Leading By Example

Being a mother to eleven little ones is not an easy job. Especially when you´ve never been a mother before. But, I am thankful for the ministry that the Lord has allowed me to be apart of.
One thing that I love about my job is that so often God speaks to me through the boys. He shows me areas of my life that need work as I see them in the boys.
I get very frustrated when I have to pick up the boys stuff off of the floor. It´s not the job itself that bothers me, but the disrespect I see toward the things they own.
A few days ago, I had a "great idea"...picking up each toy, shoe, pajama, and other discarded item, I began placing them in a large plastic garbage bag. Once in there, I had decided, that the only way the owner could reclaim them would be by paying for them.
Now my boys do not have much money, in fact only two of them regularly have a few pesos to spend on a special treat. So, of course, our currency could not be monetary. Instead I instated a new sort of credit. For each item that I had collected, the owner would in turn work for 10 minutes to earn that item back again.
When the kids came home from school, I noticed that Hector did not meet us at the lunch table. Arriving back at the house I found the reason for his absence: Hector had no shoes! All of his sandals and play shoes were safe inside their plastic waiting place. Tears streaming down his face, he said he didn´t understand where they could possibly be. Because of course, he had put them in the closet where they belonged. Long story short, Hector learned a lesson that day.
But I didn´t learn it until the following day. I was sitting on the computer finishing some last minute details for the children´s evening devotional, when Fabian came in. He headed toward the sink and began to fill it with water.
"Fabi, don´t worry about that right now," I said, "I will wash those while the kids are sitting here at the table doing their homework."
To that he replied, "No, it´s better that it´s cleaned up now. If the kids come here and see the house untidy, they won´t understand why you have a different standard for them than for ourselves."
Wow. How true. Am I teachñing the kids to respect their own things, when my own house goes overlooked many days. What is my example teaching them?


Please Lord, help me not to have double standards. Help me to teach the children you have entrusted me with through example.