Commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today. Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed, and when you are getting up.
Deuteronomy 6:6b-7 NLT
I was not a big fan of reading early on—I liked being read to but not when it was myself doing the reading. It was hard! I didn’t pick it up right away and it took effort! This was probably why as a 7-year-old I would get a little annoyed with my grandparents when they touted the advantages of reading; how it keeps your mind sharp, and how you can learn about other times and places, people, and travel.
Even though they talked a lot about reading when I was very young, it didn’t make a big impression on me. Around the age of 7, I started spending Fridays with them. Every Friday around 10 in the morning Grandpa would take me down to the library. They loved their local library which was a decent size library and they visited it frequently. He would send me off to the children’s section for me to pick out my books and, after selecting his books, he would open up the newspaper, settle into a chair, and wait for me. These Friday trips to the library are some of the best memories I have with him.
What made an impression was living out the example in front of me. Grandpa wasn’t just encouraging me to read, he was teaching me his values through the time we spent there each week. It was all those trips to the library that started to get me interested in reading. It was the cozy times when I would spend the night at their house, when they would pull out their books and recline in their easy chairs, and not a sound would be made except for the turning of pages. These were the things that caused me to fall in love with reading.
The Bible speaks again and again about instilling our values into our children. Instilling our values into our children isn’t just about talking to our children about the Bible—it’s about living out these examples on a daily basis. As parents and role models for the children in our lives, it’s not just about what we say, it’s about what we model. We can talk all day long about how wonderful having a relationship with God is, but if we act like going to church every Sunday is such a drag, then our children are not going to believe us.
It is not enough for us to just say all the right things, we have to live the right things as well. Let us always remember that the children and young people watching us are taking in way more than we probably wish they were about how we live our lives. We will mess up and there will always be things that we could have done better, but let us always be trying to model our values for our young ones, out of a place of love, not drudgery.
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