A powerful beckoning

As he (my father) had covenanted with God to saturate himself in His Book, so he sought to teach us to love it.  No one can make a child love anything, from spinach to sparrows to Scripture, but the parents' love for things exerts a powerful thrust in that direction.

Because we heard the majestic cadences of the Bible read to us day after day, year in and year out, at home and in church and Sunday school and the Christian institutions we all attended, we learned, finally, to love the Bible, in spite of all the years when we shrugged and sighed and rolled our eyes and poked each other under the table and generally appeared to ignore what was supposed to be going on.

from 'The shaping of a Christian family - How my parents nurtured my faith'
by Elisabeth Elliot