Parenting (eBook)

Introduction

Ambassadors

Your house is noisy and not as clean as you’d like it to be, you and your husband haven’t been out together for a long time, the laundry has piled up once again, you just discovered there’s nothing to pack for lunch, you’ve just broken up another fight, the schedule for the week looks impossible, you seem to have more expenses than money, none of the people around seem to be satisfied, and you feel exhausted and unappreciated.

In the middle of all the endless parenting activities, many parents get lost. They are doing lots of things, lots of good things, but they don’t know why. They’ve been swallowed up into the daily grind of parenting, but they’ve lost sight of what it is that they’re working for or building toward. They don’t understand why these ones that they love have the power to pull such irritation and frustration out of them. The menial tasks that they have to do day after day get reduced to an endless catalog of unattractive duties that don’t seem to have any overarching vision that holds them all together and sanctifies them with meaning and purpose.

As I’ve traveled the world talking about parenting, I’ve had thousands of exhausted parents ask me for more effective strategies for this or that, when what they really need is a big picture parenting worldview that can explain, guide, and motivate all the things that God calls them to do as parents. If you are going not only to cope, but to thrive with vision and joy as a parent, you need more than the next book that gives you seven steps to solving whatever. You need God’s helicopter view of what he’s called you to do. You need a big gospel parenting worldview that will not only make sense of your task, but will change the way you approach it.

Yes, you did read it right. I am deeply persuaded that what is missing in most Christian parent’s parenting are the big grand perspectives and principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ. These perspectives and principles are radical and counterintuitive. They’re simply not natural for us, but they’re essential to being what you’re supposed to be and doing what you’re supposed to do as a parent. When you parent with what the gospel says about God, you, your world, your children, and God’s grace, you not only approach parenting in brand-new ways, but you carry the burden of parenting in a very different way.

I have to be honest here. I wrote a parenting book (Age of Opportunity), and I told myself and repeatedly told others that I was not about to write another one, yet here I am doing just that. Why? Because as I listened to people tell me how they had used Age in the lives of their teenagers, I became increasingly uncomfortable. I kept thinking, “No, that’s not exactly it,” or “No, that’s not what I meant,” or “No, there’s something missing.” It took a while, but it finally hit me that what bothered me in these conversations and what was missing in these parents was the gospel that was the foundation behind everything that I wrote. So with the publisher’s encouragement, I decided to write a parenting book, but not the typical kind. This will not be a book of practical strategies for dealing with children at the various ages of their development. This book will not provide practical steps for dealing with the kinds of things every parent faces. This book is meant to be a reorienting book. It is meant to give you a new way of thinking about and responding to everything that will be on your plate as a parent. This book is meant to give you vision, motivation, renewed strength, and the rest of heart that every parent needs. It is written to give you the big gospel picture of the task to which your Savior has called you.

Lost in the Middle of Your Own Parenting Story

The big picture starts with knowing who you are as a parent. I don’t mean your name, address, and Social Security number. I mean who you are in relation to who God is, to what life is about, and to who your children are. If you don’t have this “who you are” perspective right, you will miss the essence of what God has called you to, and you will do things that no parent should do.

I am afraid that parenting confusion and dysfunction often begin with parents having an ownership view of parenting. It is seldom expressed and often unconscious, but it operates on this perspective of parenting: “These children belong to me, so I can parent them in the way I see fit.” Now, no parent actually says that, but it tends to be the perspective that most of us fall into. In the press of overwhelming responsibilities and a frenetic schedule, we lose sight of what parenting is really about. We look at our children as belonging to us, and we end up doing things that are short-sighted, not helpful in the long-run, more reactive than goal-oriented, and outside of God’s great, big, wise plan.

Ownership parenting is not overtly selfish, abusive, or destructive; it involves a subtle shift in thinking and motivation that puts us on a trajectory that leads our parenting far away from God’s design. This shift is subtle because it takes place in little, mundane moments of family life—moments that seem so small and insignificant that the people in the middle of them are unaware of the movement that has taken place. But the shifts are significant precisely because they do take place in insignificant little moments, because those little moments are the addresses where our parenting lives. Very little of our parenting takes place in grand significant moments that have stopped us in our tracks and commanded our full attention; parenting takes place on the fly when we’re not really paying attention and are greeted with things that we did not know we were going to be dealing with that day. It’s the repeated cycle of little unplanned moments that is the soul-shaping workroom of parenting.

Ownership parenting is motivated and shaped by what parents want for their children and from their children. It is driven by a vision of what we want our children to be and what we want our children to give us in return. (I’ll say more about this later). It seems right, it feels right, and it does many good things, but it is foundationally misguided and misdirected and will not produce what God intends in the lives that he has entrusted to our care. There, I’ve said it! Good parenting, which does what God intends it to do, begins with this radical and humbling recognition that our children don’t actually belong to us. Rather, every child in every home, everywhere on the globe, belongs to the One who created him or her. Children are God’s possession (see Ps. 127:3) for his purpose. That means that his plan for parents is that we would be his agents in the lives of these ones that have been formed into his image and entrusted to our care.

The word that the Bible uses for this intermediary position is ambassador. It really is the perfect word for what God has called parents to be and to do. The only thing an ambassador does, if he’s interested in keeping his job, is to faithfully represent the message, methods, and character of the leader who has sent him. He is not free to think, speak, or act independently. Everything he does, every decision he makes, and every interaction he has must be shaped by this one question: “What is the will and plan of the one who sent me?” The ambassador does not represent his own interest, his own perspective, or his own power. He does everything as an ambassador, or he has forgotten who he is and he will not be in his position for long.

Parenting is ambassadorial work from beginning to end. It is not to be shaped and directed by personal interest, personal need, or cultural perspectives. Every parent everywhere is called to recognize that they have been put on earth at a particular time and in a particular location to do one thing in the lives of their children. What is that one thing? It is God’s will. Here’s what this means at street level: parenting is not first about what we want for our children or from our children, but about what God in grace has planned to do through us in our children. To lose sight of this is to end up with a relationship with our children that at the foundational level is neither Christian nor true parenting because it has become more about our will and our way than about the will and way of our Sovereign Savior King.

I want to say right here and now that I am very bad at what I am now writing about. I like sovereignty, I like ownership, and I like having my will done on earth as God’s will is done in heaven! I often treated my four children (who are now grown) as if they were my possessions. I often suffered from ambassadorial schizophrenia—at moments losing my mind, taking my parenting into my own hands, and doing things that I shouldn’t have done. I was often a very poor example of joyful submission to God’s law. I was often a very poor representative of God’s grace. I was often more propelled by fear than I was by faith. I often wanted short-term gain more than I wanted long-term transformation. There were moments when I forgot who I was, lost my mind, and did things that really didn’t make any sense, or at least weren’t very helpful.

I am going to ask you right now...