Pastor’s Corner: Lost your marbles?

Have you ever been accused of losing your marbles? I want you to think about that in a different light.

Did you know that from the time your child is born, you have approximately 936 weeks until that child graduates high school and heads off to the workforce or college? That’s 936 weeks until they are off on their own. Kind of scary, huh?

Imagine you had a jar with 936 marbles and each week of your child’s life you took a marble out. If your child is 5, he or she has about 608 marbles left in that jar. If they are in ninth grade, he or she is down to about 159. If your child is a junior, he or she has around 54 marbles left.

Time flies. The older we get, the more we realize that is true. Especially when it comes to our kids. Before you know it, they are starting school, or driving, or even — gulp — graduating. In fact, just the other day, there were lots of posts online of a scene from the movie Back to the Future where Marty McFly sets the time machine to a date waaaay in the future... April 30, 2013. Yikes! That used to seem so far away, and now that is even history.

The truth is time matters. You can’t get it back. Your time is invaluable. It matters what you spend your time doing. When it comes to our kids, it matters what we do with the weeks we have with them. We have to be intentional.

The world tells us that to raise successful kids, they need to be well-rounded, smart, athletic, good-looking and productive. The Bible lays out a much different picture for successful parenting.

The most important thing about your kids (and you, by the way) is what they believe about God. In Psalm 78:5-8, God’s word tells us that parents are to teach the next generation about the wonders and works of God. In Deuteronomy 6:4-9, we realize that our goal as parents is not to raise successful kids according to the world’s standards, but to teach and model a life of worship in all that we do. To be honest, that is the purpose of family anyway – to worship God and teach the next generations about His greatness.

There is a new application out there created by the reThink Group called the Legacy Countdown App. You can enter in your child’s name and birth date or estimated graduation date, and it will calculate how many weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds that you have left until your child graduates. I know it is scary to think about it, but that is why we must think about it. Don’t lose your marbles, spend your marbles wisely.

So what do you do? You become intentional about building a foundation of spiritual truth in the lives of your kid. You become intentional about making memories. You make history, one week at a time, one marble at a time.  

Andy Wilbanks is the Minister of Children at Hunter Street Baptist Church. You can follow his blog at LifeAlongTheRoad.com.