Refrigerator Art

A voice came from heaven: “You are my Son,whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” Mark 1:11

Ellen, a thirty-four-year-old mother of three, enrolled in an art class at a local community college. One day her instructor announced that the assignment completed on the first day of class would be included in a notebook that was to be a major part of her grade. “May I do another project?” Ellen asked the instructor in an anxious voice. “I don’t have the first one anymore.” The instructor asked what had happened to the earlier work. Ellen replied with a trace of pride in her voice, “It’s on my mother’s fridge.”

Though your relationships with your children naturally change when they become adults, it doesn’t mean that you stop being parents. You can still look for ways to honor the achievements of your grown kids, to affirm their positive choices, to show your pride in the men and women they’ve become. When you do, you’ll find yourself developing new levels of mutual appreciation and respect with your maturing sons and daughters.

If our heavenly Father chooses to part the heavens to announce His pleasure in His Son (Mark 1:10–11), we can certainly make the effort to celebrate the accomplishments of our own children. You might start with that empty space on your refrigerator door.

Before you say good night…

How will you show your grown kids that you’re still proud of them?

In what ways have your parents affirmed you as an adult?

How did those affirmations make you feel?

Father, critical, dishonoring words seem to slip so easily from our lips. By the power of Your indwelling Spirit, help us by our words and deeds to build up, encourage, and celebrate our children…and each other, too, as husband and wife. Amen.

• From Night Light For Parents, by Dr. James & Shirley Dobson
  Copyright © 2000 by James Dobson, Inc. All rights reserved.