Faithfulness
We had a funny weekend watching the kids decompress from their first week of school. It felt like Mt. Vesuvius waiting to explode by Friday. The 8-year old had the giggles for HOURS. Seriously. She fell off her chair she was laughing so hard and then continued to roll on the floor in a delightful fit of hysterics. I guess she had some silly to get out of her system.
This is the same girl who, a few days ago, asked me if I thought she was a Christian. We were in the car and the question came out of the blue. My first reaction was to check her expression in the rear-view mirror; it was devoid of her typical Cheshire grin and expectant sparkly-eyed joke-in-the-making face. She was being serious. My mouth opened to give her the reassurance “Of course of you are, sweetie!” But it occurred to me that she wasn’t asking because she felt poorly about something; she was asking because she wanted an answer.
“Well… Do you believe that Jesus is the son of God and died for your sins?”
“Yeah” she answered.
“Okay – do you believe he rose again?”
“Uh-huh”
“Do you feel badly when you do something that God doesn’t like?”
Pause. ”Well… sometimes… Well, not always right away, sometimes, either”.
Oh honey, I thought, I know just know you feel. ”Well then, it sure sounds to me like you’re a Christian” I answered.
In the silence that followed I wished it were as easy as saying “Of course you are, sweetie!” to make it so. But the reality is that there are good Christian parents out there with children who choose to not follow Jesus and in today’s culture it’s hard to get our minds around something like that. In our way of thinking godly parenting produces godly children – every time. So we knock ourselves out trying to “do everything right”. If something goes wrong with the child, it must have originated in the parenting. But the problem with that way of thinking is that the converse doesn’t apply because then we would never have first-generation believers (like me).
This is as much a confession as a muse. I’m deeply invested in exploring this because I am one of those parents who must not have “done something right” for one of my kids. It’s something I have to work through on a daily basis. After I got through asking God “What did I do wrong?” and never receiving a clear-cut answer, I was forced to ask myself “Why does this shake my world the way it does?” I began to wonder how much of my self-perceived worth was actually based in Christ and how much of it was based in my children’s decision to follow Christ.
It’s really hard to spiritually untangle myself from my kids. I mean, we were literally one for almost an entire year and if memory serves me right, it was no picnic getting untangled in a physical sense either. ’Christianity Today’ had a great article (available here) about this called ‘The Myth of the Perfect Parent’ and I highly recommend it. I’m learning and growing in the idea that faithfulness in parenting is what I need to strive for – regardless of result. So what does that look like for me? Faithful to love when I hurt, faithful to think the best of my child when they exhibit the worst, faithful to persevere when I feel like giving up, faithful to continue to set boundaries even when they are constantly crossed.
Faithful to remember that I am not perfect and that is exactly why I – and my children – need a Savior.
