Parenting from a place of Humility
If anyone had told us before we had kids how hard parenting would be, we would never have believed them. It always looks so simple when you’re looking in from the outside.
Everyone seems to glide through parenting so easily. You rarely get to hear about the rough and tumble of it all. How very hard it is to spend 24 hours a day 7 days a week giving up yourself for the sake of your children. How exhausting it is dealing with the emotional ups and downs of your children; the constant fighting and arguing of sibling rivalry, the constant emotional demands made from you as a parent. And yet….. as hard as it is, it’s equally rewarding.
To watch your children growing and developing into the young people that God is shaping them to be. And it all passes in a flash. When you’re in the middle of it, it feels like it will never end. And then you blink your eyes and all of a sudden they are starting high school and those baby years are a distant memory. As you parent, you realise that just when you think you know it all, a new phase starts and you’re back at the beginning again. But you come to know that each phase comes and goes and that you will survive it and hopefully your children will too.
Each phase comes with its own set of challenges and you realise that you as a parent will never know everything. That you will always be learning. Learning who you are as a parent; learning who your children are. And it’s a journey that has a beginning, but very rarely an end, because you know that once you’ve had children, you are always walking around with your heart in someone else’s body.
Everyone seems to glide through parenting so easily. You rarely get to hear about the rough and tumble of it all. How very hard it is to spend 24 hours a day 7 days a week giving up yourself for the sake of your children. How exhausting it is dealing with the emotional ups and downs of your children; the constant fighting and arguing of sibling rivalry, the constant emotional demands made from you as a parent. And yet….. as hard as it is, it’s equally rewarding.
To watch your children growing and developing into the young people that God is shaping them to be. And it all passes in a flash. When you’re in the middle of it, it feels like it will never end. And then you blink your eyes and all of a sudden they are starting high school and those baby years are a distant memory. As you parent, you realise that just when you think you know it all, a new phase starts and you’re back at the beginning again. But you come to know that each phase comes and goes and that you will survive it and hopefully your children will too.
Each phase comes with its own set of challenges and you realise that you as a parent will never know everything. That you will always be learning. Learning who you are as a parent; learning who your children are. And it’s a journey that has a beginning, but very rarely an end, because you know that once you’ve had children, you are always walking around with your heart in someone else’s body.
And it’s hard. It’s hard to see your children hurting. It’s hard to see them experience the hard knocks of life and to know that they will survive it because you did. It’s hard to see them struggle with friendships, relationships, difficulties at school, disappointments. And it’s hard to know sometimes how to reach them, how to speak to them in and through the situations they find themselves in, how to encourage them, how to show them that they are beautiful and perfect just the way they are no matter what the world says. It’s hard to know what the balance is between encouraging ambition in your child and putting too much pressure on them; how to teach them to Love the Lord with all their hearts and live their lives for Him; and yet at the same time live in a world which teaches them exactly the opposite.
Parenting has taught us many things; but the most important thing we have learnt is that the only way we have any hope of parenting effectively is to parent on our knees! Parenting requires so much wisdom, so much discernment, so much grace and so much patience that we need to be heavily dependent on God in order to parent our children with any hope of getting them safely through childhood and into adulthood. We desperately need His wisdom and His discernment for this parenting journey because without it, we can do nothing for our children. We have realized that we are completely helpless and hopeless as parents without the Lord guiding us every step of the way. We cannot parent in our own strength, but we know that in our weakness He is strong and where we fail and fall, He carries us through.
And we are so grateful that we can know that where we fail, God is there and we can trust Him with our children’s tomorrows. We’re so grateful that the responsibility of raising our children is not solely in our hands because they would be a mess. We know that God is our refuge and our strength, that He has a perfect plan and purpose for our kid’s lives. He has appointed us to raise them and we need to take that task seriously by constantly committing ourselves to raising them in a godly way, consistently pointing them to Him, and being His hands and feet to them. And the best part of parenting on our knees is that we know that despite our weaknesses and failures as parents, God is the ultimate parent and he has a beautiful plan and purpose for our children, and His plans for our children will be realised despite us!
Parenting has taught us many things; but the most important thing we have learnt is that the only way we have any hope of parenting effectively is to parent on our knees! Parenting requires so much wisdom, so much discernment, so much grace and so much patience that we need to be heavily dependent on God in order to parent our children with any hope of getting them safely through childhood and into adulthood. We desperately need His wisdom and His discernment for this parenting journey because without it, we can do nothing for our children. We have realized that we are completely helpless and hopeless as parents without the Lord guiding us every step of the way. We cannot parent in our own strength, but we know that in our weakness He is strong and where we fail and fall, He carries us through.
And we are so grateful that we can know that where we fail, God is there and we can trust Him with our children’s tomorrows. We’re so grateful that the responsibility of raising our children is not solely in our hands because they would be a mess. We know that God is our refuge and our strength, that He has a perfect plan and purpose for our kid’s lives. He has appointed us to raise them and we need to take that task seriously by constantly committing ourselves to raising them in a godly way, consistently pointing them to Him, and being His hands and feet to them. And the best part of parenting on our knees is that we know that despite our weaknesses and failures as parents, God is the ultimate parent and he has a beautiful plan and purpose for our children, and His plans for our children will be realised despite us!