor and associate superintendent in a small school district near Branson, Missouri. When she first started teaching years ago now, she called her fifth grade classroom the “positive zone.“ Students learned you did not say hurtful things to one another there. I was not surprised that Leanne’s classroom was a safe place to be.
And when my older daughter Stacey calls, hurt if someone at church has criticized something she or her youth minister husband have tried to do so right, she ends up saying that she will try to understand and respect that person’s motives and point-of-view, for she is, above all else, called to love.
She once matted and framed Philippians 1:9-11, her prayer for her children, and put it in each of their rooms. Perhaps it is still there—My prayer for you is that you will overflow more and more with love for others, and at the same time keep on growing in spiritual knowledge and insight, for I want you always to see clearly the difference between right and wrong, no one being able to criticize you from now until our Lord returns. May you always be doing those good, kind things which show you are a child of God, for this will bring much praise and glory to the Lord.
So, our daughters are teaching their children that they are loved and that God loves them even more. As a character in one of my novels likes to say, “Woo hoo!“
great post! i like it!