Each day we make choices, and each choice we make has an effect on our lives and the lives of those around us. Nothing happens in our lives without a cost.

As you read through the Old Testament you can see account after account of children who paid the cost for the mistakes of their parents. Sometimes it would be generations later that the transgression would reappear.

And you could also catalog the children moving further and further away from the God that their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents served which in many cases was a direct result of a day in the past when this long gone relative made a bad decision.

I was thinking yesterday that it is time I took inventory of my own life, my own home. What am I leaving my children? Generations from now, what effect will my life have on those that I may never know?

Have I taught my children to love the Word of God? Have I shown them through my actions how to be consecrated in service to Him? Is there a love in them for the ministry, for the preaching of God's Word that can be attributed to my own love?

Can they pattern their lives after mine? What do I do when trouble comes? Am I praying like I should be?? What kind of wife have I been?

When my children tell their children stories about me what will those stories be?

We had a great deal of rain a couple of weeks back. We were heading out of town to a party when we saw the most unusual sight on the side of the road and we had no idea what it was until we investigated further.

Sticking out of the sand where a creek had been engorged with the over abundance of rainfall were hundreds of orange 2 liter soda bottles, their labels littering the trees nearby.

We asked our friends about it and found out that over 10 years ago a truck overturned there spilling its contents of orange sodas. With all of the rainfall and the rapid movement of the water they were turned up again in the soil they had been embedded in for all these years.

Apparently they were unable to retrieve all of them and the product of this driver's accident is still there all these years later.

Is there something in me that I will leave behind that may turn up down the road for my children to have to clean up?

I want my children to have an inheritance that of faith, of a love for holiness and godliness, a love for the Word of God that will carry them through the trials they will face long after I am gone, a prayer life that will bring them to His feet. I want them to remember me as a servant, as a priest, and as a warrior. And I want to give them enough that those attributes will be ever present in their lives.

So, I am guarding myself, my home, and my family from the influences today that would rob us of all God has for us, of all God wants from us, of all God EXPECTS from us. I am guarding their inheritance of Truth, for if they live in Truth they are rich beyond measure!