What I Want My Daughter to Know Before Anything Else
Someone asked me a question recently that I didn't expect to answer so fast.
If you could only pass one thing along to your daughter, what would it be?
I didn't even hesitate. Who she is in Christ.
Not her hobbies. Not what she's good at. Not even her personality, as much as I love watching it unfold. Before any of that, I want her to know who she is in Christ, because I already know what's coming for her.
The World Will Try to Answer First
She doesn't know who she is yet. That means everything around her is going to try to tell her. There will be demands for her time, her attention, what her body is supposed to look like, what she's supposed to be good at, what she's supposed to sound like and talk like. If she doesn't already know who she is in Christ, she will let all of that answer the question for her instead.
That's not a hypothetical. That's just what happens when a girl grows up without a settled answer to who am I. The world is loud, and it never runs out of opinions.
The Part I Can't Skip
Here's the part that stopped me in my tracks. I can't teach her who she is in Christ if I don't know who I am in Christ.
I can't hand her an identity I haven't wrestled for myself. I can't teach her something I haven't experienced, haven't walked with Jesus to figure out. I had to sit with why I was created the way I was created. Why I have the gifting I have. I had to become okay with the fact that I might not look or sound like other women, and learn to call that a gift instead of a flaw.
My uniqueness is something God gave me. But I couldn't teach that to her until I actually believed it about myself.
What Scripture Actually Says
This is where I keep landing. As a woman, I bear the image of God. And if I belong to Christ, something even more astonishing is true: I've been bought at a price, redeemed, and indwelt by the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). I am known and loved by a God whose grace I could never earn.
That's not an affirmation I made up to feel better. It's what's actually true, whether I feel it on a given Tuesday or not. Because of that same grace, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1). My identity was never something I had to build. It was something I had to receive.
Building This at Home
This isn't a lesson I can teach in one conversation and check off a list. It's something I have to keep coming back to, in the ordinary moments, not just the big ones. If you're in the same season of wanting your kids to know who they are in Christ before the world gets there first, I wrote about the practical side of building that in Scripture-Rooted Discipline vs. Opinion, which is really the same foundation applied to how we correct instead of just what we believe.
The exercise that changed this for me wasn't complicated. I sat down and wrote three to five sentences about who I am in Christ before I'm a mother, a homemaker, or anything else the world would use to define me. Not affirmations I invented. What Scripture actually says is true of me. I come back to that list every time the noise gets loud again.
If you want to walk through that same exercise for yourself, and then build it into how you disciple your own kids, that's exactly what The Faithful Home walks you through, starting with your own foundation before it ever asks you to build anything for your family.
Build the rhythms faithfully. Trust God with the growth. That starts with knowing who you are before you try to teach anyone else who they are.