A parent’s love for their children is unlike any other love that can possibly be experienced. No one will ever love your kids the same way you do. Who else wants the whole world for them? Who else wants all their dreams to come true? You want to protect them - body, heart, and soul. You never want them to hurt, even though you know sometimes they need to in order to be able to learn and grow. You want them to have healthy relationships, you want them to be confident, to have integrity, to see them thrive and overcome life’s obstacles with grace. You want them to have good friends and to be a good friend. You want them to discover their passion and pursue it. Basically, you want all the cheesy lyrics to I Hope You Dance by Lee Ann Womack for them. Look them up! It’s just the truth. (Honestly, who else naturally considers these things for anyone other than their own children? It truly is a unique kind of love!) But mostly, for me and so many of you … you want them to know and love Jesus. There are so many things we do as Christian parents that attempt to facilitate knowledge and promote love for Jesus. We sing to them, we read Bible stories to them, we pray with them, we talk through conflict with them through gospel lenses, we take them to church.
And yet, raising our children in light of this kind of love for them involves so much trial and error, doesn’t it? There’s no one size fits all handbook. Every family unit has its own unique set of values, spoken and unspoken, and every kid is different within each family unit. There is no one to give you parenting evaluations but yourself, and no set rubric to follow. There are principles in the Bible that are to be taught, but no set way to teach them, you just … trial and error. What works for one family or one kid may not work for another. I have rooted myself in the belief that we all do the best we can with what we know at the time. I’ve seen lots of great kids come out of horrible family situations, and I’ve seen too many great families lose their kids too early to depression or addiction. So we can’t even always judge the quality of our parenting skills by how our kids end up. The bottom line is so long as we do whatever we do out of love for our kids, we've done our job and should be able to sleep at night.
But sometimes it becomes clear over time that we made some bad calls for them along the way. Given the one-of-a-kind love described above and all that we want and hope for our kids, parenting failures are especially crushing. I wish we could say that we learn everything we need to know about life before we become parents, so that we have all the answers by the time our kids arrive. Sadly, I’m here to tell you from experience - we keep learning. We fail miserably sometimes, and we don’t even know it until the damage has been done … even when we made that choice out of love and we did the best we could with what we knew at the time. With that said, the Lord is faithful and will redeem ALL our parenting failures in His time and I pray often that He will use mine as a part of their salvation story someday. So when I do mourn a failure, I tether myself to the truth that God is a miracle worker. He is bigger than I could ever dream I am, and He specializes in making beautiful things out of dust.
But still. Sometimes our choices, though well intentioned, have unintended consequences. So when something doesn't work well the first time around, we evaluate and adjust for subsequent children, even knowing God is sovereign over our methods. One thing I wish I had done differently in my early parenting years in attempt to facilitate knowledge and promote love for Jesus, is how I handled the church experience for my young children. I am thankful to belong to a local church family who holds the philosophy that worship is a total family experience (meaning while there is usually nursery care for parents who wish to use it, all children are welcome in what the Baptists would call “big church”, and there is no separate church service for elementary and up). However, I now see how as a young parent I put undue pressure on my oldest son during this time, to stay awake, sit still, face forward etc... I focused so much on his behavior and his having a posture of “active listening” that we exasperated each other, but I was determined to make sure my child heard every life-giving word that was spoken on the off chance that this would be the day the Lord would use those words to bring him to a saving knowledge of Jesus, even at the young age of 5. This to me was part of “training up a child in the way he should go…” as if the other 6 days of the week shepherding him at home were not quite as hopeful as this one hour of corporate worship. I made him sit still and listen out of a sincere desire to facilitate knowledge and promote love for Jesus. The outcome? Well, it's significant to note that now that it's up to him he hasn't chosen church for himself yet. Could one meaningful factor be that he doesn't have super fond memories of the rigid experience I created for him as a child? ... and while this may not be indicative of his relationship with Jesus, I still wonder ... could I have better fostered a love in his heart for worship with fellow believers if I'd just treated him with a little more grace ...?
Today I marched into worship with my 4 younger kids. We were a little late (again), and there were no open seats to fit our family in the back. So we had to sit toward the front. I carried puzzles, drawing tablets, a Noah’s Ark toy, and colored gel pens in a bag for all 4 of them. At one point they were all in the floor, coloring, drawing, or playing. Although they were quiet, mostly not talking, and only soft whispers if they did, they were clearly not … paying attention. I wrestle with this inwardly. I found myself so self conscious as I looked around and saw other kids sitting so nicely and quietly with their parents, longing for my kids to want to be like them. I apologized to the man sitting in our row and the couple behind us, if my kids were distracting. But of course, they were all very gracious and sweet and understanding, even commending of my kids for how well behaved they were. Yet, even as I type this I wince a little because I know I could make them sit still and face forward. I’ve done it before. But here’s the thing. I’ve also seen the result, and I wonder … what if I just let them be kids in worship? What if they just need church to be a safe place where they can be who they are, and be loved for that? What if, as long as they are quiet and not distracting to those around us, this is the way the Lord works in their little hearts to better enjoy coming to church? In the early church, when Paul’s letters were read aloud where families gathered, is it so far fetched to think that some of the boys may have been, I don’t know, casting lots quietly for fun to pass the time while their parents took in the knowledge they would then disseminate throughout the week to them in sound bytes their brains could better digest?
Maybe I’m making a bad call now. Maybe I made a good call before and maybe it just hasn’t manifested itself yet. I may never know, but here's the beauty of it - God is at work either way. He’s given me the principles, but left the methods up to me for my own family. He has called me into the service of shepherding their hearts, but He alone has the power to change them.
For sure this is not a one size fits all issue. Every kid, every family, every local church culture is different. There is grace for all of that on my end. I don’t have it figured out. But here’s what I know: I am thankful to feel the freedom and grace from the pulpit in my local church to make these choices for my family. We all do the best we can with what we know at the time. As long as we do what we do out of love for our kids, we should be able to sleep at night, and finally, God is sovereign over my parenting choices, bigger than my parenting failures, and He will redeem them and make them beautiful in His time.
