Parenting isn’t easy.
I don’t know how else to put it. It is a 24-hours-a-day-7-days-a-week-365-days-a-year responsibility that lasts at least for 18 years…or longer depending on how long they stay in your house.
And the stakes are high. You are raising another human being…one tied to you genetically but also very independent from you. Get parenting wrong and the results can have lasting implications for you, your child, and for others. Get it right and you may still watch your efforts go down the drain as your teen whirls down his own self-chosen destructive path. There are no guarantees…except that your heart is going to be stretched, broken, tossed, turned, and possibly burned along the way.
Wow.
No wonder I meet more and more young couples who don’t want kids. Why take the risk? Why go through the hassle? Why spend the estimated $250,000 it takes to raise a child from birth to 18? What’s the point? Where’s the kickback? Perhaps when kids were the main caretakers and supporters of their aging parents, it made sense to have a boatload of them. But, hey, we have Social Security now. So maybe kids have worn out their welcome.
There is no pragmatic answer.
I can only give a personal one.
I wouldn’t trade the experience of raising my four boys for anything in the world.
Recently I took my 2nd son on a father-son adventure for his 13th birthday. The goal of the trip was to have fun with him, to challenge him to be a man of integrity, and to bless him–to affirm his strengths and let him know how much I love him.
To prepare for the trip, I re-read some of my old journals and copied excerpts to read to him. 13 years passes quickly. It has been awesome to watch him change. To grow from an infant to a teenager. Sometimes it is hard to believe that the young man that I am seeing in front of me is the same baby I cradled in my arms just a little over a decade ago.
But not only has my son changed but I have changed.
There is a verse in Psalm 127 that says: Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him. The word “heritage” is the Hebrew, nachalah. One of the definitions of nachalah is “a lot assigned by God.”
Children are an assignment. They are given by God to teach us.
We usually emphasize the responsibility of teaching our children. But in reality, they teach us more than we can ever teach them.
What have my kids taught me?
First, that I am more selfish and impatient than I ever realized. I thought I was ready for fatherhood. I had idealistic Anne Geddes’ pictures in my mind. Holding my precious gently sleeping baby on my calm ruggedly stoic chest. It wasn’t anything like that…and not just because I don’t have a ruggedly stoic chest.
I learned early on in parenting how much I valued my sleep…and how cranky I became when someone kept interrupting it. Babies and children don’t care about your needs. They only know their needs. And they want them met…by you…right now. Raising my boys gave me a crash course in servanthood. And as someone has said, “You’ll know if you are truly a servant when someone starts treating you like one.” I learned early on that I wasn’t much of a servant.
But more than patience and servanthood, my boys have expanded my heart. There was a side of me that I didn’t know existed…and I am not sure it would have been revealed in any other way. I have cried more since having children. I have prayed more. I have felt more. I have loved more. I can’t explain it and I won’t try to defend it. But I have experienced it.
I noticed it early on in parenthood. I remember watching the animated movie, The Prince of Egypt, and suddenly starting to cry. “Why am I crying?” I wondered. “This is a cartoon. And it isn’t even Bambi!” But for the first time I understood the emotions of Moses’ mom when she placed her son in that basket…not knowing what would happen to him…not knowing if it would be the last time that she laid her eyes on her child. I imagined the face of my son. The tears started flowing as the basket drifted down the river.
Now as my sons are older, I realize even more the vulnerability of my heart. I am tied to them in some strange kind of way. Their successes are my own. Their failures are mine as well. To see their joy is to feel it. To see their pain is to experience it. And yet, though I can’t imagine loving them any more than I do, they can ignore it all, misunderstand it all, spurn it all, despise it all.
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child! (William Shakespeare).
To be unappreciated and rejected by the very one you gave life to, gave time to, gave love to, gave your heart to. Can anything be more painful? Can anything feel more like death? Like a crucifixion?
God only knows.
And one of the best ways He can teach His children is by giving them their own.
