Children And Choice!

Glancing through Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible* today, I opened to pages 188-89 and noticed that the first word is children and the last word is choice. Interesting!

There are many choices involved when it comes to children.

• Whether or not to have them. Some people regard this choice as the most important choice of all--to the point that, if they become pregnant, they demand to exercise their choice to destroy the child. Others believe that the right to choose whether to have children should be exercised before having sex (or unprotected sex). Then there are those who suggest that it is really not our choice at all inasmuch as God said to be fruitful and multiply.
  
• Whether or not to love them. As a grandparent, I can't understand how anyone could not love children. Yet, I'm not too old to remember how wearisome children can be at the end of a long day. Loving your children, instead of hollering at them, is a choice you can make. Children, like everyone else, respond better to love than to hatred. Take a deep breath and choose to love them.
  
• Whether to spend time with them. Your children need you more than the air they breathe, the food they eat . . . more than anything. Children are desperate to have their parents' affection and affirmation. Someone has said that children spell love this way: T-I-M-E.
  
• Whether to train them up in the way they should go. Sometimes culture works against the family and parents don't think their kids even listen to them. THEY DO! All the surveys show that parents influence their children more than all those external influences that seem so attractive to our children. So don't give up! Don't ever give up!

These are just a few of the choices we make when we consider children. Yet, it's interesting that Strong's Concordance lists five pages of references (approximately 1,740 references) to children and only 21 references to choice (none of which have anything to do with children). So, maybe when all is said and done, the only choice to make about children is to love and appreciate them as rewards from our heavenly Father.

*Thomas Nelson Publishers, copyright 1979.