Parenting As an Opportunity, Not an Inconvenience

I've ordered the 3-DVD Parenting Seminar by Paul Tripp [Shepherding a Child's Heart] and am making it available to all  my "mom friends". Just ask! To whet your appetite, here's a recent post from Tripp's blog:

"We had planned a day at a local theme park with our children. I was anticipating a day of familial amusement park bliss. I was hoping that on this day my children would be self-parenting, and if God could throw in a fully sanctified wife, that would be cool!  Well, we’re getting out of the van at the park and one of my children said, “Dad, may we have something to drink before we go into the park?”  It didn’t seem like a dangerous request.  I opened the cooler, which was full of soft drinks, and all of my children sighted in on the one can of soda that they all knew was the best. Immediately global nuclear war broke out. They were pushing and shoving, grabbing and pulling, throwing ice at one another, saying unkind things and hitting one another’s hands out of the way. I couldn’t believe it. We weren’t even in the park yet, and my day was already ruined!

So I jumped in and said, “Do you want to fight? We don’t have to pay all this money for you to fight. I’ll take you home, put a cooler in the backyard with one can of soda in it, and you can fight forever!”  Soon my children aren’t fighting anymore because they’re watching the crowd gather as I lose it in the parking lot of the theme park.

Let’s analyze what’s going on in this moment and what’s happening inside of me. What’s going on is that a God of grace is taking a mundane moment of daily family life and using it to do something wonderful for my children and for me.  He is making the condition of their hearts visible in order to produce concern in me that would hopefully result in awareness and a desire to change in them.  But I’m not at all encouraged in this moment with what God is doing.  You see, I’m not angry in the parking lot because my children are sinners. No, I’m angry that God has exposed their sin, and because He has, I have to forsake my agenda for the day and parent them!  It all seems like a huge imposition, a hassle that I just didn’t want to deal with.

But the reality is different from God’s perspective. The sin, weakness, rebellion, or failure of your children is never an imposition on your parenting.  It is never an interruption.  It is never a hassle.  It is always grace. God loves your children. He has put them in a family of faith, and in relentless grace He will reveal their need to you again and again so that you can be his tool of awareness, conviction, repentance, faith, and change.  And because in these moments He asks you to forsake your agenda for His, this opportunity of grace is not just for your children, it’s for you as well.

But my problem is that there are moments when I tend to love my little kingdom of one more than I love His. So I’m impatient, discouraged, or irritated not because my children have broken the laws of God’s kingdom, but the laws of mine. In my kingdom there shall be no parenting on family vacation days, or when I am reading the paper on my iPad, or after ten o’clock at night, or during a good meal, or . . . I could go on.  And when I’m angry about interruptions to my kingdom plan, there are four things I tend to do.

1. I tend to turn a God-given moment of ministry into a moment of anger.


2. I do this because I have personalized what is not personal.  (Before we left for the amusement park that day, my children didn’t plot to drive me crazy in the parking lot.)

3. Because I have personalized what is not personal, I am adversarial in my response. (It’s not me acting for my children, but acting against them because they are in the way of what I want.)

4. So I end up settling for situational solutions that don’t really get to the heart of the matter.  (I bark and order, I instill guilt, I threaten a punishment and walk away, and my children are utterly unchanged by the encounter.)

There is a better way. It begins with praying that God would give you new eyes; eyes that are more focused on His eternal work of grace than on your momentary plans for you. This better way also includes seeking God for a flexible and willing heart, ready to abandon your agenda for God’s greater plan.  And it lives with the confidence that God is in you, with you, and for you and will give you what you need so that you can face, with courage and grace, the parenting moment that you didn’t know was coming."

Ted Tripp's Complete Blog Post