I was blessed by being reared in a missionary’s home in China. My father was head of the surgical department of a mission hospital. Mother helped in the women’s clinic. I grew up watching their concern for other people. Daddy was a doctor, yet he felt that mission hospital existed primarily to tell people about Jesus Christ. 

And I saw their concern for our family. I never got up in the morning, for instance, without seeing Daddy reading his Bible. I never went to tell him goodnight without finding him on his knees, praying. Mother might not have had time to read her Bible in the mornings—she was getting breakfast—but she always read her Bible in bed at night. 

They didn’t know that these and other things made a deep impression on me. 

As you read this and consider the example you are setting for your family, are you so weighed down by your sins that you feel it is quite hopeless to try? You are the sort of person God loves. A mother of 13 children was asked which one she loved most. She replied, “The one that is sick until he is well, and the one that is lost until he’s found.” God has been missing you, loving you, searching for you. I don’t know the burdens you are carrying, but He does. This business of raising a family, with all its problems, is a difficult job. Give your burdens to Him; He’ll take care of them. All He asks is that you love Him and live for Him.

Taken by permission from “Husbands, Children and God” by Ruth Bell Graham, originally published in Decision, June 1967 ©1967 The Ruth Graham Literary Trust.