“And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children” – Isaiah 54 : 13
Each time I have the privilege of attending a funeral, I am always reminded of one thing, which is an inescapable fate that awaits me – that each year draws me closer to my grave, and, that no matter how much I loathe the sight of coffin, one day, and I mean just one day, I am going to find myself in it. As scary as these thoughts may sound, we should rather put in our best to prepare ourselves for that day that we will depart this earth than spend our whole life fretting about death that will certainly come.
When someone departs in dead, the problem now is not the departed because their works have ceased, as the Bible rightly puts it. What becomes a more troubling concern is the children the dead leaves behind, whether he/she was able to give them the proper upbringing.
I had the privilege of attending a funeral over the weekend in my town. And, while I was still sitting in my solemn state, I overheard a conversation that two other sympathizers were engaging in. They were bitterly complaining about the poor quality upbringing that the dead woman gave her children which made all of them (about four in number) to be irresponsible.
The woman, along with her husband, had amassed great properties while they were alive. As the story went, they had four houses and lands, but as soon as they both closed their eyelids in dead, all they children began to scramble for the possession of these properties among themselves and sold them off as soon as they were able to lay hands on them. And, before the funeral even came, they had sold off all of them except their residence and squandered the money. Worst of all, the eldest son drunk himself to stupor on the day of the funeral. Such a great dishonor it was to their dead mother!
You may be of the opinion that this kind of lifestyle they exhibited has nothing to do with their parents, but I can tell you that to a very great extent, parents are responsible for the kind of life their children live. This is what happens when you spend your whole life working so hard to give your children the best life materially, but do not put in the same energy for their spiritual and moral wellbeing.
The material wealth that so many people have spent their entire existence to accumulate for their children will become the seeds of discord that they have ignorantly sown for those children when they fail to give them a good moral upbringing in the way of the Lord.
Some parents have consciously caused division among their children even in their lifetime by preferring one child above the other, and the hatred among those children will aggravate as soon as they have left this world. Personally, one of my yardsticks that qualifies a successful man is the quality of life that he has given his children while he was alive. Will your children inherit eternal values from you when you are no more?
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