Archive for the ‘Parenting’ Category

“I’m So Sorry, Mommy…”

Thursday, November 24th, 2011

conversion-storyMy daughter Rachel ran into my room and burst out crying, “I’m so sorry, Mommy…” This was the second time in one week she had confessed her sin before I found out what she did. The first time was a few days previous, when she told me that she had stuffed some math pages behind her bed so she wouldn’t have to do them.

“What did you do now?” I asked her through her tears.

“I cut the beaded doorway with the scissors.”

Walking to the kitchen, I saw two strands of the beaded doorway cut. I was visibly disappointed, because our entire family had enjoyed going in and out of the doorway, swishing the beads. I had found that at a yard sale over the summer, and the odds of finding another one for $3 were slim to none.

She wailed, because perhaps she had liked the doorway the most. She and I walked into my room, and I sat down with her. My daughter has a knack for getting into trouble.

“The reason you do bad things is because you don’t have Jesus living in you. You can’t help but sin,” I said. “Would you like to have Jesus in your life, helping you to do what’s right?”

“Yes,” she said. I could see that she understood her depravity for the first time. I presented the gospel, which she had heard before, but somehow never appropriated to herself. I said that Jesus died for her sin.

“But I wasn’t born back then,” said my daughter.

“Jesus died for your sin before you were born. He paid the price for the sin of everyone who would believe in Him. Your sin deserves death, and He died so that you could have a relationship with Him.”

She wanted to know how to ask Christ into her life. I was so excited, I called my husband. “Can I lead her to Christ without you? She’s ready.” My husband said to do whatever God was leading me to do. So I hung up the phone and led her to Christ.

Every year when Rachel gets her MRI for the lump on her back, I never know if she will need surgery and die. Every year I have to put her on the altar of my life and choose Christ above my daughter. And every year I wonder when the age of accountability is, and that if she were to die, would I know that I would see her again in heaven.

Now with tears streaming down my face, I don’t have to wonder any more. And for this I am truly grateful.

Don’t Force Your Children to Be Grateful

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

Thankfulness is choked out of our children by us trying to “make them grateful.” This happened to me. I grew up being thankful, but then I felt forced to be thankful, and suddenly I wasn’t thankful any more, because I felt that the only reason the other person gave me something was for me to be grateful to them. Forget it. Don’t give me a present. Can’t you see I loved it? Why do I have to chant stupid words for people not to be upset and angry and threaten to never give me anything again? It makes me want to dump the thing on the floor and walk away. I do not feel loved by a person who demands thankfulness. I don’t. I feel that they’re in it for what they can get out of it.

This affected my relationship with God. I felt that relationships were an exchange where you now had to be grateful. And even though I had always been grateful for Christ’s death on the cross, I now saw Christ’s death as something He did so that we would be grateful, and if we weren’t grateful, we weren’t allowed to have a relationship with Him. It suddenly felt selfish on God’s side, and I knew this was a warped and demonic view caused by being forced to be thankful to have a relationship with another person. This view, by the way, is completely wrong. Christ didn’t die to make us grateful; He died to free us from sin. It wasn’t for anything He could get out of us. Christ died for us expecting nothing in return. Anything good in us is because of Him anyway, and our deep love for Him includes gratefulness, but it was never demanded. It was spontaneous due to love.

I wish the person could have seen my eyes, that I was truly grateful with all my heart before she demanded it, and that after demanding it, it was suddenly gone. In its place was the wrong feeling that the other person was selfish and demanding, and I wanted no part of it.

It took me years to get over it. Then gradually God gave me back my gratefulness, but it took a painful process. Now I’m more grateful than I’ve ever been in my life, but it’s because of the grace of God, God directly teaching me about it and convicting me and transforming me. Because the way I had been acting toward this other person had been sinful.

So how did I teach my own children to be thankful? Anyone who has been invited to my children’s birthday parties can attest to the fact that I have the most thankful children on the face of the earth. Yes, in third world countries you see children who are so extremely grateful, and they’ve never been taught gratefulness. My children are identical to that. They are so excited at anything that is given to them, even if it’s a cheap toy from the dollar store. They even say thank you, though I didn’t force them to do that. In good conscience, the only thing I could do is to thank the people myself when they gave my child a toy. I quietly thanked them, not for the sake of the child to hear. But when my children heard my real thankfulness, they emulated it and actually said it.

My children burst with thankfulness, but it’s not because I forced them to say it. It’s because I myself said thank you to the giver for the sake of the giver not being offended. I didn’t care whether my children said it or not because their whole body already indicated that they were grateful. And in being genuine in my speaking directly to the giver, my children now say thank you continuously, and it bursts out of their soul.

Feed My Sheep

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

feed-my-sheep

Many years ago I took an Old Testament class given by my pastor. We studied one book of the Old Testament per week, and it took a year to get through the Old Testament. I turned in Charlotte Mason summaries for each book of the Bible as it was presented. (Right before I took this class, I had read the six Charlotte Mason books and was enthralled with the idea of written narrations for personal Bible study.) I tried to think of every detail I could remember from each book, and I wrote it down in tiny print in pencil on blank sheets of paper.

Well, study for the class took between 2 to 10 hours a day. (Ten hours only happened once, the day I did Genesis.) I loved splashing into the Word of God and surrounding myself with it. It was my food and my breath. I felt like I was inside the stories.

When the class was over, I asked my pastor to please hand back my papers, because those were my only copies. He said the reason he kept them was so that his secretary would type them up for him, because the summaries gave him a fresh perspective on Scripture. I was honored that a pastor could actually learn anything from me.

After that last class was over, I heard a sermon on prayer. I realized that my prayer life was almost non-existent, and I committed to God that I would learn how to pray. Since I already had at least 2 hours for studying the Bible (usually during nap time for my tiny kids, or during an hour of outdoor play time where I would study my Bible outside on a swing or blanket), I decided that I would set aside one hour to pray before I would be allowed to read the Bible. (You can see how hard that was by reading “The Beginning of a Prayer Warrior.”)

After the month was over, I had no obligations, but I had built a new spiritual discipline into my life, and I considered it highly valuable. Well, my godly mentor rebuked me one day for spending too much time in the Word of God. I needed to spend more time being “present” with my children. She was right.

As I drove alone in the car one day to run an errand, I asked God, “So how much time do You want me to spend in Bible study?” I opened my heart to God and expected an answer. I heard (it was not audible, but an impression on my mind), “Do you love Me?” I said, “What the heck. That’s not an answer.” Then I heard it again, “Do you love Me?” “Of course I love You, Lord. What a ridiculous question.” Again I heard, “Do you love Me?” By this time I was nearly in tears. I was hurt. How on earth could He ask me if I loved Him? And then the words came, “Feed My sheep.” I sat there stunned. The Holy Spirit had confirmed what my godly mentor had said. What I needed to do was abide, and spend more time imparting to the children what I already knew. Yes, I would spend time in the Word, but that was no longer my focus. My focus was to pour the Word of God into my children.

At that point, when I studied the Word of God, it was to prepare to teach my children. (God taught me personally from what I was preparing for my children.) Many years passed this way before God gave me permission to study the Word of God for myself again.

Getting the Parenting Thing Right

Friday, April 15th, 2011

parentingBack when I was a new parent, I was bombarded by parenting books. I always study whatever it is I want to master. Since I didn’t want to mess up the most important assignment that God had given me, I studied the subject voraciously. I even took “Parenting Infant” classes and “Parenting Toddler” classes; I attended parenting conferences at local Christian churches. After a while, I realized there were a few common denominators: the books all mentioned first-time obedience and self-control as the two most important qualities to train into young children. They all agreed about spanking, since I was reading books that were based on the Bible and not on modern psychobabble. But the ghastly thing was that the majority of books contradicted each other at every other point.

Some of the books focused so much on the nitty-gritty of not allowing your children to ever get away with anything, even if they did something by accident because of childishness and not rebellion. (I remember being a child, and my parents believing I had done something out of rebellion when it was an accident. This happened a lot. Many times there’s no way for parents to know what motivated their child. They need to ask God.) Lists of rules don’t differentiate such things.

There was a specific book that I got rid of that caused me to sin by being more militant than I already was. The Spirit of God was not in that book. It ended up that the four children who were raised under that author ALL ended up turning their backs on God because of the militant way he ruled his house. The grown children eventually came back to God, and the author is quite a good speaker now. Humble and broken. But he hasn’t retracted his book. The book that destroyed his family and will destroy many more families that follow his process.

Having thrown that book out, I knew that the parenting book about shepherding the hearts of our children caused me to rely upon God to help me shape the heart of my child rather than focusing on my child’s behavior. Parents automatically notice the outer behavior of their children, because it’s physically noticeable and inconvenient to us. But God looks at the heart. If you lose your child’s heart, all is lost. Nothing else matters.

I think parents prefer to have a list of do’s and don’ts rather than cry out to God during each time you deal with your child. Leaning on the Spirit is outside the box. It’s being yoked to Christ, which brings rest to your soul. It’s having instant access to the wisdom of God, because many times only God knows what your child needs. If you rely on lists, you are definitely “leaning on your own understanding,” which is the opposite of the way God calls us to live. We must reach upward and yield to God in the moment. The fruit of the Spirit will become evident, and you will see exactly what I mean about parenting under Christ, because there is no other way to do it right.