Drink your wine. Laugh from your gut. Burden your moments with thankfulness. Be as empty as you can be when that clock winds down. Spend your life. And if time is a river, may you leave a wake.
N.D. WilsonRead
The world is rated R, and no one is checking IDs. Do not try to make it G by imagining the shadows away. Do not try to hide your children from the world forever, but do not pretend there is no danger . Train them. Give them sharp eyes and bellies full of laughter. Make them dangerous. Make them yeast, and when they’ve grown, they will pollute the shadows.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Embrace the realities of the world and prepare children to face them with awareness and resilience.
N.D. Wilson's quote emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the challenges and dangers that exist in the world rather than trying to shield children from them. It advocates for equipping children with the skills, knowledge, and confidence to navigate life's complexities, encouraging them to be aware and proactive rather than naive and sheltered. By cultivating their ability to understand and confront the world, we empower them to thrive and bring positive change.
Themes
EducationChildrenCourageAwarenessPreparation
In practice
Example use cases
A parent might use this quote during a seminar on parenting strategies to convey the importance of preparing children for real-world challenges.
More from N.D. Wilson
All quotes →Imagine a poem written with such enormous three-dimensional words that we had to invent a smaller word to reference each of the big ones; that we had to rewrite the whole thing in shorthand, smashing it into two dimensions, just to talk about it. Or don’t imagine it. Look outside. Human language is our attempt at navigating God’s language; it is us running between the lines of His epic, climbing on the vowels and building houses out of the consonants.
N.D. WilsonRead
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