CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE

Children are hard work and looking after them gets exhausting. You have to make sure all their needs are taken care of before you take care of your own, no matter how you are feeling. If you and your child both get ill ie with a bad cold you still have to put your childs needs first. If you both get sick and your child vomits all over the carpet you have to clear up the mess even though you feel like you want to just spend a day with your head down the toilet, heaving.

You have to make sure they grow up healthy and strong, in body and mind. You have to teach them right from wrong. You have to protect and nurture them. If you are shy, meeting teachers can be an ordeal, but you still have to do it, you have to go to all their parents evenings.

You have to take them to the park even though you may prefer to stay in and watch Countdown. You have to set them a good example of all the virtues, because children always need a role model and the first one is their own mother and father. If you are a single parent you have to be both mother and father, and thats not easy, but thats what you have to do.

If you enjoy smoking weed, then you have to stop doing that, because its against the law, and you have to protect your children, and always put them first, and its not exactly protecting them if you are risking having the police banging your door down to raid your house for drugs and possibly put an At Risk order on your kids is it? Even if you can't see anything wrong with smoking weed yourself, you have to bow down the the law if you are a parent and put your child before yourself.

You have to do a lot of things you may not really want to do, and that is called Self Sacrifice, but you have to do those things with a smile on your face and in your heart, because you do them for love. This time of year you can see how birds devote themselves to their eggs and then their chicks. I had a blackbird family in the hedge and a magpie stole their babies away, it was heartbreaking to see, I dashed outside to try to stop it, but was too late to frighten the magpie away, and the blackbirds tried so hard to defend their babies, mobbing the magpie and squarking loudly at him, but didn't succeed. There is also a family of swifts in the roof and I can see them flying in and out with flies for their chicks, they are on the wing every evening,feeding them.

Parents are the best ones to look after their young wether it be birds or people. The children sort of belong to all of us, because children are our future, the human race is a family made out of lots of families, and we all have the same Heavenly Father, who created all of us in our mothers wombs.

Its dreadful when children end up in "care" because then they are amongst hired hands, and how can a person paid to do a job be better than a person doing the job from a primeval urge of parental devotion?

If you see a family struggling, and in these days there are lots of them, and you have the power to draw alongside and help them, even if its only in a small insignificant sort of way, please can you do it? Some of the times I have been very tired as a single mum and someone has done a small kindness to me, or even a kind word or little bit of encouragement, and it has blessed me so much and given me some strength. If you rebuke someone who is struggling under some heavy burden, please pray before you do it, and always try to nurture rather than destroy.

I have been reading Pollyanna and it has deeply touched me, what I have read in that childrens book. My old headmistress Miss Clarice Dawson wrote to me one time about books, and that is the sort of book she liked, because she was a Quaker. She is one person who spoke a kind word to me when I was going through a really bad time as a child, at the time I didn't trust her, I wished I had now, but at any rate I can see why she liked the books that she liked.