The truth is… I’m encouraged today. Sometimes God kisses us with little bits of revelation that really helps confirm in our hearts that we have made the right choice.
I’ve been reading a really good book by John Bevere, “Good or God.” So far, I’m only on chapter 7, I highly recommend it. I read something this morning that really stuck out to me and made me consider some choices we’ve made as parents, to our own kids and to our foster kids. He said that exaggeration is lying and God doesn’t lie or exaggerate. So, when God tells us he has more thoughts about us, individually, than the grains of sand on the shores, He really means it! That’s encouraging!
I think a lot of times we have been disappointed by people simply because they aren’t people who tell the truth. It’s hard to put your faith in someone who only tells people what they want to hear. It’s hard to believe someone you know has lied to you in the past. I know people who have been hurt when they’d found out that Santa Claus or the Toothfairy wasn’t real. True story. I never really understood the hurt, but because I saw the fruit, we decided not to lie to our kids at all. We would give them the truth even if the culture around us wouldn’t understand.
What do you mean your kids don’t believe in Santa? What do you mean you don’t do… insert acceptable cultural whatever here. Well, we simply tell our kids the truth. It might not make sense to you, but here lately, since we’ve had other kids placed here with us, I’m beginning to understand how telling the truth about everything really matters.
I’m not here to condemn you if you celebrate whatever, I’m simply sharing part of my walk with you. One of the things we’ve emphasized over the last several months with our foster kids is that they are in a safe place when they’re here. We took classes in Illinois before we moved here to Indiana and we learned a lot of different ways to make your home a “safe home.” They gave us pointers: leave the bedroom doors open, only one person in the bathroom at a time, etc. But the thing that really stuck out to me the most was this: tell the truth.
My foster kids have had their little worlds turned upside down. They’ve been hurt. They’ve been lied to. They don’t trust adults. When they come into my house I want them to feel safe. But because they haven’t felt safe before, they don’t trust people, especially adults. They don’t really know what a safe place is, so we show them. They didn’t like the rules at first, then they grew to love them because they found out that rules keep us safe. That’s a huge revelation right there: Rules keep people safe.
For months we have answered some really hard questions. We continue to tell them the truth. Even when it’s hard. The latest one that was really hard was this one: “Where’s my mommy? Why am I here?” It takes feeling safe to ask questions like that. And the reply that I gave both reaffirmed her safety and told her the truth. The thing that we need to realize is that we have to really know the truth before we say it. I’m not just talking about the truth about what we see with our eyes, but the truth as God sees it.
Children have been fed lies long enough. “If you don’t stop that, I’m going to ground you for a year.” People won’t experience real freedom or feel safe unless they’re told the truth. Even when it’s hard, even when it hurts.
Learning how to tell our kids the truth in love is a huge part of bringing the Kingdom of Heaven into your home and that’s what I want everyone who walks through my doors to experience. I want my house to be a safe place. I want my house to be one where kids years down the road can look back to and say, “That was my safe place, she never lied to me, I was loved no matter what. I learned how to just be myself there.”
Another thing John Bevere said in his book was that when we lie we are actually submitting to the father of lies, Satan. We can’t submit to Satan and have the kingdom of heaven made manifest inside of our homes. You have to nip it in the bud! You have to stop it. You have to learn the truth, stand on it, cling to it, preach it, believe it, and confess it. The truth is what brings freedom. And there’s only one way to know truth, you must know Jesus. The greatest thing anyone could ever say to me is that they met Jesus in my house.
Any kind of outburst of frustration where I exaggerate a consequence must be caught and cast down. Anything that would exalt itself above the Lord Jesus Christ, even in the name of cultural normality, must be confronted. This is how you close those doors to the enemy. This is how you make your heart, your home, your family, a safe place. You abide in the truth. That’s where transformation takes place.
That’s how we change the world: with truth.
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