THE STUMBLING LIFE OF CHILDREN AND PARENTS
Being a child is hard.
For some of us, it is easy to forget how hard it is to be a child. We forget that change is happening so fast. Our favorite shoes and clothes fit one season, but suddenly, not the next. Once you master one skill, a new more challenging one is standing right behind the celebration. As a child, you are constantly trying to understand both the world around you, and your place in it. Each new discovery is both exciting and confusing.
And then there are those parents who you have been assigned to, who keep reminding you of what you have not done, what you need to do, and how to do it.
Being a child is hard. Being a parent is just as hard.
It is challenging to walk beside our children as they try to figure out themselves and the world they live in, no matter what age they are. Each new decade of parenting brings about new challenges, conflicts and changes in roles.
When hard, challenging relationships walk beside each other for decades, it is going to get messy.
As a pastor, and a former college minister, I have heard painful stories that go beyond mess to broken relationships between children and their parents—stories that cause me to lament and pray for restoration. These stories have also caused me to pray for the messes that I see in our own family. I pray that as we continue to walk beside each other, we would share stories of how God’s grace has helped us flourish in our callings as children and parents.
I am convinced that flourishing and life-giving relationships between children and their parents don’t just happen. They are formed in the years of what feels like stumbling along, following the way of Christ, as God’s grace holds us up.
Paul, in Ephesians 5:1-2 and 6:1-4, shows us what it looks like to follow the way God has designed children and parents to flourish together. This is a way of love and sacrifice, discipleship and obedience, grace and honor, that is applied to every stage—from being a child, to being a grandparent, to being in the sandwich generation caring for both your children and parents.
Being a child is hard. Being a parent is hard. But as we look to Christ for help, He gives us hope that things can be better. Our trust in not in ourself, but in Christ and His grace that can transform the messiest relationships into healthy ones, which are robust in love.
