Teach Your Children

Two-year-old Nathaniel and his five-year-old sister were our charges for the weekend. Lucky kids. They got to be with us for the first Gator football game of the season. It’s never too early to rah-rah the kids. The chant of the day was “Go Gators!!!”

Being the apt mimic he is, Nathaniel soon picked up on the phrase, then went around the house repeating it. We were pleased. After all, our other grandsons live in a foreign land. For years they’ve been serenading us with Rocky Top. We grin and bear it, since Tennessee is their father’s Alma Mater.

I was getting Nathaniel ready for bed when I put him on the changing table to put on his jammies. “Go Gators,” he jabbered in his barely intelligible toddler talk. You’ve learned a good thing today, I assured him. And then he went me one better. He let me know that he already knew the most important thing. Slapping his little hands over his tummy, he chanted, “De Biboo tell me so!”

God told the Israelites that His commandments were to be written on their hearts. “Impress them on your children,” he said. “Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up…Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.”

When things are written on our hearts, they are never forgotten. Nathaniel will learn soon enough that “Go Gators!” is not written in the Bible.
Thanks to his parents and his church he, like his Tennessee cousins, will learn what IS in the Bible.

And that’s the best legacy a grandparent can leave.