Everything is accomplished through prayer, silence and love. Did you become aware of the fruit of prayer? Love in prayer, love in Christ. This is beneficial indeed. The more you will love your children with a worldly love – and this is often pathological – the more they will get entangled and the worse it will be their behavior.
But when the love between you and your children will be Christian and holy then you won’t encounter any difficulty. The holiness of the parents sanctifies the children.
In order to let this happening the divine grace must be manifested in the souls of the parents. Nobody gets holy by himself. The same divine grace will enlighten, warm up and enliven the souls of the children.
Many times they call me from abroad and ask me about their children and about other things.
Today for instance I was called by a mother from Milan and she asked me how to behave with her children. I told her:
“Pray when it is needed, speak to the children with love. Pray more and say less words to the others.`
Let us not become disturbing but pray in secret then speak and God will let us know in our hearts if our word is received by the others. If it is not received we should not continue speaking. We should pray in secret.
Because even by speaking we may become disturbing and make the others oppose resistance or sometimes rebel. That is why it is better if someone tells them in a secret way in their hearts by secret prayer than in their ears.
Listen to me: first pray then speak. This is what you should do with your children. If you give them advice all the time you become boring and when they grow they will feel a kind of burden.
So choose prayer first. Speak to them by prayer. Tell everything to God and God will put these inside their hearts. Meaning that you should not advice aloud to be heard. You can do this too but above all you must speak about your children to God. Tell Him: `Lord Jesus Christ enlighten my children. I entrust them to You. You gave them to me but I am helpless and I cannot guide them well. For this reason I beg You to enlighten them.` And God shall speak to them and they will say: `Oh, I shouldn’t have upset my mother for what I have done!` And this by the grace of God will come out of them.`
This is the perfect thing, if the mother speaks to God and God speaks to the child. If this is not done then you speak over and over again in their ears and in the end everything becomes a kind of oppression. And when the child grows he begins to oppose resistance, to take revenge on his mother and father who oppressed him. While there is one perfect thing: to let the love in Christ speak and the holiness of the father and the mother. The irradiance of the holiness and not of the human effort heals the children.
When the children are hurt and traumatized by a severe thing do not be surprised if they oppose resistance and speak in a nasty way. In fact they don’t want this but they can’t do otherwise in the hard moments. Then they feel sorry.
But if you get annoyed you become as one with the cunning in the difficult moments and he mocks all of you.
Pious Porphyrios, Pious Porphyrios is speaking to us, Egumenița Publishing
