I work for an organization built around teaching parents to raise upstanding, God-fearing sons and daughters. The experts here know all the tools and tricks to helping that happen. They’ve studied all the studies. They’ve counseled countless families. And much of the time—maybe most of the time—it all works like they drew it up.
But being a parent isn’t like being a cook: We don’t mix together all the necessary ingredients, pop it in the oven and voila! We have a perfectly done 18-year-old. It’s not like being a chemist, who knows exactly what’ll happen if we mix so many sleepovers with such-and-such a class schedule with a set number of hours of TV time. Our children are not things we make. They’re people, with the power to make their own choices, and their own mistakes.
Those of us who are parents can, and perhaps should, accept the sad reality that we could’ve done better by our kids. But the choices they make are, ultimately, their own.
Our families don’t look a lot like those who stare back at us on our social media pages. Sometimes, those smiling pictures we throw up on Facebook or Instagram feel like a lie, and that the reality is closer to White Boy Rick: Anger. Dysfunction. An avalanche of terrible choices. We see our children make decisions we’d never want them to make, get involved with things we know could hurt them, even kill them. And we moms and dads—maybe especially Christian moms and dads—are filled with guilt and shame. We could’ve done better, we tell ourselves. We should’ve done better.
In times when I feel that way, it’s strangely gratifying to think about how messed up and sinful we all are. After all, God is our father—a perfect father, in fact. And yet, we all make some pretty messed up choices, too. Think your family’s messed up? I imagine Him telling me. Take a look at mine.
The choices we make are our own. And the choice to correct them, that’s ultimately our own, too.
That doesn’t make it any easier for worried moms and dads to watch their kids make poor choices. And sometimes, we do have the ability to jump into our kids’ lives and rescue them, at least temporarily. Like Rick did with Dawn, we can swoop in, lift them up and carry them home.
But even then, such rescue operations are only temporary. Rick lifted his daughter out of that one situation, but he couldn’t force her to come clean. He couldn’t force her to stay that way. Ultimately, the choice had to be Dawn’s.
It can take a long time for someone to make a choice to change their ways. I internalized this difficult lesson while helping Focus on the Family President Jim Daly to write his book, When Parenting Isn’t Perfect. He wrote:
God knows we’re not a patient people. He knows our need for resolution. He knows the anguish we feel when one of our children seems to go astray, the helplessness we feel when we can do nothing about it. And yet He asks us to wait.
And then maybe, after what may seem like a million years, the waiting pays off.
Maybe, he wrote. There are no guarantees in this.
And that’s like God, too—with us.
He waits.
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