Kristen Anne Glover

Five in Tow

30 Days to Enjoying Your Children More: Forgiveness {Day 5}

Looking for the beginning of the series? Click here!

It was not the best day to go to the pumpkin patch.  The clouds hung like furrowed brows over the sullen fields.  Everything was brown, except the things that were gray, and anything that wasn’t gray was about to be because it looked like rain.

But it wasn’t raining yet, and you can’t very well stay home on a chance of rain when you live in the Pacific Northwest or you’d never go anywhere.  Besides, I wanted to fill our Saturdays with memorable activities to help pass the months while my husband was away on Army duty.

Despite the chill in the air, the kids and I donned our fleece jackets and boots and headed off.  All of us were happy to muck about in the fields and look for the craziest pumpkin.  All but one child.  One child did not want to go to the pumpkin patch, or watch cannons shoot pumpkins into the woods, or go on a hay ride.  One child chose to be sullen and mean like the clouds over the field.  One child rained all over our fun family outing.

I was not prepared for that kind of weather.  It wouldn’t have been so bad if I wasn’t trying so hard to make sure my children were happy and well-loved during their father’s absence.  This child was fighting against all the good I had planned for them, and it hurt.

That night, after I put the kids to bed and the house was finally still, I shut myself in to the bathroom and succumbed to the heaviness of my heart.  I felt sad and wounded.  The evidence of ugliness lingered, like a bruise on my skin.

I turned the water as hot as it would go and stepped into the shower.  It’s easier to think in the shower, and to cry.  Words tumbled out into the water, words of sorrow over these sins lurking in such a young heart.  It seemed silly at first, like it shouldn’t have mattered as much as it did.  Kids do stuff like that.  I was probably being too sensitive.

But that childish choice had brought a division into our home.  It had taken the beauty of the day and marred the fellowship we shared.   It stood between my own child and me and threatened the closeness we enjoyed.  It wasn’t just immaturity.  It was sin, and I hated that it was here, in my home, in my child.  In me.

It was the same old struggle in new flesh.  How I wish I could have spared him from this awful inheritance!

So there, in my little earthly temple, I pleaded to God for forgiveness for the one whose heart had been so hard that day.  “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy…”

The bitterness of the day vanished.  I found myself called to the place of Christ, not as a servant, but as a faithful high priest, earnestly interceding to God on behalf of my children.  It was as if I was standing in the gap between my children and God, clothed in Christ, asking for forgiveness for their weaknesses.  In the pattern of Christ, who prays for me, I prayed for my children as one who understands them and loves them.  I know them because they are mine.

It is an awesome thing to be a kingdom of priests, and nowhere is the reality of that calling more pronounced than when I come before the throne of God on behalf of my covenant child.  How I understand their weaknesses!  How I desire for their good, for their reconciliation to their Father!  When I grieve for the sins of my children, who often are unable yet to grieve for them themselves, it moves the heart of God.

It moves mine as well.  It is difficult to enjoy a child who hurts, offends, and disobeys.  It is hard to want to be around a child who selfishly ruins a perfectly good day by his actions or attitudes.  Even a very small person can inflict a great deal of pain.

But when I take on a ministry of reconciliation and stand in as a priest for my children, I am reminded that their offenses—as hurtful or annoying as they may be to me— are ultimately sins against God.  They are not just childish rebellions to be dismissed.  They are real sins with eternal consequences.   When my toddler refuses to obey, it is sin.  When my daughter treats her siblings harshly, it is sin.  When my son lies, it is sin.

What an awful reality.  Speaking the truth of it back to God and asking for forgiveness acknowledges the fact that my children are sinners in need of repentance.  Hearing the words spoken brings my awareness into the situation.  I cannot ignore their weaknesses when I am confessing them aloud.

It is a truth that turns my heart for my children back to God and renews my purpose to teach and train them in the way they should go because I know the consequences of sin.  I am weak!  I am prone to wander just as they are.  I see their weakness and I have compassion on them.  I understand.

But I also know the solution to the problem.  That is the beauty of the priestly role.  It allows me the opportunity to point my children to Christ, the true High Priest, the true Sacrifice.  Struggling with my children’s sin is one of the hardest parts of parenting.  But leading them to the Source of all forgiveness is truly the greatest joy.

I am writing to you, little children, because your sins have been forgiven you for His name’s sake.
1 John 2:12

Thank you for reading!  Please join us tomorrow for Day 6: Discipline. 

For further thought

1) Have you thought about yourself as a priest as we are called in 1 Peter 1:9?  Why or why not?

2) How is your role as a priest different than Christ’s role as a priest?  How is it similar?  See Hebrews 4:14-5:10.

3) Can you have a ministry of reconciliation in your home if you are harboring bitterness or taking offense at the sins of your children?  How can t help to recognize that their sins are ultimately sins against God?

30 Days to Enjoying Your Children More: Sacrifice {Day 4}

Thank you for joining us! You can find Day 1 here.

When I was young, my mother read stories.  She read stories at naptime and stories at bedtime and stories any time she didn’t know what else to do.  She filled hours and hours of rainy days with books.  Together, we looked in the windows of a little house in the middle of big woods, chased a very fat rabbit through an English garden, and hoped to anything that a spider could find a way to save a pig.

Sometimes she read missionary biographies, and our living room became the densest of jungles.  We held our breath through cannibal country and the dangerous back-allies of the Orient.  We watched the Moravian missionaries seal their belongings into caskets and send them off to Africa, where they would surely die.

It was fabulously romantic and terribly heroic to a seven-year-old with an overactive imagination and a particular aptitude for martyrdom.  I could take up a cross like that and carry it to glory.

But it is God who orders the sacrifice, and it is God who cuts the cross.  To my surprise, I was not made for being a martyr, but a mother.

The sacrifices of motherhood are not glorious like I desired.  They rarely draw the attention of the crowd.  Motherhood carries the simple, ordinary cross of ordinary days.  It is the cross of daily self-denial in the mundane circumstances when no one is watching.

It is not particularly notable, and hardly ever acknowledged.  It is lonely and monotonous and altogether mindless, sometimes.

And that’s the rub.  It is all so ordinary.  The dailyness of this cross cuts against my flesh.  I have other gifts to offer, other talents to showcase, but here I am, doing nothing more than making lunches and wiping noses day after day after day.  That’s hardly the stuff that changes the world, I think.

I begin to feel a bit like Cain, who found the sacrifices of God to be unbearable, not because he could not give them, but because he could not give what he wanted.  He was a man with a garden, but the sacrifice was meat.  That kind of sacrifice didn’t make him look good at all.  It didn’t showcase his natural talents or abilities.  It was the standard one-size-fits all model, and he wanted a custom fit.

Dissatisfaction settles in where pride has left an open door.  It settled in to Cain, and human blood was spilled onto trembling earth.  Some days, it settles in to me, and I begin to feel the hardship of my position under a cross that isn’t glorious at all.  Pride tells me I am losing my life—my self—for nothing.

That is a lie that keeps me crippled under the weight of a burden that is supposed to be easy.  It is a lie that steals the joy of motherhood and the joy of giving to God the very thing He has asked of me.

In those moments, when I am feeling so small, so devoid of anything good to give to God, I must embrace the words of truth.  There is no greater love than this, than to lay down my life for another.   To give my life for my children is the most profound and powerful way I can serve Him.   It is the simplest and most irrefutable way I can proclaim Him.  Motherhood is the gospel in action.

When I embrace the dailyness of motherhood, I am embracing the daily giving of one life for another.  It is a picture of the gospel that all the world longs to see.  It is a sacrifice that touches the hearts of my children and secures a godly remnant for a future generation.  And that is just the thing that can change the world.

If my seven-year-old self could see me now, she might be disappointed, at first.  But the beauty of the cross is this: when I give God the sacrifices He desires in the way He requires, I find joy.  It is awfully daily, awfully ordinary, and far more glorious than anything I could have imagined.

 

Please join us tomorrow for Day 5: Forgiveness

For further thought

1)      Read Psalm 51:17.  What are the sacrifices God requires of you?

2)      Micah 6:8 is a well-known passage.  Think about it in light of motherhood.  How can you please God in your daily calling?

3)     Do you sometimes feel like Cain?  What are the sacrifices you would like to bring to God?  Consider this in against the writing of the apostle Paul, who had reason to boast about his sacrifices for God.  What brought Paul the greatest joy in serving God (see Philippians 3:7-11).  How does Paul’s perspective change the way you view the mundane aspects of parenting?

30 Days to Enjoying Your Children More: Priority {Day 3}

Just joining us? You will find Day 1 of the series here.

Last year, a man with a couple of kids moved in with the woman in the green house up the street.  The kids, who introduced themselves as Chance and Hailey, had been living with their dad and a couple of older half-brothers until their dad met Sandy.  They told us their dad was going to marry her, and they started calling her mom.  They had never had a mom before so they tossed the word around their lips like something sacred.

But we could hear the yelling down the street.  We saw Chance and Hailey standing on the sidewalk while words that should never be spoken were shouted into the air.  They sneaked into our yard and hung around the apple tree and asked us what we were having for lunch.  Sometimes, when I asked if they had already eaten at their house, Chance would shrug and say, “We’re not allowed to go home ‘cause Mom—our mom—is cleanin’.”

One day, Hailey came running up to me, tears streaming down her face.  She had a bright red spot on her knee.  “I need a Band-aid!” she wailed.  It wasn’t a terrible scrape, for all her carrying on, but it was bleeding, and the blood was getting all over her clothes.

“I can get you a Band-aid,” I said, “but I think it’s better if you go home so you can get cleaned up.”

“I already went home!” Hailey bawled.  “My mom told me I couldn’t come in because I’d get blood on the carpet!”

I stared in disbelief at the green house up the street.  I had already known the children were not a priority, but to hear it like that hurt.  I hurt for the children, but also hurt for Sandy.  I guess I understood, a little.  I wished I didn’t, but my heart is deep and full of shadows and I know something of selfishness.

Like her, I have traded my joy for my children for the tyranny of the moment.  I have been angry when muddy feet tramped all over my freshly-mopped floor.  I have been too busy making dinner to be bothered with one more scraped knee.  I have gotten my children dressed for church while yelling at them because we’re late.

I know the cost of mixed-up priorities, and it weighs on my heart.  I want more for my children than that.  I want more for me than that.

But it is so easy, when my toes are in the dirt and my hands busy about the stuff of earth, to forget that this is not my kingdom.  It is easy to forget that almost everything I do here doesn’t really matter at all, at least, not the way I think it does.  When I am dead and gone my kids will not care if the living room was tidy or not, nor will they remember most of the things that I did.  What they will remember is if they were loved.

Love must always be my priority.  It is the thing that outlasts all my doings.  It is not the capstone on my list of achievements; it is the cornerstone.  If I do not have love, nothing I do matters, and I am no better than the woman in the green house up the street who worries more about her carpet than the heart of her child.

Love must permeate everything I do in my home, and my priority must be this: to wake up every day with the intention to live out my faith through love in front of my children.

This does not mean that the to-do list doesn’t get done.  It means that love drives the to-do list.  Love determines what is the best thing to be done.  Love keeps my eyes on eternity and asks the hard questions about what my children really need.

It is the simplest and hardest thing.  Love can’t fit into a box and be checked off.  It can’t be measured the way stacks of folded laundry can.  This priority requires me to seek wisdom, to understand the unique needs of my children, and to give up a false perfectionism.

Some moments, the best way to love my children might be doing the laundry.  Other times, it might mean listening, correcting destructive behaviors, giving them time to recharge, or grabbing them in a great big hug.

Always, it means pressing in to the Author of Love because I cannot give what I do not have.  I must hold fast to the truth that God’s plan for me is better than any plan or purpose I have for myself.  The children He has entrusted to me are a gift, not a duty, and I will have no greater honor in this life than if my children can say they knew the love of God because of how I loved them.  That is more important than an immaculate kitchen or being on time for soccer practice because that is the stuff of eternity.

And nothing impacts eternity more than love.

Love is the stuff of eternity

For further thought

1) 1 Corinthians 13 is a famous chapter on love.  What does it have to say about works done without love?

2) If you are like me, reading through the attributes of love can be like reading through a list of failures.  I obviously, continuously, and outrageously mess up love.   Which aspect of love is hardest for you?

3) Read 1 John 4:7-11.  What is the source of all love?  What are your actions toward your children saying about what you believe about God?

4) My prayer for you today comes from Philippians 1:9-11: “I pray that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve the things that are excellent, in order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ; having been filled with the fruit of righteousness which comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.”

Join us on Monday for Day 4: Sacrifice.