“Parents need to eat the diet they would like their child’s diet to become,” nutrition researcher Jennifer Fisher advises in the September issue of Prevention magazine. “By eating fruits and veggies themselves, parents can start a lifetime of cancer-fighting food habits without having to say a word,” the article continues. This common sense observation has profound applications.

Your Example

Parents, your children are watching you. What you eat, they will likely eat. As they see you read the Bible, they will learn to read the Bible. As they see you pray, they will learn to pray. Personal habits learned in childhood direct the course of a life.

Certainly, habits of good health and of good hygiene are important for parents to instill into children. We appropriately take care through instruction and through example to help children develop proper physical practice which will last a lifetime. How much more important, however, is the development of spiritual health which lasts beyond a lifetime into eternity?

Today, not Tomorrow

Procrastination is the death of many good intentions. How many diet and exercise programs have perished in an endless succession of tomorrows? Likewise with our spiritual health, we often delay doing what we know we ought to do. We delude ourselves into thinking that we have unlimited time to make the changes we know we ought to make.

While this thinking is wrong-headed in reference to ourselves, how much more is it mistaken in reference to our children. Lost opportunities to bless a child are, in one sense gone forever. Be what you ought to be today, so your children will see what they ought to see today. No material investment could bring the payoff of a life invested in the future of a child.