Open Another Door-Allowing your child's spirit to soar

I was speaking at a conference recently and ran into a good friend of mine, Jean Thomason. Jean has a particular passion to see parents of preschoolers get the tools they need to effectively raise their little ones. Jean has a delightful character she portrays on a series of CD’s and DVD’s called “Miss Pattycake”. Jean and I were talking and she began to share with me the story of a distraught mom whose child was not sleeping through the night. The little girl kept waking up with bad dreams. It’s not an uncommon situation. My friend shared with the mom, “You know, there is more than one way to reach a child.” Curious, the frantic mom asked what she meant. Jean proceeded to share with her the importance of not only reaching and instructing a child through their mind, their intellect, but also their spirits.

Most often we think about impacting a child by training their minds. The success of Baby Einstein products gives testimony to the eagerness that most parents have to want to educate their children well, to prepare them to succeed in life and reach their potential. Nothing wrong with this of course. However, one of the amazing things about being made in the image of God, which is something unique to human beings, is that there’s more to us that mere flesh and bone. Beyond synaptic nerve endings and electrical stimuli, there is a mystical, magical aspect to our nature. Call it our soul, call it our spirit. Whatever you call it, it’s the part of us that was made to connect with the divine. It’s what makes us truly human. An just as our bodies need to grow and be exercised, our minds need to be challenged and trained, so does our spirit. Anyway, my friend Jean gave this woman one of her lullaby CD’s that she recorded specifically to provide children with a way to encourage their spirits and to draw them closer to the One who is Spirit and who divinely created each of us. Long story short, the woman e-mailed Jean a short while later exclaiming how her daughter hasn’t had a nightmare since and has been sleeping soundly through the night. In training our children, be aware of the importance of training not just their minds but their spirits as well.