Creative Strength

Creative Strength

Be strong and courageous, all you who put your hope in the LORD!

Psalm 31:24

Does your family have a Plan B for those times when your first choice doesn’t work out? During Jay’s and Holly’s teen years, we joked we had so many things go wrong we also had to have plans C, D, E, F, and sometimes triple Z. But I wanted them to understand, as the old saying goes, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

As an illustration of that point, I kept a pair of carved, three-inch work shoes on my office shelf to remind us not to give up when our first plans didn’t work out. The carver, a Kentucky mountain man named Fred, made several of those shoes perfectly. Once, though, while working on the top of one, he cut too deeply and out snapped a piece of the wood. He started to throw the damaged shoe into the fireplace, but then he looked at it again. Picking up the broken piece, he whittled a little mouse to set inside, just as if the creature had eaten away part of the shoe. Then, with a grin, he put a higher price tag on the item.

Not only did I want my children to have that kind of creative perseverance, but I also wanted them to think ahead. Thus, even in young childhood, they pondered questions such as “What would you do if a man in a car stopped and said he wanted you to help find his puppy?”

As they got older, the questions were more complicated: “What would you do if one of your friends wanted to copy your homework?”

When I was concerned about the peer pressure they would encounter as teens, the questions became “What would you do if a friend offered you some interesting-looking pills at a party?” I also told them until they had enough strength of their own to say no, they were welcome to borrow mine. I even suggested they reply, “Are you kidding? My mom would have a fit. That would not be a pretty sight. You’ve seen her. She’s a big woman.”

They’d chuckle, but a preplanned answer gave them an escape if they needed it.

Occasionally they used my strength to help them turn down invitations to places they didn’t really want to go. Sometimes I would hear them say during a phone conversation, “I can’t go there. My mom would have a fit.”

Our children need creative strength for the challenges life will throw at them. And it’s up to us as loving parents to help them develop it. —SANDRA

Lord, help me to have the type of strength my children will want to borrow as they are developing their own.

A good example is the best sermon.

—THOMAS FULLER (1608–1661), ENGLISH CHURCHMAN AND AUTHOR