The problem with parenting.

So, I do this thing. Its madly unpopular, but nonetheless its something I do. It is called parenting. My wife and I are real old school when it comes to our kids. For instance, we actually think that it is our responsibility to raise them righteously. We not only made them, but we keep making them… into something we hope looks more like Jesus today than it did yesterday. In this undertaking we have learned there are no quick fixes, no silver bullets, and no 10 tricks on buzzfeed that is going to pull this off. There is just a slow process so bathed in the prayer that we hope they come out soaked in the Holy Spirit. It is without a doubt one of the most difficult and rewarding experiences that G-d in His sovereign love for me has allowed me to partake of. The souls I was given stewardship of are not an accident or a mere chance. I have come to realize that my children are a G-d arranged instrument. One that is meant to lead me to trust Him in depths that I struggle to dive into. It is really hard to put into words what my boys, and soon my first daughter, mean to me. It is awesome. Not awesome in all the ways that word is abused, but in the truest sense of the word.

My children are an awe-striking wonder to me. It baffles me that I would be so trusted. I marvel at their sheer existence.

They are also a huge pain in the butt. Moving them with us to France has exaggerated this reality. It would have been much easier to leave them with the grandparents for a few years (something I am sure the grandparents were tempted to bribe us to do). While it is really easy to be a parent, it is really hard to be a good parent. It is not until you try to raise kids that you realize why people choose to let somebody else do it. When you add how much they bother me to how much being in France bothers me: it causes me to boil just below the surface. While being in a foreign place does not shock me like it did earlier in my life, it still bothers me. For instance, it bothers me that a 55-year-old woman wore daisy duke booty shorts to play basketball at the gym here in France. It also bothers… no disturbs me… that there were men wearing essentially the same shorts. It bothers me that the French have not received the memo on computer technology and still requires 14 stacks of paperwork to apply for anything. It bothers me that the French speak French and I do not. While I do not get culture shock like I did in my early travels, there still exists a cultural “rub.” When this friction is added to my kids being hoodlums it is enough to make me into a rage monster. That is to say, a lot of small, petty things cause me to completely see red.

My kids, as you might guess, can turn cultural rub into a cultural punch to the throat.

For instance, in France you have to walk everywhere. EVERYWHERE. We walk more than Methuselah. We walk Chi to school. We walk to our school. We walk to the bus so after riding it we can walk to the train. I have realized that having a car in the states has seriously weakened my G-d given walking ability. We are recovering non-walking Americans: pray for us. My youngest son Deacon has this thing where he takes the smallest steps possible like the robot in the cartoon Big Hero 6 and just explores everything around him. We were trying to hurry home yesterday and Whitni caught him laying in the grass next to the sidewalk attempting to take a nap. While I understand the temptation, it is a minor tractor pull trying to get him to come along with us to any destination at a reasonable pace. A 15-minute walk becomes something that takes about the same amount of time to complete as a 4-year undergrad degree. Walking with Deacon is like sprinkling poison ivy on that “cultural rub.” It has honestly has crossed my mind to just leave him behind like the Spartan children of old in an attempt to strengthen him toward manhood. My wife disagrees with this plan of action for whatever reason. Seriously though, he is the personification of the Oklahoma term “lolly-gag.”

He is like trying to walk into the wind with a parachute strapped to your back. It is exhausting trying to convince him to keep up.

Then there is Malachi, my eldest. Malachi is on the other end of the spectrum. On the very same walk he will sprint out ahead in a glorious display of the speed his father passed down to him as an heirloom. He loves to jet out a mile ahead of us until we can no longer see him (which is a problem for all you non-parents out there). He runs off and tackles other kids, parkours on random objects, and has a serious lack of fear when it comes to cars or other fast moving objects. He is one intersection away from giving a French guy on rollerblades the concussion of his life. What is worse is that he hardly ever knows where we are going. You almost think that he has almost come to enjoy backtracking since he has to do it every 400ft or so.

He just gets to nowhere really, really fast.

You would think that the 7,000th time that he was out ahead of me and went the wrong way that it would convince him to walk beside, not out in front, of the only person who knows where we are going. Like his mother taking a French exam, I think Malachi considers himself a master at guess-work. So now we have two kids who are a half a mile in either direction of us. They have strayed away for very different reasons from the kind of Liam Neeson protection I can offer them here in France. One son I want to convince to walk like he has a purpose, the other I want to convince to walk like his purpose is the same as mine. Depending on the day, if you look at my life you will see that I am exactly like my sons when it comes to walking with G-d.

I either drag my feet when G-d is on the move, or I run out ahead mistaking speed for faithfulness. Surely there are few who have tested the patience of the Father more than me. I am a walking example of someone who looks for an excuse to abandon nearness to G-d. I have given him every excuse in the world to abandon me or to let me run off into some form of lostness alone.

These are the moments that make or break a Father. The problem is not the kids, but my reaction. The easiest thing is to just yell at them. I mean the French in our neighborhood wouldn’t even know what I was saying; especially if I really put my belligerent Southern Oklahoma trailer park accent into it. My wife and I have had many a discussion about how people lose their voice. Not that they lose the ability to make sounds, but that they lose the ability to be heard in their hearers hearts and minds. When we wear people out with the same words, tones, and instructions (aka nagging) it takes a toll on how our listeners connect with us. So, as helpful as strong words in my deep man-voice can be, they are not enough to fix this situation. The moment calls for something more. It begs for something from me, not them. It requires that I get personally involved.

Therein lies the problem with parenting; it is not convenient or easy on me.

Often I am fighting so hard to take the path of least resistance that I miss the opportunity to lay down my life for others the way that Jesus did. I am not sure how the Gospel affects all aspects of parenting, but I am sure it affects it this way. What is crazy is how I convince myself that it is somehow better for me to complain about how slow Deacon is walking than to throw him up on my shoulders and carry him in such a way that releases pure joy in his heart. It is one thing to gripe about how fast Malachi wants to run and it is another thing to race him down the sidewalk, forgetting whoever is watching. When my boys are old I wonder if they will remember me yelling at them from across the street or remember me carrying them, racing them, and making them into something that looks more like Jesus today than it did yesterday. These are the moments that can turn our story in very different directions, even if it does not seem like it.

One valuable lesson that I have learned is that when I take others burdens upon myself like Jesus did, there is a ‘worth it’ moment waiting for me on the other side of the struggle.

For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross. I wonder how much my joy can suffer and endure for others. At what point will my joy find its limits in service and tap out. It is a hard question. What is such a tragedy is that we are swimming in opportunity. I will be the first to admit that I am slow to love others like I love myself. This has a very powerful blinding effect and it cripples our response time. The truth is that we are wading through scores of ‘worth it’ moments. The problem is that they are on the other end of seasons of unwanted sacrifice. Initiating the first move is hard; just ask Jesus. We might say that the first step is a doozy. To not walk across the room, when G-d walked across time and space to get to you is kind of a mockery though, isn’t it? I am convinced this is why the Lord gives us glimpses. Fragments of what, and more importantly who, awaits us on the other end of obedience. We get a peep every now and then and it reminds us that it is ‘worth it.’

This last Sunday as we gathered in a park with a small group we are trying to plant in our neighborhood, there was one of these. To hear the Scriptures in French and to have a few French people there asking questions about the book of Philippians was soul reviving. It leaked a bit of life into my heart about what might be if we can only find enough grace not to give up. Then again, this last Sunday we gathered with a few French believers and sang songs to our Lord in French.

We went to the throne of grace in the heavenly places and we loved on our shared Lord. It was such an honor to praise Jesus with borrowed words from my French brothers and sisters. It staggered me with joy.

It enlivened me to think of what millions upon millions of French people would sound like on that glorious day when all tribes, tongues, and nations are before Him. It was even more clear how we might play a small roll in that vision being realized when the Lord brought one of my Muslim neighbors into conversation with me. As I attempted to share the Gospel in French she was captivated by the greatest story she had never heard before. We talked for nearly an hour and she left wanting to know more while I went to class wishing I knew better French. In that moment I could not remember any of the cultural “rub.” When she saw with eyes lit up the difference between Islam and Jesus there was this strange forgetfulness about anything we could have claimed to give up in order to be here. We no doubt are tempted to run ahead of Him with a will that is not His one day and the next day we are tempted to lie in the grass and quit. He keeps putting us on his shoulders.

He keeps convincing us that His navigation skills are better than mine and that He actually knows where He is going.

His grace keeps showing us glimpses. This is enough to compel us to keep going. We find ourselves drawn in closer to His side everyday. Tomorrow’s troubles will be met with tomorrow’s grace. I trust this because I know my heavenly Father is quick to take burdens like mine upon Himself in order to bring out the joy in those He loves.

He is a good parent after all.