Parenting isn’t so much about instructing people as it is about invitation into Presence.
We have dinner with friends. A couple we’ve known since we were all teens around a youth group campfire and we talk about the ten kids we’ve collectively birthed over the last decade and a half, the parents we’ve become, the people our children are becoming.
The candle flickers. We eat garden salad, butter bread. Dusk falls. We talk about sons and work ethics and daughters and frugality. We talk about daughters whose feet find our shoes too small now, about sons who beat us out to the barn every morning. We pass around a glass pitcher. I squeeze my lemon again. We vow to pray more.
“But I won’t deny it,” the wife leans over the table towards me, “sometimes we lock horns, her and I.” She sips her lemon water. “She’s our oldest and she’s the only daughter and it’s these hard teenage years.” I can feel our mama ache in the chest.
I confess broken horns here.
So our men, good men, talk measured, talk of what they live, of always treating each child, each teenager, like we ourselves would like to be treated, with a generous head’s up about what comes next, with eye-to-eye-and-ears-wide-open conversation, with always a gentle and thoughtful voice.
And I hear these fathers’ wise words and I line them up a bit different in my heart and I think too about this.
Our children are the fruit of our best love — am I making them my best friends?
Each child came to us directly from the presence of God and a parent’s daily work is to lead the child back from whence she came — back into the presence of God. To simply keep inviting the child into the transformative presence of God — to live before Him ourselves.
For only the Spirit of God can take a child and shape him into a whole and holy person. My parenting cannot do this work. I forget this. I realize parenting is complicated with seasons necessitating instruction, admonition, intervention… but I wonder –
It’s our tender love that woos them back to His.
We string a net up across the back lawn and volley laughter. We call it a day early and go swimming. We bike back lanes. We pray and vow to pray more. We endeavor to make our parenting more hospitable to soul growth. We listen better and linger longer. And we practice the hospitality of parenting — inviting children into our presence and His.
I’m thinking we’re having best friends for dinner.
And what kids don’t love apple pie?
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Photos: endeavoring to make best friends here
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