TARA GIBBS | CONTRIBUTOR
When my kids were in high school, a parenting book encouraged me to ask, “What is our family motto?” Potential responses flitted through my mind, “Glorify God and enjoy Him… Love God, love others… Encourage one another…”
However, when I posed the question, two of my kids laughed and gave me the same horrifying response, “Win.”
Hmm.
I knew we were not a resume-builder, push-our-kids-to-do-it-all kind of family, and after getting the horrified reaction they wanted, my kids followed up with better answers like, “Glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” The opportunity to get a rise out of mom had been too tempting to resist.
But their responses got me thinking, “Yes, I teach our kids to glorify and enjoy God, but what other messages do I communicate in unspoken ways throughout the week?” From “work hard and do well,” to “avoid the dangerous world,” to “our family prioritizes elite sports,” to “take good care of your physical body,” fill in thousands of potential “unspoken mottos” here: _______.
Many of these “unspoken mottos” are not bad in themselves but simply mis-prioritized. And until heaven, perfect balance will not be achieved, but that is exactly why it’s good to regularly ask ourselves, “What unspoken family mottos are we communicating?”
One place to find many truths for living in this world is the creation account of Genesis 1-2. This is where we see the world as it should be.
Sometimes I think we treat the first two chapters of Genesis like the foreword of a book: “I can just skim over that introductory part to get to the real story—sin, fall, and salvation.” A friend said to me once: “Practically, I think I often thought of Christianity as starting with the fall in Genesis 3, ‘We are sinful, and we need Jesus to be saved.’”
But sin and the fall are not the way God starts His Story of His good world. When we read Genesis 1:1-31 we learn much about how we are to positively inhabit this world day in and out. There’s a lot here from which to strengthen our lived out family motto….
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