Building a Life Your Children Can Stand On
— Faith
The greatest inheritance you can give your children is not financial, it's foundational. What are you building that they can actually stand on when you're no longer standing beside them?
My wife Torri and I are raising six children.
Six distinct human beings with six distinct personalities, six distinct gifting sets, six distinct destinies. And every day, some days more consciously than others, I am aware of what I am depositing into them. What they are learning about faith, about work, about identity, about how to treat people, about what matters and what doesn't.
I am not just their parent. I am their first leader. Their first model of what a man looks like when he leads with integrity. Their first experience of what faith looks like when it's lived rather than just spoken.
And what I build in my life, in my character, my integrity, my marriage, my faith, is the ground they will stand on long after I am gone.
The Foundation That Actually Matters
There is a kind of inheritance that gets talked about often, financial. The estate. The trust fund. The assets passed down.
And those things have their place. But they are not the foundation your children need most.
The foundation they need is a model. A lived example of what it looks like to handle failure with grace, to keep commitments when it's costly, to love someone, really love them, through decades of ordinary and difficult and beautiful.
They need to see you pray, not just professionally, not just in church, but in the kitchen, at the end of a hard day, before a scary decision. They need to hear you talk about faith as something alive and present, not as a category of life that gets turned on during services and turned off everywhere else.
They need to see you fail and recover. See you be wrong and own it. See you apologize, genuinely, without excuse, and watch the relationship repair. Because they will fail. They will be wrong. And they need to know how to come back from those moments.
What you model is what they learn to navigate by. Long after your voice has faded, your example will still be speaking.
The Values That Travel
Not everything you value will travel to your children automatically. Values travel through two vehicles: conversation and demonstration.
You have to talk about what matters, at the table, on the way to school, in the car, in the ordinary moments. Not lectures. Conversations. Questions. Stories from your own life that show the value in action.
And you have to demonstrate it. Live it visibly enough that they connect the talk to the walk. The parent who talks about integrity but cuts corners teaches their children that integrity is a performance, not a value.
The parent who talks about faith but doesn't practice it teaches their children that faith is for Sundays.
The parent who talks about love but doesn't make time teaches their children that love is something you say, not something you do.
Practical Deposits
1. Tell your children who they are, specifically. Not just "you're amazing", but "you have a gift for bringing peace into tense situations. I've watched you do it. That's a rare thing and it matters." Named identity, spoken by a parent, becomes internal architecture.
2. Let them see your faith in real time. Pray with them about real things. Celebrate answered prayer. Acknowledge when you're trusting God with something hard.
3. Invest in your marriage as a gift to your children. One of the greatest things you can do for your kids is love their other parent well, consistently, visibly, genuinely.
"The greatest gift you can give your children is not opportunity. It's a foundation, character, faith, identity, and love, that they can build their entire lives on."
Reflection: What is one thing you are currently modeling that you would want your children to repeat, and one thing you'd want to change?
Here is the charge: build a life they can stand on. Not a perfect life, a real one. A life of faith, integrity, love, and presence. That foundation is the most lasting thing you will ever create.