Three Words for Christian Parents

My granddaughter and I had a conversation recently about family while cooking together in my kitchen—a narrow galley kitchen in a house of less than 1500 square feet:

Me: “Papa and I used to have lots of children living with us in this house. We had your daddy first, and then his sister, and then two more brothers! I wonder how many people that is all together who used to live here?”

My granddaughter, a spirited, math-loving three-year-old, is now intensely interested in how this conversation is going. Her attention is momentarily diverted from stirring the eggs. “How many?” she asks breathlessly, eyes wide. She holds up her fingers to count as I say the family names one by one.

“Six!” she shrieks in disbelief. “Six people in this house?” This cracks me up because that’s the exact response I got from certain people when we announced 18 years ago that we were having a fourth child, and that no, we were not planning to move.

“Yes, six!” I smile at her, and I’m overcome, as I so often am these days, at the memories in those two little words.

Because after 30 years of marriage, of raising four children who all started very small but quickly (so quickly) grew into full-sized humans who did indeed take up a lot of space in our small house … after all those years, this somewhat crowded nest is almost empty.

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Here is God’s plan for us when we begin families of our own: that we would raise up children—human beings made in his image—all the way to adulthood, even though we ourselves are far from perfect and in need of forgiveness every day. That we would be in charge of small, vulnerable, impressionable people 24/7, despite our fairly serious character flaws. That we would provide for them in every way throughout every life stage, even when our own sinful natures are in frequent conflict with theirs. When you think of the enormity of this task that God has set before parents, imperfect and ill-equipped as we are, it’s hard not to wonder, what was he thinking?

For insight into what God is thinking, we Christians turn to the Bible, and we see there that God is playing the long game. He’s not concerned so much with telling us how to deal with the day-by-day, minute-by-minute challenges of parenting; he’s concerned instead with the much larger goal of raising up people who will love and serve him all their days, in this world and the next. And God’s goals for our children (vs. our goals or the world’s goals) are a key to peace in parenting, whether your children are toddlers, teens, or adults.

When my husband and I look back over all our years of parenthood, with its many mistakes and its many moments of pure joy, we’ve come to a conclusion about what God expected of us as Christian parents, and it’s these three words:

Lay the foundation.

It’s the main thing that he sets before us to accomplish before we release children out of our care. To lay the foundation of a strong faith in Jesus, to show our children what it looks like to be an imperfect person who worships a perfect Savior, and to model forgiveness, obedience and the fruit of the Spirit in front of them, by God’s grace, and his grace alone. To pray with and for them, take them to church every week, and teach them about Jesus.

When I look at our four adult or nearly adult children today, who are all at different points in their faith journeys, it’s very clear to me that laying the foundation throughout all the years they lived with us was the most important thing we needed to accomplish. No matter what their future brings, the foundation has been laid. It’s there for them no matter what twists and turns their relationship with Jesus might take.

The importance of laying the foundation seems intuitively simple to me now, but the Bible has been telling me this all along:

The Bible has some other things to say about raising children, but in general, the overall message is to pass down your faith. As the years fly by and your children get older, your influence over them shrinks dramatically (this is by God’s design—it’s nothing personal), but laying the foundation of faith in Christ remains your primary purpose.

I grew up in a family that considered conversation about personal faith, prayer, or religion in general to be off-limits, so I had to learn the importance of “lay the foundation” through my own parenting experience. God has been using this phrase to comfort me and bring me peace as my children leave the nest, one by one … the bittersweet reality being that we are no longer “six at home,” but three, and soon to be only two.

Your home will empty itself of children sooner than you could ever imagine. When the nest is empty, or nearly so, it’s good to be able to say, “We weren’t perfect parents. We may wish we could go back and do some things differently. But here’s what we did do: we laid the foundation. That was the primary job that God gave us to do. We did it to the best of our ability and we made some mistakes, but our children’s lives are in God’s hands. More than ever, our job now is to simply pray.”

Whether living under our roof or not, in our hearts they will always be “ours” … but actually they are, and always have been, his.

Photo by Alberto Casetta on Unsplash

Related:

Finding Hope When You’ve Made Mistakes with Your Children

Parents, Gen Z Must Own Their Faith

Unshockable Parenting