Parenting Wake Up Call
Yesterday was Easter. It was a wonderful family day. We went to church together in the morning, came home and had a delicious lunch. The kids filled Easter eggs with candy and we went out in the springtime sunshine and enjoyed watching them hunt for eggs as we snapped pictures. Later on in the evening we settled down to watch The Passion movie that Mel Gibson produced about the Crucifixion. It was our 11 year old’s first time to see it.
(We fast forwarded through the whipping scene. Is there anything more awful than watching that scene of Jesus being mutilated for us? I have forced myself at different times to watch it, other years I have had to turn my face away or cover my head as he takes my punishment. I cannot bear to watch it.)
Watching this movie is probably our most important Easter tradition. It was surprising to me sitting there with my 14 and 11 year olds how many questions that they asked. I didn’t realize it but there are so many things that we take for granted that they know because they have been in church their whole lives. I know what that’s like. I grew up in church, but didn’t really “hear” the gospel until I was 13 years old when I visited a different denomination’s church and heard about salvation for the first time. There are probably many things that are floating around in our consciousness as parents that we know and we think that they know as well, but that is not necessarily the case.
I had to laugh last year when we were downtown and passed by the public museum. My youngest two kids didn’t know what that building was! I was sure that I had taken them there because I had burnt out my older children on going there so often that I think they begged me not to take them there any more. When you have a slew of kids, the whole pack of children can blur together at times and you really can’t remember what you did with whom.
But this was another wake-up call for me. I realized that there are probably many things about the gospel that these 2 youngest children have not heard and I feel compelled to actively make sure to bring those things into their lives. Sometimes we are guilty of putting excellent effort into our older children and then losing strength and ambition when those younger ones come around and this “parenting thing” isn’t new anymore. It’s kind of like the ambition of the new parent taking pictures of their first children, how avidly the pictures are snapped. Photo album after photo album is created. By the time the 3rd or 4th child comes around the joke is that they will be lucky to find a few snapshots of themselves with their 1st photo album baby book still waiting to be completed.
Lord, help us not to do that with these younger children’s discipleship! Help us to not lose strength or focus. Help us to be just as thorough and even more skilled as we plant into the fertile soil of these children’s lives. Help us to finish our course, running our race of parenting “all out” for their sake.