Category: Parenting

“Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.” Psalm 139:23

The Psalmist asks God to examine his heart. He’s just prayed a pretty brutal prayer (check out verse 22), and he wants God to make sure his motives are pure.

I would be anxious just having the thought, “Those are my enemies! They’re evil!” much less expressing that sentiment to God. I know intellectually that if I have a thought, God knows it. Still, something seems different about expressing it in prayer — that is, in taking my involuntary reactions and making them planned expressions to God.

Recently, I’ve been trying to share more with God — to resist the urge to only come to Him with petitions or the things that I think are religious. I’ve also been trying to give myself time to listen to Him. “What do you think of this, God?” I asked last week after starting a book that, if I completed, was over twenty hours. “Is it worth reading to the rest of this?” The answer: it wouldn’t be a wise use of my time.

Continue reading ““What Do You Think?””

“In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.” Psalm 4:8

My daughter’s sleep has rarely been a time of peace. Safety? Sure. But peace? Hardly.

Because my daughter was and is a fitful sleeper, we have tried to routinize what we can: the bedtime ritual.

She takes a bath.

She brushes her teeth and takes her allergy medicine.

She sits and listens to a bedtime story.

Finally, she gets a prayer and a good night and a closed door.

Since she was a year old, that nighttime story was something my wife provided. Sure, I would fill in if my wife was away or indisposed, but if at all possible, my daughter wanted her momma to read her a bedtime story.

Continue reading “Bedtime Stories”

“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” II Corinthians 1:3–4

The root words of “comfort” mean to strengthen or support. Paul says that God is the God of all strength and support so that we can find consolation in Him no matter what our troubles are.

At times, I am physical manifestation of God’s comfort to my daughter. When she has a bad dream or takes a tumble off of her bicycle, I hold her assure that God is just as surely with her as I am.

At times, my daughter needs comforting because of something I’ve done. Whether I’ve made her angry by not giving her something she wanted or cut her off when she’s interrupted her mother, she does not then seek strengthening or support from me.

Her comfort options currently include:

Continue reading “The Purpose of Comfort”

But He gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says:

“God opposes the proud
but shows favor to the humble.” James 4:6

When I’m being proud, I never think to myself, “What I’m doing right now is prideful!” I remain unaware of it until later reflection.

Most often, my pride comes in the form of dismissive judgment of someone else: someone else’s self-care, theology, or (gulp) parenting.

The implication of my judgment is, “I’ve got it figured out. They don’t.”

Very rarely is this implication accompanied by a “thanks to the grace of God” tagline.

Instead, I’m implying that my good old-fashioned self-drive and self-determination has led me to take superior care of my body, soul, and child.

This pride is something, aptly, I’m not at all proud of.

There was a tiny fable I used to tell an awful lot when people would ask me about my first year of parenting.

I would say:

Continue reading “Humility”

“God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged.” Hebrews 6:18

Because we depend so much on God’s revealed word for our knowledge of Him, it is essential that we trust Him.

This promise from Hebrews, then, is a comforting one. God cannot and will not lie. We can trust what He tells us.

Yet, God has not revealed Himself in an easy to follow owner’s manual. We can be sure that what He has given us is true, but it is occasionally hard to know what to do with truth or even what that truth actually is. People can agree that the Bible is God’s word — that the words in it are not lies — and disagree about what His word is saying.

I’ve been thinking about this as my daughter gets older and learns more of the Bible. I treasure her childlike faith in the stories of the Bible, but it’s sometimes unclear to me whether or not she thinks of the stories she hears as historically truthful; truthful in the way that, say, a parable is truthful; or something neither true nor false (i.e. the categories don’t occur to her).

Over the past three months, I know she’s developing a greater sense of truth and falsity because I’ve started using the pair to have conversations with her. In fact, on the way home from school yesterday, she asked for a game of true/false.

Me: True or false: you ate your lunch.

Continue reading “True / False”

“You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.” Psalm 139:3

The fact that God knows everything we do can be comforting and frightening, depending on whether or not we feel close to Him.

In this Psalm, the speaker feels both emotions: confidence that God is always there and the recognition that there’s nowhere to escape.

I have nothing close to God’s omniscience and omnipresence. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to know everything and be everywhere.

But I have felt conflicted about my daughter’s presence and absence plenty of times.

When we are with each other for too long, I want separation.

“Can’t you spend some time on your own? Where can I go from your presence?!?”

Continue reading “Never Alone”

“In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’ ” Acts 20:35

Our daughter is an only child, so she receives a lot: of attention, affection, and (of course) toys.

Since she’s only five, she doesn’t have the resources to give much more than her attention and affection. It’s a blessing that she loves to do that. She’s a snuggler, a hugger, and (especially when a camera’s around) a smiler.

In church, however, she loves to give money (provided that we’ve given her the money).

Right or wrong, I tend to associate Paul’s admonition with money and the virtues of learning that giving money is more blessed than receiving it.

It reminds me that one of the things I miss most about virtual or safely distanced church services is the gathering of the tithes and offerings.

My daughter is by far the youngest person in our church, and once we began regularly attending, she established a ritual of putting a few coins in the tiny church bank that sits on the platform as her great uncle collected checks and paper money from the rest of the congregation.

Pretty soon, our daughter was collecting coins from everyone on her side of the church, and her coin dumping operation would routinely last long past the offertory song.

Clunk.

Continue reading “Blessed”

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” Matthew 7:7

This verse from the Sermon on the Mount follows some of Jesus’s strongest warnings about hypocrisy.

Don’t judge someone by a standard you don’t want them to use on you.

Don’t go after small things in someone else’s life when you have big things in your own you haven’t taken care of.

Don’t make holy things irrelevant or trite.

These promises about asking, seeking, and knocking then assume we’ll be asking, seeking, and knocking sincerely.

Don’t ask if you don’t really want an answer.

Don’t seek if you don’t really want to find something.

Don’t knock if you don’t really want in.

This past week, I’ve been playing the game Hide and Seek with my daughter. We’ve played this game at various times over the past two years, and playing it for a few days with her has given me a chance to see how much she’s grown.

Continue reading “Hide and Seek”

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me — watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” Matthew 11:28–30

I love the phrase “the unforced rhythms of grace.”

Grace is something you don’t expect. It’s unmerited.

But when God gets involved, grace has a rhythm. It has a beat. We can learn it when we walk with Jesus.

The moments when I’m most frustrated with my daughter — and least likely to show her grace — come when I myself am not well rested. I have a schedule, a plan for how things are supposed to go — how I expect them to happen.

Life during the pandemic doesn’t quite work out that way.

It’s why everyone is so zealous to get back to normal. We want to find a rhythm that we can a follow, a beat that we can keep time with.

Continue reading “Dancing to the Beat of Grace”

“Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 37:4

The Psalmist is not promising that if we delight in God, we will get a million dollars. He’s telling us that if we truly delighted in the Lord — if we saw him as the infinitely valuable lover of our souls that He is — we would want nothing more than more of Him.

At dinner tonight, my daughter extolled the virtues of nachos. “Chips, cheese, and beans,” she declared. “They are so delicious.”

Indeed.

Continue reading “Delighting In Small (And Large) Things”