To each,” Winston Churchill said, “there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”
It’s more accurate to say that life has many of these moments, many such taps on the shoulder: to serve, to take a risk, to run toward danger while others run away, to do a thing that people say is impossible.
Our kids will have many reasons to think what they’re planning is the wrong thing to do. They will be pressured to put their dreams out of their mind. Fear will make itself felt. Will they let it prevent them from answering the call? Will they leave the phone ringing? Will their moment find them unprepared? Will their finest hour pass them by like a ship in the night? What a tragedy that would be. As parents, we have to make sure that doesn’t happen to our kids. We have to help them inch closer and closer to doing what they were put here to do, to being who they were meant to become. We are supposed to prepare them for when the phone rings, for when they get tapped on the shoulder, because the one thing we know for certain is that the call is going to come.
Will they be prepared to answer?