A Letter to our Future Daughter In Law

So some weeks ago as I sat and talked with the Lord during my quiet time, He seemed to speak to me about our future daughter in law,…

This is funny to me, in that my oldest son is only 15 years old, and not even dating! And my middle son recently turned 13!

But nonetheless, it was as if God spoke to me to pray for her now, and He gave me the words in letter form.

Dear Daughter In Law,

We welcome you to our family! Oh how happy we are to finally meet you! We have prayed for you! We love you so much, even before we met you, we loved you, and we are so glad, simply overjoyed to have you with us. We asked God to bring you to us, in His timing and knew that He would be faithful to answer that prayer, because His timing is perfect. You are the perfect addition, and you are helping to make our family complete.

While praying for you, we asked God to give you His Peace and His Joy! We asked Him to fashion happiness and love in your life and heart prayed for Him to give you great health and to bless your family of origin, too.

We are thankful that God has brought you to us now and we are thankful you have chosen our son. We just love the fact that you have chosen each other as life partners. We asked the Lord to bless your union, and fill it with joy and love and understanding, peace and great communication, with a special grounding in Him.

We hope you will be happy with us too. We imagine your growing up is probably different from our family, and so we are thrilled to learn about you and discover all of the wonderful traditions and ideas you have to share with us. Please feel free to bring all of your uniqueness and amazing qualities into our family.

We have tried to raise our son to love you with an unconditional love, like the love that God has for us all. We have tried to instill in him the love of the Father by praying for the Holy Spirit to lead and guide him. As you accept our son as your husband, we pray that you both will grow continually while resting in the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Our son is a good man and you are a good woman, and we promise to continue to pray for you both; now even more so, as a couple.

My son’s father is an excellent example of the Lord’s love and he will always be here for you both, as too will I. We invite you both to lean on us as you walk out this beautiful gift called marriage; however your Greatest Strength will come from leaning on the Lord.

We look forward and take delight in watching the two of you begin your journey together! The Lord takes delight too!

So, thank you for saying “Yes” to our son, you have made his joy complete and ours as well. You are a tremendous gift to us, and you are much loved and much wanted into our family!

Love,

Your 2nd Mom and Dad

~Jeremiah 29:11

For I know the plans and thoughts that I have for you, ‘says the Lord, ‘plans for peace and well-being and not for disaster to give you a future and a hope.

Failing Well In Our House

2 Timothy 1:7

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

My marriage devotional this morning ended with a thought-provoking question. Does your spouse feel the freedom to make mistakes? Well, I should hope that my husband knows any mistakes he makes will be met with grace and love from me, because those are the responses I want when I mess up. Yet, I really do not know how he feels about the freedom to mess up in our relationship. Maybe, he and I should have a talk about it.

However, this whole topic of messing up transferred from my spouse to my kids as I continued to think about it. Do my kids feel the freedom to make mistakes?

So, at the breakfast table this particular morning, I set to find out how the kids felt. I posed the question, “What do you think is worse, trying something and failing or never trying at all? My boys were split and my daughter sided with her older brother, she is a bit hard to judge at 7 years old. She very rarely chooses differently from her older brother. What can I say; she looks up to him a lot.

I found their responses interesting, and as the morning went along, I decided to probe a bit further.

Once we were in the truck on the way to school, I pressed a little more. I asked, “Okay how many times did Babe Ruth strike out? How many home runs did he hit? How many times did Thomas Edison fail during the development of the light bulb?” My son, the one who had said “it was worse to try and fail than to not try,” spoke up and gave an answer in response to the Thomas Edison question. No one responded to the Babe Ruth question, (I knew the answer because this was an example in the devotional, strikeouts to home runs respectively, 1330/714. For the Thomas Edison question the answer was 1000 attempts, or as one website quoted Thomas Edison as having said, “I didn’t fail 1000 times; the light bulb was an invention with 1000 steps.”)

I continued to prod with another final question, as well as to try to make it more personal. “Do you all feel it is okay to fail in our family?” To this I got a resounding and unanimous, “Yes.” Praise The Lord! I thought to myself.

I told my kids I hope (and this was really a prayer to God,) they never let fear of failure hold them back. I let them know I understood fear and not stepping out, I know how that feels. I also told them I know how it feels to fail. I shared with them about starting this blog and how it is something totally new for me and how I have some apprehension about doing it. But I am not going to let those uneasy feelings keep me from trying.

So, I do not know where you are today but this is my prayer for you and for me.

 

Dear God,

I pray for my family and anyone reading this entry, give us the strength to do those things You have called us to do. Lord, infuse in us courage to carry out the work You designed for us before the foundation of the world. (For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Ephesians 2:10.) Lord, let us step out in the classroom, the boardroom, on the playground, etc.,…help us to find the strength to do the good works in our lives and our communities. Help us to inspire and encourage others with a sense of love for one another, in that when we fail in our attempts, we can help each other up, and dust each other off, knowing that You God, will walk with us in our failures and our successes.

love, a. stay encouraged, love recklessly