"What are you teaching by your example?"

We need to be keenly aware of the influence we have in our children’s lives. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote these humbling words, “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say”. Someone else has said, “No matter what you teach the child, he insists on behaving like his parents”.

The comic character, Dennis the Menace, often reinforces this very truth. Once in the midst of a chaotic mess where he had smashed a tricycle to smithereens, He asked his dad, “What are some of those words you say when you hit a bad golf shot?” Dennis had learned there was a certain way to behave when you are frustrated, not by what his dad had told him, but by what his dad had done.

Let me encourage you today to be very careful with what you are teaching your children by your example. It is not something just to consider. It is something to work on it diligently.