Many of you might not know this but my dad is a pastor and I remember growing up, I always thought my old man was doing too much whenever he kept us indoors every Saturday until we were able to recite bible verses like psalm 91, psalm 23 and also tell him what we understood from it.
Back in the day, whenever we wanted to go party with our friends or maybe attend someone else's party that we were invited to, my dad would always tell us about how we were different from those people because we were the children of a man of God and how a lot of the things those people do doesn't please God.
This was when we were still kids and I'm not going to lie, for a while it felt like my dad just hated seeing us having fun. He was a man that knew a lot of the people in our area but had no friends and I felt he wanted us to be like him. But then this was the ghetto where all sort of atrocities were happening and looking back at where we were back then, I too wouldn't want my kids getting corrupted by any of those people either.
Unfortunately I didn't see it that way when I was a kid, neither did my older brothers. One in particular made it a habit to sneak out to parties but somehow he always got caught and was punished every midnight by my dad.
You see, at that time, everyone in the area knew how straight forward and strict my dad was, to the extent where if they were passing alcohol around, they would skip us on purpose because they all just assumed we wouldn't take it anyway because of the training my dad had instilled in us.
There were certain times where we were mocked for being too scared to try what "everyone else" was trying. And so they would mockingly call us names like "pastor child" or sometimes "man of God". It's funny because now that I'm writing this, I don't even see those things as name-calling, I see it as something I should be proud of.
But if there was one moment I was really proud of, it was the one time I overheard some women talking about myself and my brother's, praising us for being disciplined and not messing around the whole street like the other kids. I had told my mom what I heard and I could tell from the smile on her face that she too was proud of both her kids and her husband because she knew that he made all of that possible.
I guess at the end of the day, one lesson I got to take away from all this is that it's never too early to start training your child in the way of the lord or in a right way, teaching him the good from bad. Because waiting until they're grown to tell them what is good or bad would most likely be a very big mistake in the future, because if my old man had waited until we were eighteen years old to tell us that as a son of a pastor, there are certain things we shouldn't do, we probably would have done all of those things before that time.