Not alone on this journey

What do you do when parenting becomes difficult?
Tensions build. Schedules become impossible. In addition to confirmation classes, you want your children to gain multi-life experiences—soccer, swimming, golf, tennis, football, basketball, music lessons of all types, gymnastics, dance, drama, and—you name it. Maybe more than children can or want to do? You rush to meet the schedules. You rarely eat or pray together. There is no time to enjoy each other during the week. Frustrations mount. Tempers flare. Feelings are hurt. Poor choices are made. Life turns into chaos.

Suddenly everything seems to collapse. Assignments not done; falling grades; a call to see the principal; mixing with the wrong crowd; shoplifting; maybe even drug involvement. Youthful innocence turns into a huge headache for you as a parent as well as for your child.

Help!

You may feel that you have failed. You are not sure where to go or what to do. Your guilt makes it difficult to be with others. You think the collapse is all your fault, but you are not quite ready to admit it. You forget the picture God gives using parental language, “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you” (Isaiah 66:13). At this moment you and your child stand in need of that special comfort from God.

Times of parental growth and pitfalls go with you throughout life. Even after the children are gone and you experience empty-nest syndrome, they return to your mind. But then you find more opportunity for reflection, for prayer, and for crafting helpfulness to maturing family members. You find opportunities to be a dinnertime parent and grandparent in ways that rarely passed through your mind in former times of frantic busyness.

God gives nourishment and strength through his Word. He forgives you and gives you strength. In difficult times, concentrate on the beauty and comfort of being connected to Jesus. In him, you and your children are held no matter how disastrous the day may seem. In Jesus all things hold together. Things hold together because Jesus forgives much, even your parental guilt.

Being a parent is a calling into which God has placed you. You might wish that the difficult days would just pass and that a new day would suddenly come. But in difficult days you resolve to pass through the troubled waters with your child. Jesus is with you, the same Jesus who held up a little child as an example of trusting faith. Let your connection with Jesus shine as you talk with your child, with the principal, with Christian friends who want to support you.

Held!
Author: Wayne I. Schulz
Volume 94, Number 12
Issue: December 2007
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