Look into my eyes

Parenting for me has always been a daunting task.  I think that my generation (people in their 30s now) has generally been the “show me” generation of kids.  Our parents did a decent job of telling us that they loved us, but many a time, the words fell short of accompanying actions.  Ironically, this has now kind of boomerang’ed a bit on me as I find my parenting not living up to the standards that I expected from my mom and dad.

Inadequacy in parenting is always at a high when finishing parenting books.  I just got finished with a great book (which I highly recommend) called Handbook to Joy-Filled Parenting by Barbara Moon.  In it, she talks about connecting to your children at a young age, by looking into their eyes and “synchronizing” with them.  It’s a neat concept that I am now really trying to implement with my kids.

My kids resist it though, which can be really frustrating.  See even though they love me, they often would rather keep doing what they are doing (playing, watching pbs, etc) than to sync up with me.  This is really hard as a parent, and yet I know that is regularly my posture to God.  The king of the universe wants to connect with me and I say….”I am busy”.  That really sucks, but not quite enough to generally get me out of doing it.

May God give me the strength to model good connecting with God by regularly “looking into His eyes”.