My best friend gave me this book for Christmas 2010. She read it and told me I just had to read it, too. “It’s different from every other parenting book you’ve read,” she told me. I fully intended to begin it right away.
It only took me a year.
The premise of the book is that God uses our children to shape us; that “parenting is a school for spiritual formation and our children are our teachers.” Wow!
Reading the first page was emotion-filled and thought-provoking for me. Thomas shares when his daughter was two she called him Papa God. Realizing how our children first see us as “God” is nothing less than humbling! It also causes me to regret my inadequate parenting skills when my children were toddlers and preschoolers, and wonder how I’ve affected their faith.
And their psyche. I can hear the therapy bills cha-chinging.
One of Thomas’ observations profoundly resonated with me: we help shape our children’s passion and hunger for God. He recounts how he realized the more time he spent with his toddlers, then preteens, then teens, “the more open they seemed to God’s presence in their lives.” And the converse also seemed true.
This inspires me to remain faithful in reading my Bible and spending time in prayer. When I do this, it is easier for me to parent my children more lovingly, patiently and with respect for them as people. They have value and worth and deserve my respect. They need me to parent them out of reverence for God.
Parenting my precious kids, now teens, is not about me; it’s about Him. I must purify myself from “everything that contaminates body and spirit” (2 Corinthians 7:1). And that covers a whole lot!
I’ve read many how-to parenting books and they have helped me see where I need to make changes in myself. But most of those books do not discuss the why of parenting. Parenting my children for the glory of God never occurred to me, yet it’s so simple to understand.
So, how about you? How do you view your role as a parent?
