A child's holistic development includes physical, mental, emotional growth and spiritual growth. A loving, safe community of faith is vital to a child's spiritual development and can offer tremendous support to moms and dads on their parenting journey.

Early one Monday morning as a principal, the Holy Spirit grabbed my attention. It was a Monday like any other during that season of my life. I went into my school's staff lounge to place yellow slips into the mailboxes of teachers that had not yet submitted their lesson plans for that week. I'll never forget: as I placed a yellow slip into one math teacher's mailbox this particular morning, it was as if the LORD stopped me and said (though not audibly), "Larry, where is your plan? You want your teachers to have lesson plans, but where is your plan for your own life, your spiritual development, your marriage, your parenting, and the discipleship of your own children?"  

When my firstborn son was a toddler, I had a particularly memorable bad dream. I was with a small group of familiar faces. In the way that only makes sense in dreams, we knew we needed to get to a certain destination and we were headed in that (ambiguous) direction. Determined though we were, around every corner of our journey we were met by another life-threatening obstacle. Quicksand, falling rocks, medieval weaponry—the obstacles became more and more terrifying and relentless. In the dream, I remember feeling real fear. I also began to dread the next turn in the journey because I knew something else was coming, most likely more awful than the previous passage.