The Parenting Career?

Carol and I just returned from a week-long visit with our daughters and their husbands. We have been parents for 29 years. You could say we have had 29 year long career as a parent.
The definition of “career” is:

A chosen pursuit, the progression of one’s working life, doing what one does as a permanent occupation or lifework.

We have discovered so many things about parenting that we learned along the parenting career:

• We chose the parenting career in which:
  1. We thought we were raising perfect, well-behaved, stunning children (We dreamed dreamy dreams).
  2. We were very unprepared for the parenting career —and we did not know it: “We had no idea.” “We worried that the parenting career was not all we had hoped it to be.”
  3. Although we have been parents for 29 years, we had to continue to learn to change our skill sets:
     • We are still in the process of discovering what it means to be the parents of twenty-something’s,
     • We are still in the process of discovering what it means to be the parents-in-law,
     • We are in the process of discovering what it means to be long distance parents.
• Our parenting career keeps progressing throughout time (babies, toddlers, kids, teens, collegians, and now young adults)
• The parenting career is a permanent occupation.

We have learned that it is not our job as parents just to control our children’s behavior and by doing so somehow create a spiritual life for them. The danger in focusing on our children’s outward behavior without the inner transformation is that sometimes our children align their behavior to our mandates to please us or to receive approval. They can end up doing or not doing things without true spiritual transformation. Without this supernatural transformation, we have moral or obedient children, but we don’t necessarily have spiritual children.

Our goal is much more grand than just:

• Teaching them Bible stories
• Taking them to church
• Teaching them good morals and values
• Keeping them away from the dangers of this world
• Defining spirituality by the things we don’t do

Our goal is to pass on a vibrant and transforming faith, the kind of faith in which:

• Our children know and hear God’s voice
• Our children desire to obey God through the power of the Holy Spirit
• Our children are defined by what they do: actions of mercy, justice, love, grace, forgiveness, strength, courage

We are learning that it’s not about adopting a “parenting style” that works for all our children, because we will need to adapt our parenting to the uniqueness of each child. God alone is divine and He alone changes hearts. We must parent with this goal in mind.

We are also learning that our lives need to be living testimonies of what it means to have genuine vibrant faith:

• We often embrace the mind-set as parents that our children will have a more vibrant spiritual relationship with Christ than we ourselves have. We can’t give away what we don’t have.
• It’s not our job to just control our children’s behavior, but rather it is our job to model with authenticity what we have in our relationship with God through Christ. And, hopefully, this is something worth passing on to the next generation.
• Our children need to see who God is in the natural flow of our lives. They need to see that our faith matters, that it’s relevant to our daily situations, that it’s real. We need to model how our lives are spiritual in every decision, erasing the divide between the secular and the sacred.

The parenting career is a divine calling--a challenge that will demand the best we’ve got to give. But it’s a challenge we face with the promises of God on our side.

The parenting career is a privilege. We should delight in our children—observing what they are becoming and have become; taking note of their passion, and remembering that the God of heaven longs to see it with us.