God is my Co-Parent
Someone I know recently told me that before they began to take religion seriously, they never would have returned their shopping cart to the cart corral. Looking around my grocery store parking lot, I wondered just how many heathens there were in the neighborhood.
I make my kids take the cart back to the corral. I require them to hold doors for adults and I have shown them how to help a lady on with her wrap. When they ask me why – and believe me they have asked me why – I always say, “It’s polite” or “convention.” In fact, I model a lot of my own parenting on my Father.
There are a lot of books out there about how to be a business leader “like Christ” or how to parent in a “Godly” way. I don’t think it’s so hard to see how to parent with faith in mind. I don’t think you need more than a little understanding of God to get how it translates to parenting. It is considerably harder to DO it than it is to SEE the PARRALELLS. But, that’s the trick of parenting, right? You can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk?
God doesn't want to see his children fail but he sometimes lets the obstacles appear before them because challenges make them grow. In the same way, I hope my kids get good grades, I hope they succeed, but I am not doing there homework for them, and the consequences of their not doing it is a necessary evil. I watch them rush headlong into crushes with short or evil boys and then scrape them off the emotional pavement because that's how to learn to avoid the yuckie ones. That's all I ask of God, if I screw up and you are up there shaking your head in resignation about me, please send Squeegee, the Patron Saint of dumb mistakes to put me on my feet again.
God sometimes seems like He's not listening. I know my five-year-old will tell you the only way she can be sure I am listening is to take hold of both my ears and face my face toward hers. God the Father and Shay the Mother may not seem like they are paying attention, but their children are still absolutely top of mind. I may not be listening but it’s likely because I am up to my armpits in papier mache and concentrating on holding the top of Mount Etna on until it dries. Something like this may also be true of God. Ultimately, not listening is not the same as not hearing. I may pray that a certain presidential candidate drops out of the race, but hopefully what He hears is a prayer for a responsible leader.
God is endlessly patient and never ever gives up hope for his children. Do my children know I feel that for them? How can I be sure they do? Not by the way I react when there are seven bags of un-taken-out garbage in the mudroom. Not by the look on my face when one of them attempts to stab another with a plastic pizza fork. Not, certainly, from my sarcastic tone after 13 hours on the road in the rain in a merciless death march to the seventh ring of hell AKA: Dutchess County, New York. Nope, that's not in evidence just now. Maybe there is an Apostle who can communicate that to them for me?
A good parent wants to see her children succeed more than anything, but their view of success may come from a different place than your own. God's idea of what completes me appears to be a great deal more than what I was willing to settle for. My idea of my children's success comes from my perspective and may not look the same to them as it does to me. I need to be sure my kids know that I am working with them and hoping for their success, by whatever definition we use. And if God has to find some super natural way to duct tape my mouth shut when they are about to make their own mistakes -because I know they have to make their own mistakes – well, that would be okay.
I hope God loves me in my current condition: flawed and striving, over weight and self medicating to get through the holidays. I think God made me just the way I am and that's not just okay but great. Deliberate. I need to be sure my children know that is how I feel about them. I need to be SURE they do. They seem flawed to themselves but to me they are perfect. They can’t see themselves from my perspective and I wish they would just trust me that they’re great. They’d have to take it on faith. I already know taking things like that on faith doesn’t happen in your teens. Yep, a Gospel explaining my intent would be handy here, again.
The shopping cart friend whom I mentioned above, she has just started going to church and is finding her way at a turning point in her life. It’s painful and beautiful to watch. But the most striking thing she has said to me is, “Do you know, God loves you not matter what? Can you imagine? No matter what I do, good or bad, He will love me the same. I can’t do anything that will make Him love me less or anything that will make Him love me more. Amazing, huh?”
What strikes me about this is: there is an expression for that. Its “unqualified love.” It is what we, as parents, are supposed to be giving. I know her family. I know they gave her unqualified love. But she didn’t get the message. I think we can talk the talk all day long, but our walk as parents is to close the distance between our children’s experience of parental and family love and spiritual or God’s love. Unqualified love should be “familiar” as in, coming from the family, and one step on the way to comprehension and appreciation of unqualified love that is “divine.”
