Parenting and Being Parented

When I was in charge of helping the 8-11 year old girls at church earn their Faith in God award {click on that title if you aren't familiar with this award}, I told them that I thought earning this award was important enough that I was going to work on getting it, too. I'm not in charge of them anymore, but I'm still working on it off and on--it's a really good resource for jump-starting a really effective study of Jesus Christ's gospel. Anyway, I changed one of the activities just a bit to make it applicable to a mother instead of a child, and here it is: " List five things you can do to help around your home. Discuss the importance of obeying and honoring your parents and learning how to work" became "List five things you can do to help around your home. Discuss the importance of obeying and honoring God as your parent, being a respectable parent, and learning how to work."

I love discussion-starters like that because they encourage me to really think about things more deeply than I would on my own... While thinking about this, I realized that this is what I believe:

I think it's important to obey and honor God as my parent because I am learning just as much about becoming like God as my children are learning about becoming a self-sufficient adult. And therefore, I need to accept the guidance of my heavenly parent (who has already acheived what I am working towards and who wants to help me out). It's so easy when you're a parent to see why it's important for your child to obey and honor you: so you can teach them things, and so they can learn things primarily by happy experience instead of by mistakes. But how often do we see ourselves as the child in a similar relationship with God? The reality is, we are always in that situation, and it doesn't even make sense to struggle through things on our own when we have tried-and-true principles given to us by our Father that, when accepted, allow us to learn things primarily by happy experience instead of by mistakes.

I also realized that I think it is vital to be a respectable parent. We can't expect our children to respect us if we don't put forth the effort required to earn that respect. I do not believe that we deserve our children's respect just because we created them. We earn that respect by respecting them; by teaching them whenever we can, by being consistent and reasonable with our expectations of them, and by making it possible for them to choose to obey and honor us out of intelligence mixed with trust, rather than demanding blind obedience because we're on a power trip or don't recognize and honor their ability to reason and understand reasoning.

It's vital to learn to work because everything worth having in the long-run is acquired through work. What "just happens" is never the best-case scenario, and the good news is, even when our hard work doesn't yield the best-case scenario, the work itself creates the best-case scenario for our character. We never completely lose out when we choose to work.

It is quite carthartic to write in your journal when you know it's about to be published for all the world wide web to see... makes you more accountable. If we talk soon (or not-so-soon :), ask me how I'm doing with actually living these beliefs! Friends make friends follow through! ;)