Children are a blessing and they can also be a frustration but added to that is the fact parenting can teach us some great spiritual lessons.
1: Kids feel they have the right to always be first – ‘I need you come here’.
2: You have to give kids the space to learn.
3: You have to let them make mistakes.
4: I’m the adult, you’re the child and I expect you to do what I tell you to.
Lets start at the beginning then. Kids seem to have this idea that they should always be first. The key word here being ‘always’. Without question when you have children your priorities should change, the world doesn’t revolve around your wants and needs anymore, but like the rest of life it is a balancing act. Babies can’t do anything for themselves and so they cry we act. That’s the way it should be babies need to know they are loved and cared for. But babies grow and they start to use words. My eldest used the phrase ‘I need’, a lot. ‘I need a doll’, ‘I need chocolate’, ‘I need you’. These desires are broken down into two categories, stuff and attention. Mostly these things are wants not needs but to a three year old they amount to the same thing. Our children know they are important when we give them time, the stuff is nice but it’s probably nicer if we spend time playing with it with them. It can be draining, and just when you think you’ve done enough to allow yourself five minutes to drink a coffee, eat lunch or even read or watch something, it’s… ‘Mummy I need you to get something’, ‘Mummy look at this’, ‘Mummy this is happening’. Sometimes I just want to pull my hair out or throw something in frustration. Is five minutes alone on the toilet really too much to ask for?
Thing is though, how often are we like this with God? Our faith, our prayers become all about what we want. ‘God I need this’, ‘God I need that’, ‘God show me some attention so I know you care’, even ‘God before I can do what you asked I need…’.
Wow that’s a sobering thought. How often is my prayer life like that? It really is all about me, and it shouldn’t be. It is time I realised I am not a small child. My dad and I don’t see each other or speak everyday but I know he loves me. My husband and I do see each other everyday and do tell each other everyday, ‘I love you’ but I don’t sit there constantly after him for something. If my girls never grew out of their ‘I need you to do this for me’ phase, I would be exhausted and incredibly disappointed.
Yet often with God it is like we never grow up. ‘I love you God’ is closely followed by ‘can I…?’. You’d think after 25 years of believing in God I’d have learnt better. But no, at times I am just as bad as the Israelites and their grumbling, selfish, fearful attitude got them walking around the desert for forty years. I don’t want that. So I need to grow up and understand God loves me and is always there for me so I shouldn’t need to be the focus of attention all the time. Lets face it when we see older kids acting like three year olds we shake our heads and say there is something definitely wrong there.
Points two and three are tied together. We need to unwrap the cottonwool we may be inclined to put around our children, allow them to do things that may concern us and also give them the space to make mistakes. How else do we learn and grow? A child will never gain confidence in themselves if we don’t let them try things by themselves. My eldest used to love going to the park when really little, she’d get to the top of the slide reach for the overhead bar and swing from it. I thought about stopping her. I worried about her hands slipping and her falling, but I’d let her go for it. She loved it and never once fell. It gave her the confidence to try other things and when she did hurt herself I held her and kissed her and patched her up and she would go and try something else.
When she first got her bike she rode it too fast down a slope and crashed into a tree. It really hurt her and she wasn’t sure about getting on the bike again. But she did. It took a little convincing and I held the brakes with her when she went down that slope the first time after the crash and she got her confidence back. You can tell your kids a dozen times to hold the brake but sometimes it’s not until they crash that they realise they should have held the brake. We can listen to so much advice but sometimes some of us are so stubborn we don’t get it until it is our face planted into the rough bark of the tree. That’s when we go ‘oh that’s why you said that’.
It is all about learning and growing up. God wants us to learn and grow up in our faith just as we want our kids to learn and grow up, from sitting to crawling to standing; from letters to words to sentences. We weren’t created to lie in dirty nappies for our whole lives. If our grown kids wanted us to still spoon feed them…I’ll leave that thought with you. Yet we still want God to spoon feed us. This isn’t a new problem but God wants us to grow up.
Brothers I could not address you as spiritual but as
worldly – mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk not
solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed,
you are still not ready.
1 Corinthians 3:1-2
When I was a child I talked like a child, I thought like
a child I reasoned like a child. When I became a man,
I put childish ways behind me.
1 Corinthians 13:11
If we don’t grow we can’t move forward on our spiritual journey. We cannot fulfil our part of the great commission if we don’t grow.
Back to the lessons from parenting. Then there are those times we just want our kids to obey us. There are a great many times I tell my daughter to do something and there are a great many times she seems to think I’m just saying it to hear myself speak. Sometimes my reason for telling her to do something is because I don’t want her to get hurt, sometimes it’s because it’s the best way to do it and sometimes, if I’m honest, it’s to save my sanity. Tonight it was all to do with going to bed. She can procrastinate with the best of them particularly when it comes to bed and it’s even worse during daylight saving. She was being disobedient and so I said ‘because I said so’. Suddenly I wondered how many times God has said that or wanted to say that to me. After more procrastination I took some of her toys off her. Ever wonder what your procrastination or disobedience has cost you in as far as God’s best for your life? God has something for each of us but if we don’t step up then we force his hand and he gives it to someone who will. Fortunately God is the God of back up plans and he always has an awesome plan for our lives but there have been times in our lives when my husband and I have pondered the thought of missing out on God’s best for us and we don’t want that.
So what did I learn today? I learnt that sometimes I need to be willing to hear God say ‘because I said so’. Or better yet I need to learn to do it before it gets to that point.
It’s amazing what we can learn from our kids.
Lets start at the beginning then. Kids seem to have this idea that they should always be first. The key word here being ‘always’. Without question when you have children your priorities should change, the world doesn’t revolve around your wants and needs anymore, but like the rest of life it is a balancing act. Babies can’t do anything for themselves and so they cry we act. That’s the way it should be babies need to know they are loved and cared for. But babies grow and they start to use words. My eldest used the phrase ‘I need’, a lot. ‘I need a doll’, ‘I need chocolate’, ‘I need you’. These desires are broken down into two categories, stuff and attention. Mostly these things are wants not needs but to a three year old they amount to the same thing. Our children know they are important when we give them time, the stuff is nice but it’s probably nicer if we spend time playing with it with them. It can be draining, and just when you think you’ve done enough to allow yourself five minutes to drink a coffee, eat lunch or even read or watch something, it’s… ‘Mummy I need you to get something’, ‘Mummy look at this’, ‘Mummy this is happening’. Sometimes I just want to pull my hair out or throw something in frustration. Is five minutes alone on the toilet really too much to ask for?
Thing is though, how often are we like this with God? Our faith, our prayers become all about what we want. ‘God I need this’, ‘God I need that’, ‘God show me some attention so I know you care’, even ‘God before I can do what you asked I need…’.
Wow that’s a sobering thought. How often is my prayer life like that? It really is all about me, and it shouldn’t be. It is time I realised I am not a small child. My dad and I don’t see each other or speak everyday but I know he loves me. My husband and I do see each other everyday and do tell each other everyday, ‘I love you’ but I don’t sit there constantly after him for something. If my girls never grew out of their ‘I need you to do this for me’ phase, I would be exhausted and incredibly disappointed.
Yet often with God it is like we never grow up. ‘I love you God’ is closely followed by ‘can I…?’. You’d think after 25 years of believing in God I’d have learnt better. But no, at times I am just as bad as the Israelites and their grumbling, selfish, fearful attitude got them walking around the desert for forty years. I don’t want that. So I need to grow up and understand God loves me and is always there for me so I shouldn’t need to be the focus of attention all the time. Lets face it when we see older kids acting like three year olds we shake our heads and say there is something definitely wrong there.
Points two and three are tied together. We need to unwrap the cottonwool we may be inclined to put around our children, allow them to do things that may concern us and also give them the space to make mistakes. How else do we learn and grow? A child will never gain confidence in themselves if we don’t let them try things by themselves. My eldest used to love going to the park when really little, she’d get to the top of the slide reach for the overhead bar and swing from it. I thought about stopping her. I worried about her hands slipping and her falling, but I’d let her go for it. She loved it and never once fell. It gave her the confidence to try other things and when she did hurt herself I held her and kissed her and patched her up and she would go and try something else.
When she first got her bike she rode it too fast down a slope and crashed into a tree. It really hurt her and she wasn’t sure about getting on the bike again. But she did. It took a little convincing and I held the brakes with her when she went down that slope the first time after the crash and she got her confidence back. You can tell your kids a dozen times to hold the brake but sometimes it’s not until they crash that they realise they should have held the brake. We can listen to so much advice but sometimes some of us are so stubborn we don’t get it until it is our face planted into the rough bark of the tree. That’s when we go ‘oh that’s why you said that’.
It is all about learning and growing up. God wants us to learn and grow up in our faith just as we want our kids to learn and grow up, from sitting to crawling to standing; from letters to words to sentences. We weren’t created to lie in dirty nappies for our whole lives. If our grown kids wanted us to still spoon feed them…I’ll leave that thought with you. Yet we still want God to spoon feed us. This isn’t a new problem but God wants us to grow up.
Brothers I could not address you as spiritual but as
worldly – mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk not
solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed,
you are still not ready.
1 Corinthians 3:1-2
When I was a child I talked like a child, I thought like
a child I reasoned like a child. When I became a man,
I put childish ways behind me.
1 Corinthians 13:11
If we don’t grow we can’t move forward on our spiritual journey. We cannot fulfil our part of the great commission if we don’t grow.
Back to the lessons from parenting. Then there are those times we just want our kids to obey us. There are a great many times I tell my daughter to do something and there are a great many times she seems to think I’m just saying it to hear myself speak. Sometimes my reason for telling her to do something is because I don’t want her to get hurt, sometimes it’s because it’s the best way to do it and sometimes, if I’m honest, it’s to save my sanity. Tonight it was all to do with going to bed. She can procrastinate with the best of them particularly when it comes to bed and it’s even worse during daylight saving. She was being disobedient and so I said ‘because I said so’. Suddenly I wondered how many times God has said that or wanted to say that to me. After more procrastination I took some of her toys off her. Ever wonder what your procrastination or disobedience has cost you in as far as God’s best for your life? God has something for each of us but if we don’t step up then we force his hand and he gives it to someone who will. Fortunately God is the God of back up plans and he always has an awesome plan for our lives but there have been times in our lives when my husband and I have pondered the thought of missing out on God’s best for us and we don’t want that.
So what did I learn today? I learnt that sometimes I need to be willing to hear God say ‘because I said so’. Or better yet I need to learn to do it before it gets to that point.
It’s amazing what we can learn from our kids.
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