the susie solution

I’m back from our visit to our son, daughter-in-love and newest granddaughter.  I’ll spare you all the panegyrics over how adorable she is; take them as read!  Although our oldest daughter has had two kids, they live here in town, so although we got to see them much sooner after birth, and more frequently after, this visit was different because we spent four days in my son’s apartment.  Much more intense!  And boy, did it bring back memories of those first days of our own parenting adventure – the feeling of being in over our heads, in totally unfamiliar territory, with little confidence in our ability to parent this morsel of humanity.  It’s been a few weeks shy of 27 years since then, and our adventure with our five kids has taken us to places we had no idea even existed.  As is not uncommon, I find myself wishing I could go back and parent then with what I know now.  I can’t do that, of course, but I want to share one thing that I wish I had learned a lot sooner.  So here is a letter to my son and daughter-in-love, or anyone still in that journey:

Dear Phil and Brooke,

Welcome to the wonderful, crazy, scary world that is parenthood!  You have no idea just what you’re in for now.  Which is probably a good thing.

I have every confidence that you two are going to be great parents.  You take your parenting role very seriously, giving thought to your course of action rather than simply acting on the impulse of the moment.  Already you are recognizing the dying to self that good parenting requires.  You are seeking the counsel of those with more experience, which is wise, but you are maintaining an independent judgment of the fitness of that counsel for your own situation, which is wiser still.  Above all, you have hearts devoted to the Lord and are leaning on Him for wisdom, desiring to do what is right.  Yes, you are going to be great parents.

You are also going to fail.   There will be times when you put your desires above Evie’s needs.  You will be impatient.  You will speak in haste.  You will choose the convenient over the constructive.  You will ignore things you should correct and punish actions that were foolish but not disobedient.  You will over-react.  You will make bad decisions.  In these and many other ways, you WILL fail.  Welcome to parenthood!

That may not sound very encouraging, but if you can accept the inevitability of your own failures just as fully and as matter-of-factly as God does, you will have deprived the Enemy of his greatest weapons against you in the parenting venture – the fear of failure.  As long as you are afraid of failure, you will be living in the Prison of Perfection – not the freedom Christ died to give you.

You see, the Enemy wants you to keep focusing on trying to be perfect.  He’ll use the “if you parent ‘right’, then your kids will turn out ‘good’” lie.  Sadly, even the Christian community has bought into this fallacy.  You probably already read my post on the misuse of the Proverbs verse on “Train up a child”, so I won’t repeat the arguments here.  I’ll just say this:  There has only been ONE Perfect Parent in all of history, and HIS kids got kicked out of Eden!  Trying to be the perfect parent won’t guarantee the outcome for your kids.

The Enemy says you should try to be perfect so you won’t disappoint God.  But this is bogus as well.  Isn’t it funny how we say that we know we’re not perfect, yet we get so upset with ourselves when confronted with the proof of it?  We really do expect ourselves to be better than we are, and when our reality doesn’t meet those expectations, the result is disappointment.  But God cannot be disappointed!  God has no expectations other than reality. He knows even more clearly than we do just how sinful we are.  Think of Jesus calmly telling Peter of the betrayal to come.  There was no frostiness to His voice.  No “how COULD you!” shaming tone.  Jesus wasn’t shocked or disappointed at what Peter was about to do.  SIN IS WHY JESUS WAS HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE.  It’s HIS righteousness in us that He wants to see perfected – not our own.  Our own self-improvement projects are all doomed to fail.  HE’s the Professional!

Part of striving for perfection means that when we fail, we have to wear guilt like a hair shirt until we are rubbed raw and bleeding.   The truth is that there’s no guilt TO wear, because Jesus already wore it. “There is, therefore, now no condemnation for those that are in Christ Jesus.” No condemnation. Period.  If God does not condemn us, how dare we condemn ourselves?  We need to confess our sin to restore fellowship, but the forgiveness is already granted.   Every action has its consequence, and so will our failures – but our failures don’t take God out of the equation.  When Jesus told Peter, “You’re going to betray me”, He also told him, “…and when you turn back, strengthen your brothers.”  Jesus was already looking beyond the failure to what use He was going to make out of it.  When the Word promises that “in all things God works for the good of those that love Him” – “all things” includes our failures.  Don’t ever give yourselves credit for being able to force Him into Eternal Plan B, as if you can somehow fail badly enough to screw up eternity.  You can’t.

I don’t mean to sound like I think it doesn’t matter what you do as parents.  Obviously, I want you to be the best and wisest and all that that you can be, and provide as little fodder for the therapists as possible.   These are my grandkids we’re talking about you raising, after all.  It is, however, especially for their sake that I hope it is the LORD you will take seriously, not yourselves.  My grandkids don’t need your perfection; they won’t be perfect themselves.  They need to see the God Who is bigger than their failures, and they’ll see Him best by seeing Him through you.  Immerse yourselves in His mercy, grab onto His grace, frolic in His forgiveness, rest in His resourcefulness!

You’re going to be great parents, and you’re going to fail.  And neither is what matters.  You’re free to fail because HE NEVER WILL.