When you wear your snow boots out of the house and then ditch them in the bushes
because you want your new sneakers to be seen – like I did as a kid – you quickly learn wet
feet stay cold all day. Not a lesson quickly forgotten.
Children know right from wrong as we allow them to live with their mistakes. By doing so
they also learn the feeling of doing what’s right. Like the feeling of staying warm and dry on
a snowy day.
But we don’t have to wait for wet, cold feet to begin helping them know right from wrong.
One way to begin is taking the advice of Navy Seal and Admiral William H. McRaven who
has said, “If you want to change the world . . . start off by making your bed.”
Make your bed? Yes, every day. In the physical realm, which kids can see and feel, the
chances of teaching right from wrong in the more abstract, mental, relational, and spiritual
realm, are greatly increased.
Out of physical orderliness grows mental orderliness, and mental orderliness produces
orderly behavior which translates to knowing right from wrong.
And you can’t beat the feeling of knowing you’ve done the right thing with a neat room and
a made bed to cuddle up in at the end of the day!
“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger [do not exasperate them to the point of
resentment with demands that are trivial or unreasonable or humiliating or abusive; nor
by showing favoritism or indifference to any of them], but bring them up [tenderly, with
lovingkindness] in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” Ephesians 6:4 Amplified
