# Dear Lydia, Sister to Sister Language: en Author: Sheryl Zeiset Tanzania, East Africa Original issue: The Heartbeat of the Remnant, Fall 2021, Number 3 Source pages: 20–21 Read article: Original PDF: Fall\-2021\-Remnant\(1\)\.pdf [The Heartbeat of the Remnant, Fall 2021]() You asked me for advice the other day about how to disciple your daughters\. I have only two daughters and they are still young, so I don’t have a lot of experience\. I can only share from the desires I have for them and from the experiences I had with my own mother\. At 15 years of age, I was an introvert to the extreme\. The only person I shared deeply with was myself\. I had decided that I needed no spiritual interaction with others and could quite easily make it on my own\. I was wrong, of course\. I am so grateful for my mother who knew that and began chipping away at my heart\. We walked the hay field together as we untangled questions on peers, modesty, and relationships\. We took long walks down our dirt road; cried and laughed together over life’s perplexities\. She taught me how to sew, and how to work even when I was tired\. Most of this was done by example, not that she always had perfect lectures ready when I needed them\. She was often tired too, but I never heard her complain\. People say, “more is caught than taught” and this is true with a mother and her daughters\. I expected my mom’s input in my life, and she was not afraid to tell me what to do\. Have you noticed how unpopular this is in our generation? I hear young girls talk about “researching” and “finding out what they believe”, often coming to different conclusions than their mothers\. This confuses me\. I trusted my mother’s opinions and convictions a lot more than my own and wanted to learn from her\. I did not have enough confidence in my own thinking to make my own decisions\. I wonder what changed\. I wonder if social media and the internet have anything to do with it? When I was young, we had an outdated version of an encyclopedia and a dictionary on our bookshelves\. That was the extent of our research options\. Also, I only had a few friends\. They all lived a few miles from our house\. We went to school together and sat together on the front bench at church\. We knew each other’s dirty feet in the garden and how we smelled after milking a cow\. We didn’t know what a smart phone was, or even a ‘dumb’ phone\. The only phone we had was the one on the bookshelf with the long cord\. The phone numbers we needed were handwritten on a piece of paper taped to the wall\. The only music we listened to was the imperfect melodies we produced around the kitchen table\. Our world was indeed small\. But I think we needed a small world because we weren’t mature enough to figure it all out or to “research” it all on our own\. Compare that with what our young people need to face today\. Many of them are given a smart phone in their teen years\. There are shelves of books, and all the music they would ever want in a confusing mixture of good and evil\. There is a vast amount of information\. There are podcasts and sermons\. And there are friends—hundreds of them if you’re popular\. All this on a little handheld device\. I wonder if parents really know what books their teens are reading, or what music they’re listening to\. I wonder if they know the “pastors” and “teachers” they’re listening to\. In addition to this, there’s the friend group on social media\. Young people are influenced by their peers and they’re certainly not mature enough to handle a few hundred of them from all over the world\. The innocent fun is a major influence, often bigger than the influence of church and family\. So my advice, Lydia, is that you shelter your daughter\. I know, it’s not popular and people will think you’re quite old fashioned\. But don’t allow your daughter to be enticed by a group of friends on her phone\. Show her how to cultivate relationships by living and working with others, not by posting her most beautiful photos online for her friends to ‘like’\. Help her plan events with a few friends you trust\. Associations are powerful, so know who your daughter’s friends are\. Eliminate the hundreds of ‘virtual’ friendships, encourage wholesome face\-to\-face interaction, and the things her hands can touch and create\. Help her discern these things by pointing her to God\. If your daughter needs a cellphone, make sure you know what she is using it for\. Help her make those decisions and be her accountability\. Keep communication lines open\. This is your responsibility\. In my girlhood years, my mother kept us close\. We lived and worked together every day\. It reminds me of the verse: *And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up –Deuteronomy 6:7\.* The simple duties of home, lived out as a family unit is God’s design\. This is how my mother touched the hearts of her daughters and lived out a practical faith for us to imitate\. You have seen the sparkle in your daughter’s eyes, the excitement\. “Mom, can I please spend the night with Jenny? Please?” Or perhaps you’re at a reunion and all the girl cousins are piling together in one room\. What do you say? You love to see your daughter happy, and you want her to have fun\. My advice is, don’t say yes to the classic sleepover when your daughter is with other girls for the night without your presence\. If you’re visiting as a family and she is sleeping with cousins or friends, make sure she has a bed to herself\. Be watchful and be wise\. Once your daughter is old enough to be wanting a job, make sure you have a vision\. Is her job helping her grow in becoming selfless and hardworking? Or is it feeding a selfish and affluent lifestyle? Take note of the environment and the people she is with\. The things she is learning and experiencing—good or bad—will affect her for life\. Maybe it is necessary for her to help with financial needs or maybe there’s not enough to do at home; still there is a need to carefully evaluate and consider the long\-term outcome\. Is her job replacing opportunities of service or of learning homemaking skills? Is your daughter’s job helping her to develop a spirit of contentment and service or is the extra money a stumbling block to her? Lydia, protect your daughter’s reserve\. Keep her accustomed to modest clothes that cover her body well\. Don’t buy tight leggings and t\-shirts for her to wear to bed\. Don’t trade her modest reserve for faddish clothes even if it’s only for bed\. Teach her to cover her body modestly not only when she’s in public, but also when she’s around the house in the evening\. It’s okay to feel out of sync with what “everyone” else is doing\. You are making these choices with a purpose—to protect your daughter\. We live in an evil world\. Be discerning with the books you allow your precious daughter to read\. Her conscience is being shaped by what she is reading, so keep the books wholesome\. If you are homeschooling, be discerning with the curriculum you use\. The brightly colored, popular books are not worth it if they compromise your values, so choose books that your child can wholeheartedly follow\. Educate your daughter in the basic facts of life\. This world is not a safe place, so teach her what evil men can do and what to watch for\. Teach her to speak out—or yell—if she senses something to be wrong or feels unsafe\. She needs a safe place with you where she can discuss any fears or questions that she has\. Teach her the beauty of God’s plan for marriage and raising a family in simple words that she can grasp, starting from a young age and adding to it as she grows\. Ignorance does not produce innocence\. Don’t think of this letter as a recipe, Lydia\. Being a mother is not a science like cake baking, it is spiritual work\. Love Jesus\. Make Him the focus of your life and your daughter will be silently influenced in His ways\. Speak of Him as you disciple your daughter\. You are guiding her towards Jesus so she can have a personal encounter with Him and begin her own journey\. Like me with my mother when I was 15, so likewise, your daughter is depending on you to make the difference in her life\. With love, Your sister ![A woman and a girl walking together on a dirt road]() ## Magazine citation - [A woman and a girl walking together on a dirt road](): Unsplash\.com