Knobs

*`By wisdom a house is built,  And by understanding at is established; And by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant things” (Proverbs 24:3-4).

Hey Gang:  In the last blog I shared my experience with “scar tissue” and how it affected my life.   Several weeks ago I also wrote several morning messages on ‘Don’t get to comfortable. This morning I would like add the third leg to the stool, namely what I refer to as ‘knobs’ on the inside of your forehead. You may think my analogy here is a little weird, but after more than 40 years of working with the most unpredictable animal in the world, the dysfunctional teenager, I have earned the right to be a little weird.

Before you commit me to the nearest loony bin hear me out.    In Genesis 2:7 we read these words, Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being”.  You do believe you were created by God and that God breathed life into you, don’t you?

If you are not sure, turn to page 897 of the New American Standard Bible and read verses 13 through 18. (Psalm 139:13-18).  In other words, at birth we have all the wiring we need to take us through this life on earth……however…. When we are born we have a smooth data bank in our heads.  It is kind of like a computer that has had no data input.  It has the ability to do some things but, it is only as we add programs to the hard drive, that it becomes a functional and usable convenience.

Now, back to the ‘knobs’. I learned very early in my tenure of working with young folks that I had to find something that not only penetrated their ‘domes of intellect’/ hard drives, but prepared the way for me to hang additional knowledge on.  That, my friends is ‘knobs’.  They could understand it when I said,”Yyou lack understanding in new things because you have no frame of reference in your head on which to hang that new knowledge.

One of the common denominators in the children we worked with is they had no knobs on which to hang the things we were trying to teach them.  That required meeting them on the level of their knob development.  I had to come up with a vocabulary that not only penetrated but stuck like glue to the inside of their forehead. 

Are you still with me for I am about to make a point that could make your parenting oh so much easier.  If you do not prepare your child to receive a new revelation or piece of knowledge by doing some preliminary knob development, do not expect the new information to penetrate and stick like glue.   

Soooo, the key to knob development, read Deuteronomy 6:5-9 and pay special attention to these words, “You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.  You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals (knobs) on your forehead.” 

Blessings,

Gramps