I can still remember bringing our first daughter home from the hospital

I had placed her on our bed and was simply watching her gurgle and wiggle. My heart was filled with such awe and wonder as I realized this tiny living being had been formed in my womb. My husband and I had given birth to a new life, a unique life.

At that moment, I realized the awesome privilege I had been granted: the privilege of nurturing this child so that she could become all she was meant to be. In the course of the next five years, she was joined by two other sisters, and our little family was complete.

The challenge

In those first years as a parent, I read many books about childrearing. One of the goals I adopted as a result of that reading was to create an environment for my children that would encourage them to dream. I wanted them to discover their talents and strengths so that they would find a purpose for life that would be a source of great joy and deep meaning. I wanted them to see life as filled with possibilities, and to see their limitations as so many opportunities for growth. This perspective on nurturing children still guides my parenting to this day.

Here are some of the principles I am applying to help my children dream about what their life can be.

Expose them to beauty

Did you ever notice that in the age-old story of Adam and Eve, God begins his relationship with man by exposing him to the beauty of all He has created for him? He brings him to an amazing garden, introduces him to all the animals and shows him the great usefulness, variety and complexity of all He has done. If Adam’s father, God, starts his son’s education by introducing him to wondrous beauty, then I believe we should too.

When my children were preschoolers, I decided to stay home to raise them. This gave me the opportunity to spend a lot of time with them. One of the things we did nearly daily was go outdoors to walk and play. We spent time looking at flowers, listening to birds, spying on groundhogs and cats and sheep.

Every summer, we went camping. We’d get away from the noise and lights of the city and enjoy dark star-filled nights. I marvelled at their innate understanding that the wondrous world around them was the work of a wondrous Creator.

My husband and I also wanted to expose them to the beauty man can create. We played all kinds of music, read all kinds of books, went to art galleries and museums, watched beautiful films, involved them in various sports. We also decided to provide them with toys that allowed them to create beauty on their own. Dolls allowed them to create stories. Lego blocks gave them the freedom to imagine villages and towns — even alternate worlds filled with wondrous things.

Today, my children still enjoy beauty. They continue to create worlds through drawing and writing. They create music, enjoy exploring the world through science. Beauty begets beauty. Beauty begets dreams.

Help them discover their strengths and weaknesses

My children’s love of beauty and their active involvement in the arts, science and sports has helped them discover who they are. By exposing our children to a wide variety of activities, we help them discover their likes and dislikes. This helped them discern what they would like to do later in life.

Children love to excel. As parents, we should constantly be on the look-out for each child’s area of strength. It’s important to verbalize these observations to help them see themselves more accurately. We all need to hear, “Wow, you did that really well” or “You have a real talent for that!”. Sometimes a child (or an adult for that matter) does not see their own area of strength until someone points it out.

We have all seen the early auditions for American Idol where there are at least a few tone-death youths try to become rock stars. Some have spent years taking singing lessons and are shocked to hear that they do not sing well. Somehow, they failed to come to a realistic appraisal of their strengths and weaknesses. This makes their discovery of their true calling much more difficult.

Dreams based on an unrealistic appraisal of self have very little chance of coming true. We must therefore also help our children recognize their limits and their areas of weakness. This is not meant to discourage them, but rather to help them evaluate the work and effort that will be required of them in each possible field of endeavour.

Help them overcome adversity

If we want our children to dream, we must teach them how to deal with difficulties and frustrations. Even the most gifted children will encounter problems in chasing their dreams, and an ability to overcome adversity is the greatest quality determining success in life.

One of the ways we help our children overcome adversity is to agree with them that it is hard. My middle daughter is dyslexic, and my acknowledgement of how hard she must work to learn to spell and write frees her to express her sorrow and frustration over this problem. We have used this difficulty to define success by the effort she puts into her work rather than the marks she receives for her work.

We have applauded every success, every improvement, every progress she sees. We have provided all the tools and aids we could. Our unspoken motto has been: Enjoy working in your strength areas, seek to improve in your areas of competence and work hard at overcoming weakness.

This year, she was told by the director of her school that she has improved so much that she no longer needs special treatment. This success came at a very great cost to her: repeated public embarrassment, multiple failures despite innumerable hours of work, and constant frustration. But she never gave up.

She knew she needed to improve in this area if she was to accomplish her dream of studying science at university and so she persevered year by year by year. The character development we saw as she tackled this challenge amazed us. Teaching our children the value of perseverance and discipline is an extremely important part of preparing them to live out their dreams.

Help them get to know their Creator

The very best dreams are given to us by God. The Bible tells us that God created each of us to accomplish particular tasks He planned for us to do. By helping our children get to know God, we help them discover that plan and destiny. God created them in His image, and they will get a very deep sense of how wondrous and precious they are as they discover God’s infinite love for them.

Children often learn to know God by watching their parents get to know God. As we are faithful to follow the dreams God has placed on our hearts, they learn how beautiful and exciting life with Him can be.

Living out God’s dreams for you is the surest way to help your children live out those he has prepared for them.

My father’s suicide catapulted me into a time of deep grief

In those first shock-filled days after I heard the news that my father had hung himself in the basement of our home, my heart would scream: “NO, NO, don’t think about it! It hurts too much!”

After the funeral, when I left to return to university, I felt so alone and overwhelmed. Whenever I had time to think, I would think of Dad, and I would cry. Questions and doubts started to fill my mind:

• If God loved me, why had He allowed this disaster?
• If God was all-powerful, why hadn’t He stopped my dad?
• If God was all-knowing, why didn’t He let me know how despairing my father was? Why hadn’t He shown me how to reach him?
• If God was there, why hadn’t He done something?
• Was God there?

I had become a Christian a few years ago. The thought that Jesus had died for me so I could be forgiven and know Him personally had filled me with surprise. I could know God? He could be closer to me than a brother? Of course I wanted to know him! Of course I wanted to be forgiven! And when, at 16, I invited him to come into my life and forgive me and change me He had done so, filling my heart with a sense of His presence.

But now, for the first time, God had really disappointed me. And I felt I had really disappointed Him too. You see, my father and I had spent time together just a few days before he died, and he had asked me questions about God I couldn’t answer. Then he had asked me to transfer back to the university at home so I could be with him, and I had refused to do so. Now, I wondered if he would still be alive if I had done what he wanted, and I was tormented by a deep sense of guilt.

Thankfully, God put a very special person on my path who would help me work through my guilt and my questions by meeting with me weekly for the next few years. She pointed me to books and resources that really helped me grow in my faith during that time of doubt. The first time we met, she shared that the Christian life was impossible to live, and if we tried to live it by our own strength, we would end up frustrated. Only Christ could live the life He called us to, and He wanted to live through me, but to do so, He needed me to surrender my life fully to him, and trust Him daily for the strength to obey. I was certainly frustrated. I was certainly aware of my sin and my weakness, and so I did surrender my life to Him and ask Him to fill me with His Spirit.

And I believe that it is His Spirit who gave me the perseverance and the strength to keep coming daily to God with my pain and my questions, so that He could comfort me and speak to my heart.

For the next months, I would spend about an hour or two a day with God. Sometimes it was with tears streaming down my face. He had showed me through the Psalms that I could say anything to Him, ask Him anything, be absolutely real with Him, and so I brought my doubts about His existence and His attributes to him. And He answered my questions in a very interesting way: He showed me Jesus.

I asked:

• Are You really there, God? And He showed me that the universe in all its complexity and beauty declared His glory, and that Jesus was the invisible God made visible. His life, His death, His resurrection and the prophecies He fulfilled were all compelling evidence of God’s existence. As I read books on apologetics and as I studied the prophecies, my doubt was replaced by a deeper faith, a more reasoned and fact-based belief.

• Do You love me? Jesus showed me the depth of His love for me, over and over. He had left heaven to live as a human, experiencing everything we live through. He knew grief, He knew pain, He knew loneliness. One of his friends, Judas, had committed suicide. He knew. He understood. He had died for me. He was committed to spending eternity with me. I was his sister, His Father’s child. Forever. But I was struggling with believing in His love because I was focusing on the pain of the moment, while He was focusing on eternity. Just before going to the cross Jesus told His disciples: “As the father has loved me, so have I loved you.” The Father’s love was allowing pain and suffering in Jesus’ life. How could Jesus be so sure He was loved, when He was facing such agony? In Hebrews, a book I read so often I nearly memorized it, it says: “… for the joy set before him, Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame.” He endured the pain, because of what He would gain. And if God allows pain in our life, it is so we can gain by it. He promises that in Romans 8: “All things work together for the good of those who love him.” God wants me to be like Jesus, and if He allows pain in my life, it is because He will use that pain to make me more like Him.

• Did You love my dad? God showed me Jesus crying over Jerusalem, pleading with His people to turn to Him and put their trust in Him. He showed me passages that spoke of His desire to see all people come to repentance, and I slowly discovered the broken heart of God. He used my pain to help me understand His pain. I understood in my heart now the passage in Isaiah 53 which declared Jesus to be a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. God loves us, and wants us to know Him, but has wisely given us true freedom to choose Him or reject Him.

• Is my Dad in hell? This was the worse question of all. I had never really thought about hell before. But I had no idea were my dad stood with God, and the question of hell was now very real to me. And as God and I talked about it, I realized that I had to leave my dad in God’s hands, knowing that God’s love for him was infinitely greater than mine could ever be. I realized God hates hell as much as I do. That was the very reason why Jesus came: to die for each of us so we wouldn’t have to go there. God doesn’t send us to hell. We choose to go there by refusing to accept the love and forgiveness He offers us in Christ.

• Could I have done something to stop this from happening? The famous “what ifs?” haunted my thoughts for months. What if I had prayed more? What if I had known the answers to his questions? What if I had gone back home? God showed me I had two problems. The first one was that I was taking responsibility for another person’s life. I was playing God. My dad was responsible for his actions. I wasn’t. The second problem was that although I had accepted God’s forgiveness, I wouldn’t forgive myself. One day, as I read a verse in Romans 8 that says, “It is God who justifies, who is it that condemns?” I realized that by not forgiving myself, I was basically telling God I was more just than He was. Talk about pride! I fully accepted His forgiveness that day, and every time the guilt would return, I would just return to that passage and say, “I will not make myself out to be more righteous than God. He has forgiven me, and I forgive myself, too!”

As I look back on that time, I realize that my grief was a gaping wound at first. It overwhelmed me. It filled my thoughts and my heart. But as I continued to take it to God, over and over and over again, He took that wound and slowly healed it so that it became just a tender spot. I am still amazed by His ability to take the worst possible things and change them around so that good comes out of them. But it is what He does, when we let Him. He gives “beauty for ashes, the oil of joy from mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness” (Isaiah 61.3).

Is this the life for me?

Take a look at your life. How would you describe it? Contented? Rushed? Exciting? Stressful? Moving forward? Holding back? For many of us it’s all of the above at times. There are things we dream of doing one day, there are things we wish we could forget. In the Bible, it says that Jesus came to make all things new. What would your life look like if you could start over with a clean slate?

Living with hope

If you are looking for peace, there is a way to balance your life. No one can be perfect, or have a perfect life. But every one of us has the opportunity to experience perfect grace through a personal relationship with God through His Son, Jesus Christ.

You can receive Christ right now by faith through prayer. Praying is simply talking to God. God knows your heart and is not so concerned with your words as He is with the attitude of your heart. Here’s a suggested prayer:

Lord Jesus, I want to know you personally. Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins. I open the door of my life to you and ask you to come in as my Savior and Lord. Take control of my life. Thank you for forgiving my sins and giving me eternal life. Make me the kind of person you want me to be.

Does this prayer express the desire of your heart? You can pray it right now, and Jesus Christ will come into your life, just as He promised. Is this the life for you?

If you invited Christ into your life, thank God often that He is in your life, that He will never leave you and that you have eternal life. As you learn more about your relationship with God, and how much He loves you, you’ll experience life to the fullest.

In those first shock-filled days after I heard the news that my father had hung himself in the basement of our home, my heart would scream: “NO, NO, don’t think about it! It hurts too much!”

After the funeral, when I left to return to university, I felt so alone and overwhelmed. Whenever I had time to think, I would think of Dad, and I would cry. Questions and doubts started to fill my mind:

• If God loved me, why had He allowed this disaster?
• If God was all-powerful, why hadn’t He stopped my dad?
• If God was all-knowing, why didn’t He let me know how despairing my father was? Why hadn’t He shown me how to reach him?
• If God was there, why hadn’t He done something?
• Was God there?

I had become a Christian a few years ago. The thought that Jesus had died for me so I could be forgiven and know Him personally had filled me with surprise. I could know God? He could be closer to me than a brother? Of course I wanted to know him! Of course I wanted to be forgiven! And when, at 16, I invited him to come into my life and forgive me and change me He had done so, filling my heart with a sense of His presence.

But now, for the first time, God had really disappointed me. And I felt I had really disappointed Him too. You see, my father and I had spent time together just a few days before he died, and he had asked me questions about God I couldn’t answer. Then he had asked me to transfer back to the university at home so I could be with him, and I had refused to do so. Now, I wondered if he would still be alive if I had done what he wanted, and I was tormented by a deep sense of guilt.

Thankfully, God put a very special person on my path who would help me work through my guilt and my questions by meeting with me weekly for the next few years. She pointed me to books and resources that really helped me grow in my faith during that time of doubt. The first time we met, she shared that the Christian life was impossible to live, and if we tried to live it by our own strength, we would end up frustrated. Only Christ could live the life He called us to, and He wanted to live through me, but to do so, He needed me to surrender my life fully to him, and trust Him daily for the strength to obey. I was certainly frustrated. I was certainly aware of my sin and my weakness, and so I did surrender my life to Him and ask Him to fill me with His Spirit.

And I believe that it is His Spirit who gave me the perseverance and the strength to keep coming daily to God with my pain and my questions, so that He could comfort me and speak to my heart.

For the next months, I would spend about an hour or two a day with God. Sometimes it was with tears streaming down my face. He had showed me through the Psalms that I could say anything to Him, ask Him anything, be absolutely real with Him, and so I brought my doubts about His existence and His attributes to him. And He answered my questions in a very interesting way: He showed me Jesus.

I asked:

• Are You really there, God? And He showed me that the universe in all its complexity and beauty declared His glory, and that Jesus was the invisible God made visible. His life, His death, His resurrection and the prophecies He fulfilled were all compelling evidence of God’s existence. As I read books on apologetics and as I studied the prophecies, my doubt was replaced by a deeper faith, a more reasoned and fact-based belief.

• Do You love me? Jesus showed me the depth of His love for me, over and over. He had left heaven to live as a human, experiencing everything we live through. He knew grief, He knew pain, He knew loneliness. One of his friends, Judas, had committed suicide. He knew. He understood. He had died for me. He was committed to spending eternity with me. I was his sister, His Father’s child. Forever.But I was struggling with believing in His love because I was focusing on the pain of the moment, while He was focusing on eternity. Just before going to the cross Jesus told His disciples: “As the father has loved me, so have I loved you.” The Father’s love was allowing pain and suffering in Jesus’ life. How could Jesus be so sure He was loved, when He was facing such agony? In Hebrews, a book I read so often I nearly memorized it, it says: “… for the joy set before him, Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame.” He endured the pain, because of what He would gain. And if God allows pain in our life, it is so we can gain by it. He promises that in Romans 8: “All things work together for the good of those who love him.” God wants me to be like Jesus, and if He allows pain in my life, it is because He will use that pain to make me more like Him.

• Did You love my dad? God showed me Jesus crying over Jerusalem, pleading with His people to turn to Him and put their trust in Him. He showed me passages that spoke of His desire to see all people come to repentance, and I slowly discovered the broken heart of God. He used my pain to help me understand His pain. I understood in my heart now the passage in Isaiah 53 which declared Jesus to be a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. God loves us, and wants us to know Him, but has wisely given us true freedom to choose Him or reject Him.

• Is my Dad in hell? This was the worse question of all. I had never really thought about hell before. But I had no idea were my dad stood with God, and the question of hell was now very real to me. And as God and I talked about it, I realized that I had to leave my dad in God’s hands, knowing that God’s love for him was infinitely greater than mine could ever be. I realized God hates hell as much as I do. That was the very reason why Jesus came: to die for each of us so we wouldn’t have to go there. God doesn’t send us to hell. We choose to go there by refusing to accept the love and forgiveness He offers us in Christ.

• Could I have done something to stop this from happening? The famous “what ifs?” haunted my thoughts for months. What if I had prayed more? What if I had known the answers to his questions? What if I had gone back home? God showed me I had two problems. The first one was that I was taking responsibility for another person’s life. I was playing God. My dad was responsible for his actions. I wasn’t. The second problem was that although I had accepted God’s forgiveness, I wouldn’t forgive myself. One day, as I read a verse in Romans 8 that says, “It is God who justifies, who is it that condemns?” I realized that by not forgiving myself, I was basically telling God I was more just than He was. Talk about pride! I fully accepted His forgiveness that day, and every time the guilt would return, I would just return to that passage and say, “I will not make myself out to be more righteous than God. He has forgiven me, and I forgive myself, too!”

As I look back on that time, I realize that my grief was a gaping wound at first. It overwhelmed me. It filled my thoughts and my heart. But as I continued to take it to God, over and over and over again, He took that wound and slowly healed it so that it became just a tender spot. I am still amazed by His ability to take the worst possible things and change them around so that good comes out of them. But it is what He does, when we let Him. He gives “beauty for ashes, the oil of joy from mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness” (Isaiah 61.3).

Whatever the pain, whatever the doubts, whatever hard questions, you’re facing, the Holy Spirit longs to lead you to a place where God can comfort you and speak to your heart. It’s true – we really can’t live the Christian life without the Holy Spirit’s help. And yet, all we have to do is ask Him to fill us – to lead and empower us – and He will do it.

Why not pray this simple prayer and by faith invite God to fill you with His Spirit:

Dear Father, I need You. I acknowledge that I have sinned against You by directing my own life. I thank You that You have forgiven my sins through Christ’s death on the cross for me. I now invite Christ to again take His place on the throne of my life. Fill me with the Holy Spirit as You commanded me to be filled, and as You promised in Your Word that You would do if I asked in faith. I pray this in the name of Jesus. As an expression of my faith, I thank You for directing my life and for filling me with the Holy Spirit. Amen.