1 Calling
Principle: Nothing is more important in your life than being one of God’s tools to form a human soul.
You’re frustrated because for some reason on this particular Tuesday night your two-year-old daughter has decided that she will not, under any circumstance, pressure, or threat, eat her peas. You’re not asking her to eat poison; they’re peas—silly little, round, green vegetal orbs! What in the world is in her mind right now? Why do these little tasks have to be so hard?
You can’t believe it—another note from his teacher. This is the fifth note in three weeks, and he’s only in kindergarten! For some reason he won’t stop talking in class during the moments when he’s not supposed to be talking. He talks when the teacher talks. He talks when other students are trying to talk. He talks with his mouth full during lunchtime. He talks his way through his nap time. He talks when you’re trying to talk to him about talking too much! And you thought that finally sending him to school would simplify your life.
It’s been one of those days. You’re convinced it’s a sibling conspiracy against you. It feels as if your children have plotted together to make this day particularly difficult. It feels as if it’s you against The Legion of Rebellious Ones. You’ve lost your patience too many times. You’ve said and done embarrassing things. You raised your voice and made ominous threats, but nothing has seemed to help. You’ve lost control of your own house and, silently and with a bit of guilt, you wish for the simple days of before.
You’ve just had one of the best conversations you’ve ever had as a parent; it’s hard to imagine that an eleven-year-old could be so deep, so philosophical. You were caught off guard; you had no idea that in this passing moment time would stop and profound considerations would be on the table. You didn’t feel very prepared; you stumbled over your words. You hoped what you said was helpful, understandable, and wise. You hope the way you said things would open up more conversations. You just wish an alarm would have gone off, telling you that things were about to get very serious.
She seems embarrassed by you. It really does hurt. She used to run into your arms for comfort and love. She loved to hold your hand as she skipped her way through the mall. She would dress up in your clothes and pretend to be you. She’d get on a stool in the kitchen and “help” you cook dinner. She would run to you with that great big smile when she won the ribbon at gymnastics. Now she wants you to drop her off at the mall and asks you please not to come in. She doesn’t really want you to pick her up from school and when you do, she wants you to park down the street. She doesn’t bring many friends home and when she does, they hide in her room out of sight and separate from you. You want her to run up to you and bury her head in your chest and say, “I love you. Mommy,” like she used to, but you don’t think she will.
You’ve taken them to a movie; it’s the one thing you all enjoy doing as a family. It was billed as a fun family comedy, but it’s been filled with sexual innuendo from beginning to end. You didn’t catch the last part of the movie because your mind had wandered away thinking of what you should say, how you should handle what your children were exposed to. How much did they understand? If you talk to them, will you just be opening a can of worms? Is it time to have a very frank talk about sex? Are you ready? Are they ready? How will you do it? When will you do it? You wish you had a script to follow.
As you carry the final bit of his stuff up to his dorm room, you tell yourself that he’s a good kid, but you really wonder if he’s ready. You look at him, and you don’t see a university student; you see a leaky-nosed, scuffed-kneed six-year-old begging to spend the night with a friend. He did okay in high school; no drugs, sex, or jail time. He was determined to go away to college, somewhere new, somewhere different from home. You worry that his dorm has double the students that were in his high school. The girls walking around the hallways of his coed dorm make you uncomfortable. You want to grab him, throw him and his pile of stuff into the car, and get out of there as fast as you can before you lose him completely. He tells you not to worry, that he will be okay, but it doesn’t help. You pray with him before you leave, but you’re still a wreck. You ask him to call later, but you don’t think he will.
She finished college. She’s come back home while she looks for a job. You thought that your parenting days were over, but they’re clearly not. The state of her room, her choice of friends, and the way she spends her time make you wonder if she is ready to be a full-fledged adult. You have mixed emotions. You loved having your house and your time back again, but you missed being a mom. Now she’s back and it’s different. You know she still needs you, that she’ll need guidance as she makes her launch, but you’re not sure she realizes it. Every night you try to go to bed and sleep at the normal time, but you never really get to sleep until you hear the door and know she’s home safe. You’re tired of being a parent and thankful that she’s home, all at the same time.
You’re haunted by regret. You don’t want to be, but you are; not about anything big, but about all those little moments of failure. You remember the little promises you made that you got too busy to keep. The moments when you yelled when you should have been listening. You remember how hard it was to have children and be fair and how often you failed. You remember falling asleep at recitals and hope they never knew. You remember making ridiculous threats and hope they don’t remember as well as you do. You remember that time you stopped the van, made them all get out, and told them that you wouldn’t let them back in until they could get along with one another. You remember that it was easier to announce the law than to give grace. You’d like to be free of regret, but you’re not.
What is everything I just described about? What unifies all these parental scenarios? They are all about a calling—one of the most significant callings that could ever be laid in the lap of a human being. If you would stop and think about its full ramifications, it would make you run away unless it had already made you too weak in the knees. In a way it’s insane for anyone to actually think that they could take this on. You’d have to be delusional to think that you’re actually prepared. It has the quality of standing before a 747 and telling yourself that you could pick it up if you wanted to. It seems that this could possibly be the one mistake of an otherwise perfect God. Is it really true that God asks parents to be his agents-on-hand for the forming of a human soul? Really? Let’s consider the enormity of God’s plan and what it means for you as parents.
Parents as Treasure Hunters
Here’s what you need to understand: everything you do and say in your life, every choice that you make, and everything you decide to invest in is a reflection of a system of internalized values in your heart. As beings made in God’s likeness, we do not function by instinct. Rather, we are value-motivated human beings. Your words, your time commitments, your finances, your emotional highs and lows, your relationships, and your spiritual habits together form a portrait of what is really valuable to you. Think with me for a moment; if I were to watch with you the video of your last two months, what would I conclude is of true value to you? Or, if I were to watch the last few months of you parenting your kids, what would I say about the level of importance given to this foundational task that God has assigned to you?
I write in What Did You Expect? that when we talk about values, no passage is more helpful than Matthew 6:19–34. (Why don’t you stop and read it right now?) In this passage Jesus uses the word treasure to capture the fact that we all live in pursuit of what we’ve named as important. We are all alike in the fact that we all get up every morning and dig down into the soil of our lives to find some kind of treasure. And the way we speak and behave is our attempt to get out of our lives and relationships the things that are important to us. Now, this is hard to accept, but it needs to be said: parenting is either a thing of the highest treasure to you, and that is demonstrated in your choices, words, and actions every day, or it’s not.
So it’s humbling but helpful to admit that on this side of our final home, many, many things in our lives as parents compete for a place in the treasure center of our hearts. For example, we live in a world of beautiful physical things, either created by God or crafted by man out of what God created. These physical things play to the quest for beauty that God built inside us, but they can command a place in our hearts that God never intended. And if the pleasure of physical possessions becomes too important for you, it will create all kinds of dysfunction in tasks that God has called you to as a parent. For example, parents who are too controlled by possessions (houses, cars, lawns, furniture, artwork, etc.) tend to be so busy acquiring, maintaining, financing, and protecting their possessions that they have way too little time to invest in their children in the way God intended. Or parents who love possessions too much tend to be so uptight about protecting their possessions that they unwittingly turn their home into an uncomfortable furniture and craft museum that their children are now tasked to live in. It’s possible for a mom to be more worried about stains on her couch than the soul of her son, or for a dad to be more focused on the shine and maintenance of his new car than the heart of his daughter. There are parents who fail to be hospitable to the friends of their children because they are concerned about the impact on their physical surroundings and possessions. Do physical things get in the way of, or create needless tension in, your parenting?
Or how about success? I am persuaded that the desire for success is another thing that the Creator wired inside us. In the image of the Creator, we’re designed to create. We were made to be builders, managers, and doers. We were designed to change our surroundings. We were created to leave an imprint of our work as we move on to another place. We were made to strategize and achieve. Because of all of this achievement, success is important to us. We all want to be successful. In fact, if you have no motivation to succeed anywhere in your life, if you don’t care about accomplishing anything, we would all think that something is emotionally or spiritually wrong with you and that you need help. But, like possessions, this very good, God-created thing can become a bad thing in your life if it becomes the ruling treasure it was never meant to be.
Thousands and thousands of children are handed over every day to people they don’t know because success in work and career has become too important for their parents. Since neither parent is willing to step away from their work outside the home for fear of its long-term implications on their career and finances, no one is left to take care of the children, so someone else must be hired to do it. I know this is controversial, and I would never judge a couple who have their children in day care without knowing the details of why they made that decision, but I am troubled that we are not talking about this more. I am saddened by the numbers of children who are not with their parents for the bulk of the day during their formative years. I am saddened by the growing cultural comfortability with “latchkey” children. I am concerned about how many exhausted parents pick up their children at the end of their day and are just not able to have the kind of patience and grace that they need for the rest of the evening with their children. This not a matter of a busy schedule, but busyness that is a matter of values. How many children rarely see their fathers because Dad is off to work before the kids are up and around and home from work after they go to bed? By the time they are teenagers, they are used to Dad not being involved with their lives and don’t expect attention or participation from him anymore. How has the value of career success impacted your commitment to the work that God has called you to as parents?
Fasten your seatbelts; I’m going to be even more controversial here. I am deeply persuaded that for many people, it is their commitment to ministry that constantly gets in the way of doing what God has called them to do as parents. Perhaps this is the most deceptive treasure temptation of all. There are many, many ministry fathers and mothers who ease their guilty consciences about their inattention and absence by telling themselves that they are doing “the Lord’s work.” So they accept another speaking engagement, another short-term missions trip, another ministry move, or yet another evening meeting thinking that their values are solidly biblical, when they are consistently neglecting a significant part of what God has called them to. Sadly, their children grow up thinking of Jesus as the one who over and over again took their mom and dad from them.
This is a conversation that parents in ministry need to have and to keep open. It is very interesting that if you listen to people who are preparing couples for a life of ministry, they will warn them about the normal and inescapable tensions between ministry demands and parental calling. But I propose that two observations need to be made here. First, the New Testament never assumes this tension. It never warns you that if you have family and you’re called to ministry that you will find yourself in a value catch-22 again and again—that it’s nearly impossible to do both well. There is not one warning like this in the Bible. The only thing that gets close to it is that one of the qualifications for an elder is that he must lead his family well. Perhaps this tension is not the result of poor planning on God’s part, but because we are seeking to get things out of ministry that we were never meant to get, and because we are, we make bad choices that are harmful to our families. If you get your identity, meaning and purpose, reason for getting up in the morning, and inner peace from your ministry, you are asking your ministry to be your own personal messiah, and because you are, it will be very hard for you to say no, and because it is hard for you to say no, you will tend to neglect important time-relationship commitments you should be making to your children.
But there’s one more observation to be considered. The Bible is very clear that God is not so unloving, unwise, unfaithful, and unkind as to call us to one command that will necessitate the breaking of another one of his commands. His commands are not competing demands that flow out of competing value systems. They are a single fabric of threads that, woven together, define what it means to live in a way that is good, right, beautiful, and pleasing to him. Committing yourself to obey one of his commands never means you will suffer and be punished because it has caused you to disobey another. None of his commands exist in isolation and none of them conflict.
So if zeal for ministry causes me to be less than faithful to my calling as a parent in the way that I manage my time and energy, I am seeking to get something out of my ministry that I am not supposed to get. Do ministry decisions and commitments make it hard for you to faithfully do your work as a parent?
I would ask you right now to be humble, open, and honest. What competes in your heart and therefore in your daily decisions for the value that parenting should have? In your mundane, repeated, daily schedule does parenting have the place of high honor and high importance that God intended? What other things get in the way? What new and better choices is God calling you to make?
The value of parenting goes to the heart of what God has designed every human being to know and to be. To lose this thing is literally to lose a piece of your humanity. Parenting gets to the core of what should motivate every thought, desire, word, decision, or action that every human being has ever taken. There is nothing in the life of any child ever born that is more needed than this. This is the thing that makes parenting of highest importance—holy in the true sense of what that word means. This should be the goal at the bottom of all the things you do and all the things you want for your children. To lose sight of this is to miss the point of parenting. To lose sight of this removes the tracks that give direction to all that you do with each of your children. This is the thing that should satisfy you on those goods days with your children and keep you motivated on the very hard days with them. This really is the central task that makes your work as a parent a treasure of extreme value. Pay attention to the words below:
Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deut. 6:4–9)
When your son asks you in time to come, “What is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the rules that the Lord our God has commanded you?” then you shall say to your son, “We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt. And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. And the Lord showed signs and wonders, great and grievous, against Egypt and against Pharaoh and all his household, before our eyes. And he brought us out from there, that he might bring us in and give us the land that he swore to give our fathers.” (Deut. 6:20–23)
There’s the value that God places on parenting, summarized in a couple brief, but profound paragraphs. Your work as a parent is a thing of extreme value because God has designed that you would be a principal, consistent, and faithful tool in his hands for the purpose of creating God-consciousness and God-submission in your children. You can’t create this yourself, only God can, but you have been appointed to be an irreplaceable tool in his powerful hands. You see, at the core of what God designed human beings to be is the acknowledgment of his existence and surrender to authority. Those are the things that he meant to rule the heart of everyone who ever lived. Your kids will never be what they’re supposed to be or do if they lack God-consciousness. It is the essential thing that must be developed in the heart of every child, and the passages above say that that task was assigned by God to parents.
Your church was not designed to replace you, but to assist and equip you for this essential work. Your government was never designed to replace you, but to protect you as you do this core work. The school near you will never replace you; at the very best it will support you as you do the work that only you can do. You could argue that the chief reason God put parents in children’s lives is so that they would know him. The most important thing that a child could ever learn about is the existence, character, and plan of God. If you know this fact, it will alter the way you understand and interpret every other fact in your life.
Now, although God, in grace, has placed you and your children in a physical world that constantly points to him, your children came into the world with a devastating problem. Your children have the perverse and life-shaping ability to look at the world around them and not see God. They will consistently see the signs (the created world), but they will consistently fail to see what the signs point to (the existence and glory of God). And if you don’t acknowledge God, not only are you a profoundly disadvantaged human being, but you will then insert yourself in the middle of your world and make it all about you. Children who don’t acknowledge God will act as if they are God and will resist the help and rescue that God has provided for them through their parents.
But there is more. At some point your children are going to begin to wonder why they have the rules that they have, why they have been told to believe certain things, and who in the world put you in charge. Sadly, many parents have little more to say than, “Do it because I told you to do it,” or “Do it or you’re going to get punished.” Those explanations get a response from your children only as long as they fear you, but there will come a time when they don’t fear you anymore. If all you’ve given your children is fear of you, then when they leave your home, they will no longer have anything to motivate them to do what is right.
The second paragraph from Deuteronomy 6 helps us here. It tells us that we should root all the rules and beliefs that we give our children not only in the existence of God, but in the things that he has, in grace, done for us. You could say that the advice here is to connect everything you require of your children in behavior and belief to the story of redemption. When your child questions the rules, don’t puff up your chest and tell him he better obey or else; talk to him about a loving Redeemer, who not only created him but shed his blood for him so that he could know and do what is right. When your child wonders about what is right and what is wrong, don’t just threaten him with the law of God; woo him with the sweet music of the grace of God. When she is struggling with what God says is right, don’t talk of God as just a judge, but as a helper and a friend who meets us in our weakness with forgiveness, wisdom, and strength. Blow your child away with God’s patience, mercy, and love. Talk again and again about how he willingly exercises his power for our help, benefit, and rescue. Go beyond enforcing your authority and point to his authority, and go beyond pointing to his authority to pointing your children to his grace.
God hasn’t made a mistake in tasking you with being his tool for the forming of the souls of your children. You see, he has opened the eyes of your heart to his existence, presence, and rule so that you could be a tool of the same in your children. He has revealed himself to you not just for you but for your children. But there’s something else he’s done. He’s bestowed upon you his forgiving, rescuing, transforming, and delivering grace so that you could be his tool of the same in the lives of each of your children. His gift of grace is not just so that you would be a recipient of grace but also a daily instrument of that very same grace in the lives of those he has placed in your care. In his grace you find everything that you need to be what God wants you to be in the lives of your children and to do what he has called you to do with them.
Here’s the bottom line: God has met you so that you would be ready to introduce his glory and grace to your children. Every day is filled with opportunities to point to God, maybe in the fact that water boils, that leaves turn, and that the sun comes up in the morning, or maybe in the power of the storm, the taste of a steak, the beauty of a sunset, or the honey from a bee; all these things exist and are held together only because God created and controls the physical world. God has opened your eyes to his presence and glory so you could help open the eyes of your children. So capture the opportunities around you to point to him. Don’t let a day pass without doing it and don’t feel that it’s weird to talk about God all the time. He is so pictured by his creation that it is positively weird not to be reminded of him and talk about him all the time. And remember, the teenager needs this as much as the toddler does. Nothing is more important in all of life than this; it really is what makes parents so valuable.
There’s one more thing that needs to be said; it will be a theme in this book. No one gives grace better than a parent who humbly admits that he desperately needs it himself. Today, with your children, how about being that kind of parent?