In Due Time
by Denise Sproul

One of the (many) great things about being a keeper at home is that you never run out of work to do. For most of us, we can't recall many times, if any, where we sat around thinking, "Well, you know, I've got this time on my hands. The home is kept, the home fires are burning, all is well in this little world. Wonder what I should do now." Despite the fact that we have much worthwhile work to occupy our days, one of the most discouraging things is that we often feel we never actually finish a job. Yes, for our husbands, when they paint the outside of your house, it will need to be painted again one day. But laundry has an even shorter shelf-life. It isn't a once every five or ten years kind of job. Raising our children is at the core of our calling of being keepers at home. We delight to know that we have important work to do, seeing our children grow in grace. We are wise to remember that this is central to what we're called to do. But we can also be easily discouraged, for our children remain sinners.

We can face in our children the same paradox we face in ourselves. The more righteous we become, the more aware of our sin we are. That is, as we progress, we see that we have farther to go. The same can happen with our children. In fact, it should. We need to be careful not to be satisfied with doing better than the heathen, as if such were some sort of challenge, We should always be looking carefully at our children's fruit and seeing where praise is due and where pruning needs to be done. Discouragement often comes when we see the sinful parts of our children, some of which are very obvious to us because they are repetitive offenses and/or because they are particularly ugly sins even to our human eyes. All of this is more reason for us, as keepers at home, to long for the return of the King.

As with ourselves, our children will only be perfect when they die, or when He returns. This is something we ought to look for with joyful hope—not so much their dying, but their being made perfectly righteous. In fact, we should work especially hard remembering this. It is easy to look in hope for our daughter Shannon to be made whole—that she will talk, sing, pray, praising God in her perfect little whole self. Jesus will feed her at the marriage feast of the Lamb and she can feast on the bread and the wine because she will be well. But what really ails her, though it's not so physically noticeable in our other children, is the same thing that ails them. The problem isn't her brain, but her heart. We all have the same condition, and it is a congenital defect. All the children we have will be born the same way, and we as parents are likewise afflicted. There is no way to avoid it but there are certain things that can be done. We can also rest assured that if we belong to the Lord, we will get progressively "better" until we die.

As we look forward in hope, we must look forward with patience. Is that difficult for all of us, or just me? The patience part, I mean. We want what we want and we want it NOW. But God does what He does in His time, not our own. You would think that after the umpteenth time of our looking back and seeing that God's timing was perfect in a situation that we wouldn't have planned that way, we would at least realize from experience that God knows what He's doing—and that we would be ashamed of ourselves for not taking Him at His Word.

This confidence in God's timing being perfect should also give us perfect peace about the day-to-day disruptions and aggravations that often leave us frustrated. When the three year old spills her milk for the 20th time—I'm not naming any names, but her initials are E.C.—or they forget again to say ' please' when they've heard the reminder their whole lives, we can bear it with patience. We discipline where needed, look to see if the reins need to be tightened, do it, and move on—cheerfully.

We should keep in mind as we look at our children that we too are children: we should strive to love our children as our heavenly Father loves us, with patience and perseverance. I should remember from God's Word that His love never fails. If I am to be like Christ to my children, I need to love them faithfully. That means looking past my own selfish desires for comfort and ease and seeing each day what it means to love them sacrificially.

Sometimes if I'm reading on the couch or talking to a friend on the phone I don't want to be interrupted because Maili needs her teeth brushed or Delaney needs help with the breakfast dishes. Sacrificial love means I not only give up my 'free' time at times, it means I do it joyfully, being grateful that God has given us Maili and Delaney. It also means recognizing that sometimes (often times) loving and nurturing them involves mundane things that I would rather not have to do.

Training children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord involves huge things such as discipline, teaching Scripture, encouraging them to serve others and so on, but it also involves Mommy just being there with them, getting them up and dressed, feeding them, etc. Lots of these things can be done by someone else and can sometimes be done by others with no harm to the children, but Mommy also needs to be regularly pouring herself into her children by doing these things for them in love. Our older children are certainly trained and capable of doing much to help but I am still responsible for many small tasks in taking care of our family.

Perhaps little will help the little ones grow in grace more than seeing our hopeful expectancy. As we pray for Jesus' return, we show them where our hope is. We show them that we are here for His kingdom and that everything we do should bear witness to that fact. We are not here for our own ends. Most importantly, in raising them we show them that we seek to be stewards of our children, knowing that they are really His.