Sacred Parenting: How Raising Children Shapes Our Souls

by Gary L. Thomas

I believe we learn more from failure than success, but when parents keep kids from failure, our children inevitably end up lacking wisdom.”

Children are our heart’s mirror. How we interact with them truly does reveal what we value most about life.

For our kids’ sake, we must become spiritually strong enough to watch them hurt and allow them to fail. Otherwise, we undercut their own spiritual and personal growth.

But we’re fallible human beings. We get tired and grouchy. We don’t always think before we act. We’re far from perfect. And parenting puts the spotlight on our imperfections like nothing else.

Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer speaks for many parents when she says that she doesn’t find it all that difficult (once the angry moment has passed) to forgive her children. What she finds far more difficult is learning how to forgive herself.

I think it helps to realize how taxing any job is that requires giving care twenty-four hours a day. I made one group laugh by claiming that I’m a tremendous father when I feel rested and not stressed-out; I’m a wonderful husband when I don’t feel exhausted and have no pressing deadlines.

But almost all of them confess to regular pangs of guilt when work and child raising collide. Why? Journalist Lisa Belkin put it succinctly: “Being a working parent means having at least one moment of the day when you push your children away.”

I can’t be God to my kids, but I can model my need for God. Guilt has given me this gift of understanding.

It is my job as my children’s parent to model my own need for God’s mercy and to demonstrate how God can use even sinful people to accomplish his aims.

We can deduce that if God in his divine wisdom chose to give sinful children to sinful parents, then our children are not so weak that they are unable to endure our sinful behavior . . . Our children are not that fragile. If they were, God would have waited until we were further along in the maturing process before he gave them to us. But he didn’t.

What helped me to become more mature? What has given me a better perspective? What has worked on my character over the past decade and a half? Raising my kids!

God adores your kids, but he is also crazy about you. You’re his much-loved son or daughter. He has a direct interest in your care and your spiritual growth, and he sees your kids as valuable teachers and prophets to that end.

We’re not the best parents, not by far. We don’t have all the wisdom we’d like. We don’t understand how everything fits together. We make mistakes; we make messes. We can do everything wrong—but God looks at us with a Father’s delighted eyes. Where we see weakness, God sees humility. Where we see messes, God sees intent. Where we see failings, God sees motives.

Yes, kids can suck us dry. Certainly, excruciatingly painful moments can mark the parents’ journey. Exhaustion can seem like a constant companion. On some days, I feel like an abject failure as a dad. But let’s not forget the times when even troublesome kids can reach up, unzip the veil that hides heaven, and show us what true love and sheer happiness are all about.

If our parenting isn’t generating joy, it’s losing spiritual momentum.

One of the greatest gifts a parent can give to his or her children is to enjoy them, to cherish them, to laugh with them, to give them the satisfaction of knowing that we feel so very thankful to walk this life with them.

Children can help to awaken in us this God-given penchant toward joy. A spiritually healthy home is a place of laughter and joy. When both are absent, it’s a spiritual thermometer that something may be wrong.

While we may be tempted to think of such interludes as interruptions, they more closely resemble spiritual vacations. Don’t resent these interruptions; receive them as gifts from tiny prophets who are saving us from being stupidly serious and missing the joy of the gospel.

Families start to break down—and marriages often break down, for that matter—when we stop enjoying each other. There is a place for discipline, sacrifice, commitment, and perseverance, but an equally important place exists for enjoyment. Those who never take the time to truly enjoy their family miss out on one of the most profound wonders God offers.

This is the severe side of sacred parenting: giving to kids who can’t see the benefits in what they’re receiving, walking at times through the darkest of valleys, being called all manner of names as we seek to raise godly children, crucifying our tendency to be people-pleasers. In the process, we get blessed, transformed, and invited into the very ministry of Christ himself. We join him in his own courageous confrontation of a broken and sinful world.

Every person who came forward for prayer for struggles with anger was the mother of small children.

Parenting brings real emotions to the surface—emotions too strong to ignore or deny. You can’t become a parent without feeling, at various times, joy, sadness, anger, and a host of other human emotions. The process of parenting forces us to become more mature in handling some of the trickier emotions, particularly anger.

All of us need anger to occasionally motivate us, but very few of us can make anger our ally without succumbing to its darker side. Although I don’t think this fits every situation, in most circumstances our anger should be reluctant.

To avoid anger altogether is to fall into the Buddhist trap of annihilation of desire. The Bible makes one thing very clear: God is anything but a stoic! Only a grotesque and treacherous faith confuses tolerance and leniency with love. There is a time for anger and for wrath, but every time anger uncoils is a dangerous and fearful time we should accept only because we must, not because we can.

Here is where the Lord seems to beckon us to what the ancients called the spiritual discipline of surrender. Paganism seeks to manipulate divine forces to serve the human will: do the right thing, and you obligate God to respond in a certain way. Authentic Christianity seeks to surrender the human will in order to serve and give glory to the divine God. At various points we will feel disappointed with God, frustrated with God, even angry with God—but what matters is that we make Joshua’s famous declaration our own: “As for me and my household, we will serve the LORD” (Joshua 24:15).

I believe we are to treat anger like a potentially toxic, yet highly potent and controlled medicine. At times it must be prescribed, but we should handle it carefully and limit its use. For starters, if we use anger for too long, it becomes fatal; we’re to get rid of it the same day that it is born: “Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry” (Ephesians 4:26).

We must contain anger within its proper season and bring it to an end as soon as we can, lest it give birth to resentment and bitterness. The Bible means that as soon as we enter the neighborhood of anger, we should be eager to get out. It’s not a place to dwell.

her prime before she reaches her forties. The lessons that childbearing and child raising teach men can change their lives in this respect: All of us guys need to move to a level of maturity that goes beyond looking at women as sex objects. Experiencing the miracle of birth with our wives and watching them nurse our children can train us to look at women in their totality, to respect them for the life-giving skills and the wonders of their anatomy apart from the aspect of sexual pleasure.

Loyal bonding brings a rush that is different from lust or romance, and its quieter undercurrent grows very strong, is deeply meaningful, and is ultimately much more satisfying. It may lack the primitive edge of lust, but it carries the seasoned satisfaction of joy—a type of satisfaction never known by shallow men who think they are “trading up” by divorcing their wife and marrying a younger woman.

There’s only one way to develop perseverance: We must surrender to God as we feel pushed past the human breaking point. We have to reach the threshold of exhaustion and then get pushed even further. One trial can help us deal with fear. Two trials can lead to wisdom. But perseverance? That takes a bundle of difficulties. All of which means that parenting extremely demanding children feeds a spiritual need in our soul—the crucial discipline of perseverance on which our fruitfulness as believers prospers.

Out of obedience, I want to serve God as he has called me to serve him, and yet the most long-lasting way I can accomplish this is to pour my time into my kids.

To be a parent is to make an impression.

Sometimes responsibility, loyalty, and maturity call us to willingly lay down our dreams for the sake of those we love in the hope that those who come after us can accomplish even more than we could.

How do kids get nurtured with the active love, available counsel, and prayerful presence they so desperately need? On the backs of their mothers’ sacrifices, that’s how.

God invites us to grow beyond ourselves and to stop acting as though our dreams begin and end with us. Once we have children, we cannot act and dream as though we had remained childless.

It is shortsighted at best, and the height of arrogance at worst, for fathers or mothers to become so busy with their own ministries and lives that they shortchange their children, forgetting they have a responsibility to pass on to the next generation whatever advantages they have received.

Elton Trueblood put it best: “It is the right of little children to have individual love all day long and to have more than the tag ends of affection. But this situation will not change until the family is seen as an institution so precious that men and women will sacrifice something, even in excitement and personal expression, in order to maintain it.”

Just as Jesus’ ministry called him to sacrifice legitimate desires and even needs, so parenting at times will call us to lay down things we’ve truly been looking forward

As our kids mature, we have to move from controlling our children to influencing them.

When we think of our own departure from this world, we are reminded that our highest call as parents is to prepare our children, not just for our death and their death, but to face God in eternity. When that moment comes, no other preparation will seem half as significant.