Two Scenarios

Imagine yourself a film producer. One day, you are handed two screenplays to choose:

(1) A boy from a good family comes into bad neighborhood and is seduced to follow wayward living. He enjoys the wild, reckless, and adventurous so-called "freedom" for a while until he discovers that it all doesn't worth the love and affection he's got back home, so he turns away and returns to his family after learning his lesson.

(2) A boy from a good family comes into bad neighborhood, is seduced to follow wayward living, gets trapped in deep trouble, and gets killed without ever being able to return to the right path.

Which scenario would you prefer?

No doubt, you would choose the first one, as would any film producer in the world!
Nevertheless, my friends, that first scenario is nearly always found in fictions and not necessarily so in reality!
As a matter of fact, observing the situation of our days, the majority of young generation tend to fall into the second, tragic scenario!
Youths try to bite a taste of the forbidden fruit, thinking they can get away in the end, but the consequences of their recklessness overtake them before they can learn anything from it -- and they end up with their lives either cut off or shattered. There's no anti-climax of repentance, no resolution of second chance.
That's what we find in reality. Most of the time, there is no second chance as offered in the movies. The sand in the hourglass runs out way too fast.
That is real life.

But we also need to keep in mind that the fact we find so many cases of the second scenario out there also results from how frequent our children are exposed to the first scenario at home!
Parents, be careful what television is "teaching" our children!
TV or movie plots are fictions, delusive rather than instructing. We need to emphasize to our younglings from the early stage of childhood that the stories told through that tube is NOT REAL!
A youth these days is so prone to tell him/herself, "Ah, it's okay. I'll get away with it, just like the hero(ine) in the movie last night."
If we don't want our children to have this pattern of thought printed in their mind, we'd better start guiding them from now on in understanding fiction, filtering and selecting the stories they should and should not watch.
How many young lives are wasted out there on the streets, never returning home as living teens, bright and joyful as they should have been in their prime of life, just because we let the poison slip unnoticed from the crystal tube into the children's head?
Let's take extra caution in bringing up our kids. Don't let them believe "there is always a second chance" slogan offered by man-made stories. They probably won't survive that second chance!

Raising Two Toddlers at the Same Time

One of the bright sides of having two children consecutively is that it saves more time and money in raising them both. With the rates of school fee and daily needs tend to inflate from time to time, it is definitely more economical to send them to school and provide for their needs (clothes, food, milk, diapers, etc) at the same time, compared to having another child several years apart from the first one – when everything has inflated in monetary value.

Aside from that, there’s incomparable satisfaction and joy in watching them grow together. Our children, Dharma and Sarah, are only 15½-months apart. By now, they have looked like twins! They befriend each other and do everything together. Since the two are only a little over a year apart, they learn good teamwork – and they amaze us every single day with the progress and creativity they come up with.

What about the down-side?

Oh, of course there’s a downside!

Children between 12 to 36-months old are in their exploration phase. They want to know everything and find out how stuffs work. Every day I find my wardrobe plundered, our bookshelves emptied, magazines torn into pieces, journals, papers, booklets, pens, pencils, soaps and hair-combs get scattered all over the house, plates, bowls, and cutleries end up as toys on bed, and so on.

Yes, raising two toddlers at the same time does save more time and money.

But, it costs us double the amount of energy!

Whew!

Children: the Real Future Investment

Twenty years ago, a classmate told me, “When I grow up, I wanna be a doctor, like my old man.”

I nodded. “Mm-hmmm… I see.”

In turn, he asked, “What do you wanna be?”

“Me?” I gave a thought. “Build a family, I guess.”

He laughed out loud. Of course, the idea of building a family – get married, have children and rear them up – is completely out of the reach of fourth-grade students.

But two decades after that very conversation, I know exactly that I get what I want – and that I want it right from the start, ever since I was a child.

Many people don’t actually realize which things should come first in their list of priorities, thus sometimes we run into those workaholics who keep racing their lives without even knowing their clear destination or aim. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing careers or establishing one’s lifetime achievements. But the underlying question is: What are you doing it for?

Sean Covey (son of author Stephen Covey) wrote in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens, that at the brink of death, no one would think if only they had spent more time at the office. Touché!

Achievements and fulfilling one’s destined role in life is important. Yes. But there are more valuable and irreplaceable things that should come first.

One of the greatest needs of mankind is regeneration. We hand down our wisdom, knowledge, understanding, culture and character to the next generation. Without regeneration, we would only be toiling in vain under the sun. Without successors to carry on our names and the work of our hands, all we do will end up meaningless and vaporize in the course of time. Thus, the future investment we should really make lies in our children. It is more important to show greater care and attention on what’s happening in our homes instead of what’s piling on our office desks.

To conclude, David Roper, one of the writers of the devotional Our Daily Bread, wrote that children “are our lasting legacy – an investment we’ll never regret!”