What is the temperature in your home?
Dr. John Trent, best-selling author and founder of Strong Families, explains how to create a more comfortable atmosphere in your home by blessing your children. He shares helpful advice from his book The Blessing.
Dr. Trent says that we can create a culture of blessings in our homes by paying attention to the temperature gauge. He shares a hypothetical example,
“Say that it’s January, just set the temperature in your house all the way up to 48 degrees. Now, 48 degrees you can make it, it’s 48 it’s not 30 below, but if you walk into a house that’s 48 degrees – just try doing life in a house like that.
“As much as you like you’re working in the kitchen, you’re sitting down, if you keep moving you might be okay but every time you stop and it’s that cold.”
Is your house too cold?
One of the things that warms up a house, biblically, is by being a blessing to our kids and to our spouse. For example, parents can be a blessing by consistently providing their children with affirmations. Dr. Trent stresses the importance of this,
“I’m convinced that every kid in every home deserves to know that there’s at least 1 person in their life who’s crazy about them.”
We also need to be aware if the temperature gauge is broken in our home. As a marriage and family counselor who has worked in college settings, Dr. Trent discusses reality of brokenness in the world today.
“There are so many broken people today, it’s just ridiculous. For so many of them, the differentiator between growing up with brokenness and staying broken or moving forward, is guess what? There has to be just one person.
“It could be a teacher; it could be a coach…Lord willing it’s a parent, or a grandparent.”
Children gain a better understanding of how much God loves them by feeling loved and accepted by their parents.
“If somebody really believes that somebody is crazy about them, then when you begin to hear about this God that’s crazy about you; loves you so much that He laid his own life down for you, that’s way easier to understand. Water has a hard time rising above its level.“
“Just having one person committed to giving you the blessing can to literally be life changing, even if things were difficult growing up.”
As parents, we all have the opportunity to adjust the temperature in our homes and be the vessel that God uses to bless our children.
