Amara,
It is with great joy that we celebrate your 9th birthday!! We love you very much and it is very special to see you growing, learning, and developing day by day! You have shown yourself to be a loving sister to Tirzah and we pray that you will always have a very tender place in your heart for her (and each of your siblings). We also pray that you will continue to have a great love for babies by seeing them as a gift, blessing, and heritage of the Lord. May you be making the most of the time while you are growing up in our family by following our direction in training you for your future. With your commitment to Christ and your dedication to following the Lord, your coming years are very bright and full of promise.
We will be diligently working to prepare you for being a help-meet to your future husband and a loving mother to many children. As a part of this training, there are many skills that you will be needing and many additional skills that will be beneficial in these future roles. One of the joys that we have in being your parents is to provide you with tools that will help you in your life. Two of the skills that can be a blessing to those around you now and those that God will provide in your future family are knitting and crocheting. It is with this idea in mind that we include gifts for you this birthday that will enable you to develop these skills. We hope that these gifts will be useful and a joy by allowing you to learn new crafts. In addition, we hope that these gifts will communicate our love to you, as well as our commitment to training you.
Amara, it is a blessing to have you as our daughter and we are praying that you will be growing and learning day by day. We are excited to be on this journey of the Christian life with you. We are confident based on Holy Scripture that as you are obedient to the commandments of the Lord, that God will bless you with a life that is joyful, exciting, and filled with great hope!
We love you, Amara! Happy Birthday!!
Love Always,
Dad and Mom
Birthdays are a great time to reflect on God's goodness, grace, and mercy! It is with joyful hearts that we provide this letter for the very first birthday of our dear daughter, Tirzah!
Tirzah,
What a blessing it is to celebrate your very first birthday! You are so precious and dear to us and it is with great joy that we have welcomed you into our family! God answered our prayers with you as we desperately desired to have more children added to our number.
We already have so many special memories of you. These memories include not only your first year after being born, but also all the days leading up to your birth--starting with the moment that we first learned that the Lord was forming you inside the womb. The time of awaiting your birth was very exciting to us and we praise the Lord for bringing you safely into this world and safely into our loving arms! You are a treasure and watching you grow and learn has been a great privilege. Seeing you smile, listening to you laugh, and watching you develop from being a newborn that was unable to hold her head up to becoming a 1-year-old that can crawl and feed herself has been a great joy. Each stage of your life has been a blessing and we look forward to your future with excitement. We will be training you to be a girl (and later a woman) of virtue and character based on what is taught in the Bible.
On your birthday, we were at a very special conference that was called The Baby Conference in San Antonio, Texas. One of the messages of this conference was that children are a blessing from God and are to be eagerly sought! We wholeheartedly agree with this message and YOU are a blessing, a gift, and a heritage from the Lord. May you ALWAYS view children with this godly perspective. Our prayer for you is that you will know our love for you each day, that you will commit your life to Christ very early in life, and that you will live according to God’s perfect plan communicated to us in Scripture.
We celebrate this very special first birthday with you and we remember the blessing of your birth, we thank God for His very special gift of you, we think about all the wonderful times that we have had with you already, and we anticipate many special memories with you in future coming days!
Happy first birthday, Tirzah! We love you very much!
Love Always,
Daddy and Mama
“A wise son maketh a glad father” (Proverbs 10:1, KJV)
“My son, keep thy father's commandment, and forsake not the law of thy mother: Bind them continually upon thine heart, and tie them about thy neck. When thou goest, it shall lead thee; when thou sleepest, it shall keep thee; and when thou awakest, it shall talk with thee.” (Proverbs 6:20-22, KJV)
It is with a glad heart that we celebrate your 16th birthday today! What a blessing it is to see you growing in godly manhood! Your growth in becoming a self-disciplined man who is being sanctified by the Lord Jesus Christ has been very evident and we are very blessed and privileged to be a part of preparing you for a special future of service to the God of the Bible! The upcoming years will continue to shape you for your life work that the Lord has providentially planned for you. We pray that this time will provide you with a solid foundation on which you can build and it is with great joy that we look forward to these years.
We are seeing many of your strengths with increasing clarity and have great hope for the dominion work that the Lord will enable you to accomplish. Your gift of writing, your interest in history, your growing foundation in theology, and your steadfastness in committing to doing what is right will serve you well for a lifetime. As we look to the future, we see that these building blocks are being put together for a very specific purpose that God has ordained.
The presents that we give to you for your birthday are intended to encourage you in a godly pursuit involving your gifts and interests. The first book that we give to you (Adventure in the Wilderness: The American Journals of Louis Antoine De Bougainville, 1756-1760) is one that you have often referenced and we hope will serve to help you gain in knowledge of the French and Indian War, gaining an appreciation from a primary source about the providence of God in this conflict. The leathercraft set that is our next present to honor you on your birthday is for learning the valuable skill of working with leather that can be another avenue of being productive with your own hands, blessing others, and honoring our Lord.
As you have shown yourself to be an honorable son, our gift for your trunk (which contains many special gifts in preparation for your future) is a reflection of our desire to honor and bless you for your commitment to honor. We gladly add to the trunk 20 volumes of the G.A. Henty library. We hope that you know that these books are much more than simply words on paper to us, but that they represent our desire to give to you a special gift from our hearts in appreciation for the son that you are today and that you will become in the future. We joyfully give these books to you, knowing that you will enjoy reading them, that they will be filling your mind with themes that are consistent with what God teaches in His Word, and that they will be a tangible reminder of the blessing that you are given as you are obedient to the truth of Scripture!
We love you, Jordan, and may you pursue a godly, righteous, and holy path for the honor of the Lord! You are a great blessing and we are so excited to see how God is using you today, as well as His plans for you in the future! May you always lay whatever God accomplishes through you at his feet and be humble before Him so that you can have a great impact for His kingdom!
Happy 16th Birthday, Jordan!
