How To Love When You Have No Honor
I must admit I laughed at that in the moment, but then I realized just how visual that statement is.
If you have ever lived with a child who shows that type of reactions and actions to you, you can easily be at your wits end begging for some type of relief in helping you to get a little ahead in your parenting.
Now, I'm not a stranger to that feeling.
I remember when our oldest child was in her preteens and I was struggling so much with honor, I was feeling as though I was fighting a losing battle, and that there was a clear line drawn between my husband and I.
My husband had all the respect, and I had little to none.
I remember going up to this woman who I looked up to in the homeschooling community. She had a booth at a convention. Sounding familiar?
I went up to her and I shared with her some of my experience and I said, what do I do?
At the time, I didn't recognize the problem was honor. I just knew that I needed help. I needed a way out, I needed someone to tell me what I need to do and I will do it.
I remember she shared her wisdom with me and she said, you know, based on your story, I'm going to tell you that your daughter looks at your husband differently than she looks at you, and you need to get to her heart because that's the only way that you're going to change that.
But she didn't really give me any real distinctive step.
She just told me I had to get to her heart.
So as you can imagine, I took that information and I walked away.
How do I get to her heart? How can I get her to honor me like she loves and honors my husband?
Well, let me tell you, our home was in chaos.
I had made so many, many bad mistakes.
I had created the conflict in our home between my daughter and I.
It was my fault.
But yet, in my parenting wisdom at that time and what everyone else was teaching me about parenting, I looked at it as though it was my daughter's fault.
I used words of strong willed over her.
I used words of that would just put a mental state between her and I.
So I was the culprit in the situation and in my research of honor, honor is high respect, high respect, highly esteemed.
Those are the things that my daughter thought about my husband, and yet not about me.
Now, the difference between the two is I was home with my daughter all the time.
I was a homeschooling mom still, but I was homeschooling her 24/7.
I was with her 24/7/365 for more than 18 years.
And at this point it had only been, I don't know, 10 or 11 years, something like that.
Well, I got to this place of recognizing that my husband reacts to her differently than I react to her differently.
It's not our actions.
We both showed loving actions.
We both had the same way of acting, toward her.
It was the reacting that was the difference.
In my reactions of her actions, I was causing the lack of respect.
So I'm gonna teach you something that most people will not be teaching you.
If you want honor, you must earn the honor, just like trust.
So in order to be highly respected and highly esteemed, we must act a certain way and react a certain way in order to have that honor.
That honor is a gift.
It is not expected.
I know you're probably sitting here and thinking, well, just a second.
The fifth commitment says, honor your father and your mother.
It does, but also in in Ephesians 6, it says, fathers do not exasperate your children.
So we must sit and think right after saying, honor thy father and my mother. Then it says, fathers, do not exasperate your children.
Now, father and mother should both be there, but what I want you to recognize is that honor is a result of a relationship.
It's not at the beginning.
It's the result of a relationship.
So we must take ownership of our relationship with our children, our parenting, and we must recognize that in order for us to have honor, we must earn it.
Now, if you've like me and love history, you will think of people in history, different generals and leaders in military situations who were honorable in their actions or dishonorable in their actions.
That's what I want you to think about.
How honorable are your actions and reactions to your children? How dishonorable are your actions and reactions?
I want you to think about that.
I want you to start taking action about those.
Now, I made so many mistakes.
I am not going to sit here and sit in guilt over it because I have been forgiven from it.
But I do wanna say that in my mistakes is what I see many, many parents making.
Because I said so.
Do as I say and not as I do.
Acting one way and expecting your children to act another.
Having two different standards, one for you and one for everybody else.
These type of things are dishonorable actions.
When we want an honorable relationship with our children, when we want our children to honor us, we must first be honorable.
So to have more honor, we must be loving in our actions to our children.
And that is one thing that I know that my husband has always been.
He's always been that loving first, I have always been the temperament one.
I was the reason my daughter was not able to honor me.
It was me.
And so not understanding that, not having that wisdom back then it caused a lot of friction, a lot of conflict.
What I want you to say, and I want you to recognize is when we do not have honor from our children, we tend to fight, we tend to get on the defensive. But what if you recognize that there is a spirit in your relationship, in you that is causing this conflict that is arising up and causing not highly esteemed,
not highly respected, but lowly respected, lowly esteemed.
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