Words of Faith: Erin's story on sharing love and Jesus Christ with children

Train A Child, Win A Soul
A Words of Faith story by Erin Unger

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” 
~ Proverbs 22:6 (KJV)

‘Growing up with my kids’ sounds like a cliché, but it was the truth for me. My husband and I started our family very young. Being a stay-at-home mom to five children born in a 6 ½ year period does something to you. Back in the day, when I had a gaggle of kids surrounding me, I was tired and overworked. And my husband worked long hours. That meant I was home alone a lot with the ‘crowd’. Oh boy, did I struggle some days. But God compelled me to not only love my own children but to reach out to others. Even with the long days of diapers and feedings, I couldn’t have too many kids with me. They needed love and Christ as much as my own.

Many a Sunday, we’d roll into church with our minivan full to the brink. Kids would pour out of it like rice out of a hole in the bag. And it didn’t end with them. We eventually did foster care for a few years, too. But there was this one year that we had a family friend who was going through a divorce. Her son was five or six at the time, and they weren’t religious. But I had this urgency to get their boy to church. I didn’t know if they’d even let him go with us, but I wasn’t going to give up. I had faith God could open doors for me, and He did just that. The parents let us take him.

It wasn’t always easy getting up even earlier, rounding up all my kids and heading to pick up more, but it was a calling. And, you don’t ignore a calling from God. I trusted my Savior to get us safely to church, and to help us with all the little ones.

A long time passed since those days of double-buckling to get to Sunday School. The busyness of life kept us moving ahead, away from the little ones so precious to us as some moved away, including that little boy. We kept tabs but we weren’t to see until years later the miracle God worked in him. That boy, now an 18-year-old young man, showed up at a family party a couple months ago.

He thanked us for caring so much for him, for bringing him to church so he could meet his Savior, one that he may have never known if we hadn’t been obedient to the calling of Christ.

I thank God for letting us see the fruit of our labor. It does a lot for your faith to see it! And I thank God that one more child is His. A life changed forever, a life that is claimed by my Savior.

Sometimes you don’t know what the end result will be. But you must answer God’s call. Who knows…you may see a miracle. Train up a child in the way he should go…

~*~
Author bio: 

Erin Unger weaves romantic suspense tales long after the midnight oil has burned out. But her natural night owl ways help her get a lot of writing done while her kids sleep. 

Her first novel, Fateful Fall (Worthington Detective Agency Book 1), released on August 2. She illustrated Memphis Learns the Hard Way by Karla Priddy Gragg in 2013. 

Splickety Magazine published her flash fiction story, An Accomplice to Love, in February 2016.

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Connect with Erin:
Website - www.erinungerwrites.com
Author Page on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ErinUngerWrites/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/erinungerwrites
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/erinungerwrites/

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