Life Lessons in the Mess

The following is an excerpt from my interview with Lori Wildenberg on my podcast, You’ve Got This.

Don’t we want our life to be neat and not messy?

Lori: When we first start having kiddos, we think that if we follow a certain formula it will surely work out properly. But life is lived in the unexpected, isn’t it? And our kids are little humans with human frailties and human strong willed, just like we are. So life gets a little messy and it even did in the Garden of Eden.

As Christian moms, we take too much on ourselves to keep our lives from getting messy.

Lori: If we had it altogether and did everything perfectly and our kids did everything perfectly, how would our little ones learn empathy for anyone? Compassion would never be developed in a person who never experiences a little struggle or a little suffering. Our trials in our life help us develop a godly and a loving character toward other people.

The messiness teaches us much that we wouldn’t learn otherwise.

Lori: It is parenting that grows us and helps us understand the heart of God as well as how He feels about his children, and really how He does sets things out for us so we can life well, I really think that gives us a whole different perspective of who God is as well.

How do you encourage parents to connect with their kids?

Lori: We often know what we don’t want. We don’t want impatient kids, we don’t want kids to demonstrate anger in a way that’s destructive. I’ll say to parents: Think of the thing that we want instead of the behavior we don’t want. Let’s say a child is not cooperative or obedient, then the thing to work on is a cooperative heart. A parent should start noticing the times she is cooperative and build on those times when cooperation is demonstrated. To focus on that instead of the negative. We always have a short-term goal and a long-term goal. The long-term goal is character building, to build these various character traits in our kids. The way to build it is to focus on the thing that you want.

When we’re thinking of a positive character trait we want our child to work toward, that shifts the entire conversation within their home.

Lori: It empowers their parenting because now they are focused on what needs to be done. It also changes prayer because then we’re praying, “Lord move my child to have a more respectful attitude.” We want to pray a replacement prayer: “Lord, please remove the impatience and replace it with patience.” I think those are really powerful prayers to have for our kids. It focuses our prayers, it empowers our parenting and it changes our kid’s heart because they can see that they are being loved for who they are.

It helps us as parents to look at our child not as a problem, but as part of the solution. A large part of our job is to help our kids identify the sin in their heart and train our kids to get rid of the sin.

Lori: Where we are most effective is when we work out of relationship, and that’s the thing that makes the difference to our child. For instance, in my book The Messy Life of Parenting, I always talk to about relationship and interdependency, rather than independence. As a Western mindset, we feel that we need to raise our kids to be independent but what I think we mean is that we want to raise responsible children.

To hear more great advice and stories from Lori, listen to “Living Life in the Unexpected” on the “You’ve Got This” podcast.