Parenting Adult Children

Last week Anne and I had a really sad day.  On Monday we both left for work and came home to an empty house.  Not that we didn’t come home to an empty home many days but this was different.  The last of our six children had packed her car and left for college.  What was amazing was she left us some notes expressing love and appreciation that made us cry.  I read them first so I knew what was coming for Anne when she got home.  Then on Wednesday we drove to Liberty University and helped her move into her dorm.  There was definitely a solemnity on the drive home.  Things have changed—it's already different.

I had the privilege of raising six children.  I remember vividly towing six little ones behind us everywhere we went, including all the needed childhood paraphernalia like strollers and portacribs, and longing for the day they were older.  But nothing prepared me for the difficulty of the years to come.  I no longer had to carry them in my arms but the emotional burden I took on for each of them was enormously harder.

It’s been a decade since I began to parent adults and now they are all in that category.  I’m far from being an expert but I have learned a few things as my parenting has shifted in this new stage of life.  Maybe they will encourage you.

You can’t!  The first and maybe most important thing I learned was that I couldn’t parent adults.  There comes a time in the lives of our kids when they come from under our control and leadership and they spread their own wings.  If I continue to try to parent them from the position of authority and power that I’ve used until then, I will only drive them away and damage our relationship. 

I didn’t get it at the time, but when I went off to college my own father wrote me a note telling me just that.  He told me I was now my own man and I had to make my own decisions.  He’d be there, offer counsel and help me in any way he could, but I was now a man.  Many of us will never say that to our kids but it’s going to happen regardless.  They will become their own person and emancipate themselves from our parentage, whether we want them to or not.  It will help if I will accept that I am no longer ultimately responsible for them—they are now responsible for themselves before God.

You trust!  When you come to the place of surrendering your right to parent your adult kids, you must also, at the same time, trust God to lead them and help them.  I don’t care what the context, it’s always scary to trust God—to surrender control.  I don’t know about you but I made plenty of mistakes as a young man—still do—and consequently I want to spare my kids those same mistakes.  Let’s be honest, we too often want to make decisions for them.  But don’t you realize that God has used every one of your failures to make you who you are?  I don’t mean that we should want our kids to fail or make mistakes, but I am saying we have to trust God that He will work through it for their good—as He did with us.

And here’s what that means specifically: you and I must let them shoulder the responsibility for the decisions they make.  I’m not saying we never rescue our adult children, sometimes we should, but far too often we don’t allow them to experience the consequences of their choices and thereby stymie their growth.  Too many moms and dads are too often bailing their adult children out instead of trusting God.  I remember Anne once heard the Lord tell her that she was getting in the way of what He was trying to do in our kids lives.  It takes a tough love to let our kids grow through pain, but we must learn to trust God.

You pray!  Along with trusting God, we commit ourselves to remember them to God through prayer.  The Bible book of James says prayer can greatly change things.  As God is sovereignly superintending our world, He can rescue or direct our kids in response to our petitions.  If anything we need to prioritize prayer for our adult kids, but it’s equally true that our supplications do as much or more for us in the area of trusting God.  In other words, the more I pray for my kids the easier it is to trust God’s work in their lives.

You counsel!  This may sound contradictory to what I’ve already said, and I confess it takes some balance, but we never give up the role of counselor to our kids.   We must relinquish the desire to control them, to tell them what to do, but never the responsibility to speak into their lives.  The Bible actually calls us to speak into each others lives as brothers and sisters in Christ; how much more should we do that as parents to our grown children?  The difference is we speak, not from a position of power or parental authority, but rather from a loving, equal relationship.  Jackie, a friend of ours and a mother of three adult children in their late 30’s---early 40’s, says she always tells her kids what she thinks but what they do with it is up to them.

You love!  There is nothing more needed by our adult kids than for us to love them.  But what does that mean?  Loving them means you pour into them what they greatly need from you.  They need you to respect them, to believe in them, and to affirm them.  When they don’t call as much as you like, you call them.  When you wish they’d initiate more, you still take the lead without pouting or getting your feelings hurt.   You love them.  You tell them often and you show them continually.

Parenting toddlers had its challenges, but so does parenting grown-ups.  However there is also great reward in this new parental relationship and I’m looking forward to what lies ahead as I walk with my adult children.

Missions And Your Children

One of the concerns I’ve often heard from people considering a life invested in missions is, “What about my kids?”  Parents worry about how the experience of growing up overseas will affect their children.  Now I think that is a valid concern.  I remember how I felt driving into Tete, Mozambique on a trip seeking to discover whether Anne and I should move there.  I remember vividly thinking, “How would my kids adjust to living here?”  Well, my life is at least in part a product of the decision my parents made to give their lives in service in the small Latin American country called Uruguay.  I don’t doubt that there will be some losses for your children if you were to follow God’s lead to a culture worlds away, but there are many positives too.  Let me share a few of them. 

L-R (Steve, Don, Jimmy & Alan)

Maybe this will be the most obvious, but your children will grow up bilingual.  As our world becomes progressively smaller with rapid transportation and the networking of the World Wide Web, being able to speak two languages is such a boon.  It will not only open doors of opportunity in business, but it will give them an open door to many relationships they never would have had otherwise.   From my own perspective, being able to speak Spanish along with English is something I treasure profoundly.

Your children will be multi-cultural and by that I mean, they will see themselves as something broader than just Americans.  Please don’t misunderstand.  I love our country.  There is not a country in the world like America.  Her freedoms and opportunities are indeed the shining star of our world, and I believe those have come about because of our Judeo-Christian heritage--but I’ll leave that to another post.  But my point is that I am just as much a Uruguayan, in my heart, as I am an American.  I love Uruguay.  I was raised there.  Uruguayans are in part my people.  Please don’t hate me for this but if Uruguay and the USA ever meet in the World Cup, I’m confessing ahead of time I’ll probably be pulling for Uruguay.   When your children grow up in a different land, they have a bigger perspective than just America and I think that is a good thing.

Children of missionaries will often be stretched emotionally and socially, and as a result be more adaptable to what comes their way.  Because we are kids of two lands, two cultures, we learn to change, to adjust, from homeland to homeland.  Back here in Virginia, where we’re from, Christmas is in the winter; it’s usually extremely cold and we’re all hoping for a white Christmas.  Where I grew up in Uruguay Christmas is in the dead of summer, sometimes in the nineties on Christmas day.  And Christmas is celebrated with fireworks, not Christmas carols.  As a son of missionaries, I learned to roll with the tide.  Change and differences were a regular part of life.

I know every child is different, but I believe another positive from growing up in a foreign land will be an earlier and greater maturity.  I’m assuming this maturity comes about because of some of the things I’ve already mentioned, for example the flexibility and the multi-culturalism, but your children will tend to rapidly mature emotionally and socially.  From an early age I rode buses in a large metropolitan city of a million and a half—by myself.  Consequently, at the age of seventeen my parents allowed me and another friend of the same age to travel to Europe.  For the next five weeks we toured all over the continent with only a train pass, a map to different youth hostiles, and a small pack of clothes.  I recognize that was a different day, and I’m not so sure they’d be willing to do that in these times, but my point is that we tend to mature early on.  I asked my parents, as a parent myself, how could they have let their seventeen-year-old son do that?  Their response was simply, “You were mature enough and we knew you could be trusted.”

Celebrating Dad's Birthday with Family

There is one more thing your children will gain if you choose to invest your life in reaching the nations—they will get an extended family that will be theirs until they die!  I said I treasure being bilingual, and I do, but I treasure just as much or more the “aunts and uncles” that come along with being part of a mission.   Every one of my parent’s fellow missionaries became my uncle Dennis or my aunt Peggy.   Even at the good ole age of fifty-five, it’s hard for me not to call them uncle Jimmie or aunt Norma.  They will always be family to me and your fellow missionaries will always be family, true family, loving family, to your kids as well.

I know that not every missionary kid or every mission experience will fit the bill as I’ve described it here, but I'm convinced most will.  Don’t be afraid to follow God’s lead to the ends of the earth because of what it will do to your children.  Your children will be blessed beyond measure.

When God Says “No”

Has God ever said “No” to you?  I mean have you ever asked God for something and He hasn’t granted it?  Sure, that’s happened.  Who hasn’t asked for it not to rain for a special outing but it still pours like ‘cats and dogs?’  Or who hasn’t needed rain badly, and asked for it repeatedly, but God allows the drought to continue.  There are many times we ask for things and God’s answer is to not give them.  Most of the time those things are something we desire, but in the grand scheme of life, they aren’t too important to us.  But has God ever said “No” to something that your soul longs for, maybe even as much as you desire life itself?  This dream, this desire, this yearning may be a lonely person’s desire for a relationship, a barren woman’s desire for a child or a sick person’s desire for healing.  The list of those all-consuming dreams could actually be very long.

We follow Jesus.  We love Him.  We trust Him.  We serve Him.  And though we’d never articulate these words, in our hearts we often believe “He owes us,” and we can’t even imagine why He wouldn’t grant us what we ask for.  Yet we ask Him for it repeatedly and the continued answer is a firm “No.”   Maybe there even comes a time when we hear God clearly tell us, “The answer will always be ‘No’; I’m not changing my mind on this one.”   Either way, at some point the reality sets in, God is saying no to our dream or desire. 

Have you ever been there?  Have you heard God say “No” to an intense longing in your heart?  I dare say most of us have—maybe all of us.  When that happens I believe we are faced with two possible responses.  The first is we can doubt the nature of God, His character and even His identity.  I think this is what happened to John the Baptist in the times of Jesus.  Remember he was the one God sent to prepare everyone for Jesus’ coming.  John announced Him and then pointed Him out.   But after John had been imprisoned for some time he sent word to Jesus, “Are you really the one or do we need to wait for another?”  So this man who had been so convinced Jesus was God’s Savior, now doubted.  Why?  It doesn’t tell us for sure but I believe it was because Jesus wasn’t doing what John thought He should.  Maybe John thought Jesus was going to raise an army and attack Rome; so many Jewish believers thought like that.  But maybe what he thought was that Jesus should have released him from prison.  I have a feeling John had been praying for that, but God continued to say “No.”  So, somewhere along the line, John began to doubt the very nature of Jesus.   “Are you the one?  Are you the Savior?”

When God says “No” to that which means so much to us, our tendency is to entertain thoughts that God doesn’t love us or that God isn’t who we think He is.  We begin to doubt the nature of Jesus, His divinity and His love for us.  Our inner, natural man begins to whisper to our hearts, “If God really loved you, He’d answer yes.”   Or, “If Jesus really was God, He’d say yes.  Maybe Jesus isn’t really who you think He is.”  And then like John, we begin to ask, “Jesus, are you the one or is there another?”

But there is another path we can take in the face of God’s “No” answer to our desires.  We can choose to trust Him.  We can choose by faith to still believe and know that God loves us and cares for us, and we can surrender that longing or desire to Him.  I used to think of this as me putting my desire or dream in the pantry storage room and leaving it there; but always knowing that one day God could still choose to go in, get it out, and give it to me, somewhat like He did for Abraham when he took his son Isaac, and with every intention of his heart surrendered him to God.  God gave Isaac back to Abraham in part because Abraham trusted and loved God enough to surrender him.

You may be asking, “How do I do that?  It’s so hard to lay this dream down?”  Do you remember what Jesus told John?  “Blind people receive sight. Disabled people walk. Those who have skin diseases are made ‘clean.’ Deaf people hear. Those who are dead are raised to life. And the good news is announced to those who are poor.”  Here’s what Jesus was saying to John, “Take your eyes off yourself--your expectations, and even your desires--and look at who I am and what I’ve done.  Look at me—not your unanswered expectations.”  That applies to us too.  When God says “No," and we hear the whispers in our soul that God doesn’t love us or maybe that He isn’t who we thought he was, look at what you do know.  Look at the cross of Jesus.  For God so loved you that He sent Jesus to be your Savior.  The cross is the apex of God’s love for us.  Look at the resurrection of Jesus, for it is the concrete proof that God loves you and that Jesus is God.  Then look around today.  See what God is doing.  See the lives He’s changing and the hearts He’s transforming.

Jesus’ last words to John were, “Blessed is anyone who does not give up their faith because of me.”  Don’t give up your faith, your confidence, and your love for Jesus because He says “No” to your heart’s dream.  I know that doesn’t help with the pain that goes with God’s “No” to our desires, but it will help us trust in Him.  It will help us surrender our longings to Him.  It will help us stay faithful and be filled with faith, even when we don’t understand.  Charles Spurgeon once said, “God’s too good to ever be unkind; He’s too wise to ever make a mistake.  So if you can’t see His hand you can trust His heart.”  Don’t let God’s no’s derail your faith.  Trust Him. 

Invest your time

Welcome to August!  Another month rolls by under our feet and it won’t be long before summer is in our rear view mirror.  Last night at the combined worship service our church shared with a sister church, a brother approached me and introduced himself.  "You probably don’t remember me,” he said, “ but I was at a men’s meeting when you spoke at Tucker Swamp church years ago.”  It took some mental jarring but as he explained, I did remember.  He reminded me that the very day I spoke I had gone scuba diving with a friend and we had watched another diver drown when a piece of his equipment failed.  (He was diving alone which was definitely a no-no.)  I changed my talk that evening and spoke on the brevity of life; life is but a vapor.  The brother last night said, “I’ve never forgotten that talk; it made an impact on my life.”  

So this morning let me just remind us all to treasure our days, to use them wisely.  They are passing by so quickly; James says that our lives are “but a vapor,” a puff of smoke.  In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul encourages them to "make the most of their time” and I’d like us to hear that challenge.  What does that mean, ‘make the most of my time?’  In context Paul goes on to say “understand what the will of the Lord is” so obviously making the most of our time means using it the way God wants us to.  I’d like to suggest three investments of your time that God wills.

1. Invest it in your personal relationship with God.  'Chair time;’ that's my favorite way of referring to it.  Each day use part of your time to read your Bible and talk with God.  Read another book too if you can, like a Christian biography that will inspire you.  We say we follow Jesus so let’s follow Him; every morning that’s exactly what Jesus did.  He spent some time with God.

2. Invest time in your family.  If you are married, give time to your spouse to talk, to cuddle, and to serve.  Communicate.  Encourage and build each other up with your words.  Carve out time for that.  If you have kids, give time to them.  Play with them.  Read to them.  Do sports with them.  Just be with them.  Dedicate time for them too.

3. Invest time in God’s Kingdom work.  As a young boy Jesus told his parents, “Don’t you know that I had to be about my Father’s business?’  Do you know what God’s business is?  It’s people!  It’s serving and redeeming and transforming people.  We too need to give time to serve our King and further His Kingdom by investing in people.  That means giving time to be a part of God’s family.  It means giving time to help reach people who don’t know our Father.  It means giving time just serving others like Jesus did.  Christian leaders are often informing us that Christ-followers today are valuing the church, and by that I mean God’s people, less and less.  We no longer prioritize our gatherings or ministry.  We are willing to use less and less of our time to love, serve and invest in others.  I want to encourage us to be different.  I urge you to push back against that trend and instead of less, use more of your time to serve, love, reach and equip others. 

Life is fleeting, passing by so very quickly.  Use it wisely.  Invest it as the Lord desires you to.

Thirty years and three things I've learned

It’s hard to believe, but 30 years ago today Anne and I exchanged marriage vows.  I wish I could tell you that it has been an easy 30 years or 30 years of bliss but that wouldn’t exactly be accurate.  The truth is that it’s been a hard run in many ways.  We didn’t date very long when we married--we dated two weeks and I asked her to marry me-- and we would have married in about a month; but my parents were out of the country, and they told me they would be extremely upset if we married without them present.  So we waited another two months.  The reality is we didn’t know each other and as it turned out, we were very different.  They say opposites attract, and that must have been what happened to us, because it wasn’t long into the marriage that those differences became pronounced. 

But a bigger hurdle to overcome was probably unrealized expectations.   You may think, as the stereotype would go, that Anne came to our marriage with grandiose expectations for marriage but by her own testimony she really didn’t have any.  It was I who had a head full of expectations.  Ever since I was a young seventeen-year-old I had longed to find the woman who would walk through life with me as my wife, and I had a dream of what that would look like.   Unfortunately, our marriage was different than the imaginings I had anticipated, and reconciling my dreams with reality was hard.

So we had ups and downs in marriage.  There were some good times but there were many where we struggled greatly.  I remember one year when heading to the SBC Convention in New Orleans, I left Anne crying because our relationship was so difficult.  God used my brother to open my eyes to some really detrimental attitudes and practices I was employing in my marriage and God radically changed in my heart upon my return.  We went to counseling numerous times in our marriage seeking help and though we’d often fall back into trouble, I think counseling helped every time. 

During our marriage God blessed us with six incredible kids that both of us adored.  We had three boys and three girls and I often said that God gave us the “Brady Bunch”-- boy-girl, boy-girl, boy girl.  We did our best to raise them to love the Lord Jesus and love each other.   Anne and I never “fought.”  By that I mean we were both raised in homes where our parents never yelled at each other, and that had never been our practice either.  In spite of our struggles, we weren’t openly combative and I believe that our kids felt relatively secure in our relationship.

We are now celebrating 30 years of marriage and I believe one of the reasons we managed to make it this far was the fact that we came to our marriage with a no-divorce policy.  When we got married we were committed to no divorce.  I don’t believe we ever talked about divorce, as we were committed to not even using that as a bargaining chip.  I wish I could tell you divorce never entered my heart, but that would not be true.  There came a time in my life when I gave up on our marriage and I wanted out.  If not for my fear of hurting my children, my church family and my Savior, Jesus, I most likely would have. 

With Anne's permission, I’d like to share with you three vital truths we’ve learned experientially in the last three decades.  Maybe you’ve been blessed with a fulfilling marriage, with little or no troubles, then most of this won't really apply.  Thank God for such a blessing.  But if like Anne and I you have had your struggles, maybe you will find this helpful.  

First, never think it can’t happen to you.  No one goes into marriage expecting anything but marital bliss; no one expects to fail or be anything but very happy.  The legendary myth was that one out of every two marriages fail but we now know that is just a statistic that was passed on and on without any basis in statistical analysis.  But the truth is still too many marriages fail, probably closer to one in four, but the reality is that no marriage is fail-proof.  When Anne and I were married the premarital counselor told us that we would probably struggle; I remember thinking how ludicrous that notion was.  Not us!  Never!  He didn’t know what he was talking about but even before the honeymoon to OBX was over, the cracks in our fail proof marriage were showing.  I never would have believed we'd struggle before the ceremony—no one could have convinced me-- but two sinful people are always in jeopardy of failing, including Anne and I, and including you.

Second, if you quit investing in your marriage, or in any relationship for that matter, it will not stay the same.  It will begin to degenerate and there will come a time when it is no longer ok to just be there but uninvolved.  When I quit investing in our relationship, Anne and I slipped further and further apart and eventually there came a time when I wanted out of my marriage.   Relationships are always built on people giving and receiving; if one stops that process, the relationship dies—it doesn’t stay the same—there is no neutral zone.

Third, marriage is what sustains love; love doesn’t sustain marriage.  That was Detrick Bonheoffer’s conviction and I’ve discovered it to be true.  I know that love is really much more than feelings, but let me talk about feelings of love for just a minute.  I believe that romantic love is important, we see it portrayed for us in the Bible in the Song of Solomon, but it's only a part of marriage.  Today we live in a culture when the emotions of romantic love and happiness are the highest ideals in marriage.  The Supreme Court just ruled that marriage is all about romantic love; gender and children are immaterial to marriage.  The problem is that if you make romantic love the highest goal in marriage, when you lose those feelings of love your marriage is in danger of ending.  So many divorces happen because people fall out of love and they are no longer happy.  A common cry of our day is, “I just want to be happy,” and when our spouse doesn’t make us happy anymore, the marriage ends. 

However a study by the National Survey of Families and Households found that 86 percent of unhappily married people who stick it out find that, five years later, their marriages are happier. Most say, they’ve become very happy indeed. In fact, nearly three-fifths of those who said their marriage was unhappy in the late ’80s and who stay married, rated this same marriage as either “very happy” or “quite happy” when interviewed again in the early 1990s.  Here's the point, if couples will stay married they can often find a way to work through the difficult times; I found that to be true.  My commitment to Jesus and his view of marriage, kept me from bailing on Anne and today we’re recovering the love that had grown emotionally cold.  

Now, before I leave this post someone might be saying, "Wonderful, I'm glad your marriage turned around and you guys are doing better but that can never happen for us."  Or someone else might be thinking, "This gives me hope but I don't even know where to begin."  Truly I can relate to both those thoughts-- I understand them clearly.  I don't mean to imply that any of what I've written is easy or without pain and much sacrifice.  I'd say that most of us who struggle need a third party to listen and help us sort through impasses that come along.  But the key to change, the first step to making it different, goes back to the second thing I learned: I can't choose to stay disconnected, unwilling to invest, and expect the marriage to change for the better.  Such a disconnected stance will only lead to the absolute disintegration of the marriage.  So the turn around that happened to us can happen to you, and the place to begin is to recommit yourself to invest.  Forgive the past and press into the future.  I know it's hard, but open yourself back up to give, to feel and even to be hurt again.

As Anne and I begin this fourth decade as a married couple, we're hopeful for all that lies ahead.  This morning Anne wrote me a note and I want to share with you the last paragraph: "But we have had some good times!  We have been together 10,950 days; We have been pregnant 1,596 days; We have been to 30 beach vacations; Been to Alabama about 50 times; Eaten about 21,900 meals together.  Well...you get it.  We have done a lot together.  Let's hang out together 30 more years.  Let's laugh more.  Go more places.  See more things.  Love each other better.  Let's make the last 30 the best!  I love you forever!"   We really have no idea all that God has in store for us in the years to come.  I know we're hopeful for more daughters-in-law and sons-in-law, and we're both looking forward to the grandparent years.  We're even entertaining the idea of foster parenting and one day going to the nations as missionaries in our retirement.  So many possibilities lie ahead of us in the years to come and of this one thing I'm confident, Jesus kept us by His grace and He will surely keep us 'til the end!