Tag Archives: parenting

Success and faithfulness are not competing: But faithfulness wins

Dadu Shin NYTimes

Word has it that the next generation is declining the opportunity to make families and raise children because they are afraid they can’t be a success at parenting. Researchers are collecting reasons for this new outlook:

  1. Therapists have taught them their parents caused all their problems and they don’t want to mess up any more children.
  2. Donald Trump and his cronies have disrupted the world to smithereens and climate change is hovering over them, so they don’t think it is responsible to doom a child to a failed life.
  3. They can’t imagine having the permanent relationship that is the best-case scenario for raising a happy kid. Besides, they already have a demanding relationship with their phone. Alone is safer.

Preoccupied with success

Pondering how children are successfully bred points out how preoccupied we are with success. Achieving it is an endless uphill battle and many people feel like they are slipping down the slope. If I am a thirtysomething, success is that goal, that destiny-yet-to-be-realized for which I am responsible. My education has been laced with “Find what you can do successfully and concentrate on it,” and “Make choices that make you happy. It’s up to you.”

My nephew just graduated from the fire academy; it has been a lifelong goal. Now success for him will be finding a scarce job. I Googled job opportunities, and they are apparently out there in his vicinity. But good luck! Success is elusive.

Right now, I am unsuccessful at selling my jewel of a condo and am preoccupied with the process. I blame Trump for making everyone nervously clutch their money. But I also blame myself for buying it, for spending so much money on it, and for hiring an unscrupulous contractor to rehab it. My lack of success tends to haunt the background of my mind. Until I am successful, feelings of doom or distrust keep arising.

Is faithfulness really more important?

Christians often contrast being successful with being faithful. And so do I. This post is born of an attempt to stay faithful in spite of the stuff in the back of my mind. Success has to do with something external, something prospective, something we wear as an element of identity. Faithfulness is something internal, something constant, something we are, something as elemental to us as our birthright. Joy is not something you achieve; it is something you enter into.

I was talking about success vs. faithfulness with a long-time-together but yet-to-marry couple. They reported that wondering about the success of their relationship brought up quite a bit of judgment.  Rather than receiving the love at hand, success judged their love according to what it should be, according to what “successful” loving looks like, whether they had ever been successfully loved in the way they idealized or not!

The idea of faithfulness was somewhat foreign to them. They were among those who come from dysfunctional households in which the parents were “faithful” but obviously not happy. The unconditional love that faithfulness implies did not seem like a good idea. They said their conditional love was what made the other person behave well enough to maintain the relationship. But they did look at each other and ponder whether it was their faithful conditional love, that mysterious commitment, which kept them together.

I’m on a little team which has been attempting, since the beginning of Lent, to start a new church within our church. So far, we have been notably unsuccessful in my eyes — I prefer miracle to methodical. At the outset, we agreed that one of the best things we could do in the face of Trump was build more opportunity for community. So far, most people are still torn up, not grafted into our new group. We may yet succeed if we are faithful to the vision and if we listened well enough to ourselves, the moment, and God in the beginning.

If we’re not occupied with success, then what?

It is not that easy to decide what a faithful person should be doing every day in this surreal era we’re getting used to. When I get out on the street in my counterdemonstration to Trump’s vanity parade in DC on June 14, I will not feel successful. Even if a million people show up at the flagship event in my hometown, Philadelphia, I will be wondering about who opted out. Yet I feel called and committed to be there and to keep at it until we at least don’t have psychopaths with nuclear weapons running us around. Even if we don’t get rid of them, I don’t want to miss being the real me doing what I am given to do.

Near the end of his ministry, we find the Apostle, Paul, instructing the Ephesian elders about what they should be doing every day once he has moved on (Acts 20:17ff). He encourages me to keep listening to the call of God instead of just making things work according to my own, often faulty logic. Paul starts with the example of his own faithfulness: “You’ve seen how I lived. And you know that my only concern is to finish the task that Jesus gave me.” As Paul would say elsewhere, “What is required of stewards is that they be found faithful” (1 Cor. 4:2).

Paul and Medievalish Ephesians by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, ca. 1830.

In Paul’s economic world, a steward is just a servant. He doesn’t own the household business, the master does. His main responsibility is to do what he is given to do. He cares about the success of the enterprise, but doesn’t directly bear the costs or directly reap all the profits. If the owner assigns him to do something that tanks, he’s not to blame. If the owner assigns him to work at something that turns out to be a great success, any credit is shared. Success and failure are master words; faithfulness is the concern of stewards. That’s a big change in worldview for most of us.

Faithfulness is imperfect

A fourth reason we could add to the list for why younger people do not want to have kids might be science. They all learned to conduct an experiment to test the truth. Who wants their experimental process of raising a kid to prove they should not have raised a kid? Science teaches us to get things right; it is about mastering facts. Since we can’t really do that, a lot of us do nothing.

Paul taught the elders that completing the task Jesus started is desirable, but what is required is being faithful, running the race to the end whether you win or not. After all, it is Jesus crucified that saves the world — people still don’t think that can be a successful approach! In spite of what typical people think,Paul demonstrates that the question is not always, “Is this going to work out right? Can I be assured this is going to get me where I want to go? Can I guarantee I won’t make mistakes and mess up my kids?” The question is, more fundamentally, “What am I given to do right now in my situation? What’s my best shot to take?” We’re not responsible for accurately predicting what should happen or for perfectly making the right thing happen. We’re to be as faithful as we can be according to our present understanding of our assignment. Science is good. But living is not scientific.

I am relieved that my limitations are OK, but I also don’t like it. I really want things to work out according to how I estimate what success will be. Presently, that would mean selling my condo for as much as I want, undermining Donald Trump, making a new church happen, and having all my relationships plugged in and playing. I like to get things done. I’m more like a lot of us who get overwhelmed with the needs they see. What about the prisoners? Shouldn’t I foster a child or mentor elementary kids? What about food insecurity? Climate crisis? There are still housing issues in North Carolina! If you read this blog, you know I’m moved by a NYTimes article every day! I think it is good that we want to save the world — we’re partners with the resurrected Jesus, after all. But not every assignment from heaven has my name on it.

American Christians tend to ask, “Where can I make the biggest impact?” I think it would be better to start with “What does it mean to be faithful today where I’m at?”  In Matthew 25 Jesus tells the parable about stewards taking care of the master’s money. A lot of preachers make that a story about how to be successful and not get thrown out of the Kingdom of God! But the key verse will always be: “His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’” We can probably do our best if we don’t spoil our efforts by gauging their future success or worrying too much about how much failure we’ve accumulated. The joy of the master is more a place of committed love than controlled outcomes

Show up for your kids: Let go of your “helicopter God”

In a recent article for the NY Times Parenting section, Daniel Siegel, along with Tina Payne Bryson,  uncannily explored the gospel again. I’ve read Siegel’s books, seen him speak, and have often been surprised by how I resonate with his spiritual wavelength.

This time he is taking some loving swipes at how parents, especially people of means, are raising their children. The picture I lifted from the article shows the problem clearly, I think. He asks us to:

Take a moment and fast forward in your mind to a day in the future when your child, now an adult, looks back and talks about whether she felt truly seen and embraced by you. Maybe she’s talking to a spouse, a friend or a therapist — someone with whom she can be totally, brutally honest. Perhaps she’s saying, “My mom, she wasn’t perfect, but I always knew she loved me just as I was.” Or, “My dad really got me, and he was always in my corner, even when I did something wrong.” Would your child say something like that? Or would she end up talking about how her parents always wanted her to be something she wasn’t, or didn’t take the time to really understand her, or wanted her to act in ways that weren’t authentic in order to play a particular role in the family or come across a certain way?

Francesco Ciccolella, NY Times

The power of showing up

Of course, Siegel is going to say something brilliant that makes you wonder how you could have ever parented without him. For the most part, he thinks he can explain everything and make it all work reasonably well, even in territories as complex as the brain and your family system. But in this case, I think he is asking the right question,

Do our kids feel seen by us? Do they feel truly seen for who they are — not for who we’d like them to be, and not filtered through our own fears or desires?

I think the answer is probably, generally, “No.” And I doubt that when Siegel was thirty-two, and trucking kids to little league games and such, he was asking the right questions, either. Now that he is sixty-two, he has better questions than “How in the world are we going to get through this week?” Or “How are my children going to survive their next twenty years?”

He is trying to help us all with his new book, The Power of Showing Up. The main point is something you may already know:

Showing up means bringing your whole being — your attention and awareness — into this moment with your child. When we show up, we are mentally and emotionally present for our child right now….The idea is to approach parenting being present and aware in your interactions with your child — and to make repairs when that doesn’t happen.

As usual, I think he has a great idea. But, as usual, I think it would be even better if he had Jesus to make it happen.

Where does one get the power to show up?

The power of showing up is great if you have the power to show up. Doesn’t it seem a bit grandiose to suggest in a parenting section article that people should simply change their mind and show up? — they should bring their whole being — their attention and awareness — into this moment? Buddhists have suggested that philosophy for centuries and some great people have practiced it well. But most of us are having trouble with our “whole being,” not to mention “attention” and “awareness.”

His advice has a lot of merit, in my opinion. But he does not give a lot of help with where to find the power to follow his advice unless you happen to have it already. Helicopter parents may communicate a lot of their anxiety to their child because they feel powerless, not because they intend to exercise a lot of power. I think the reason most people hyper-parent is their fear of doing a bad job. Many people in the United States are driven by the fear of missing out or failing and they don’t want their kids to miss out or fail. They are hyper-responsible, since they believe whatever life is, it is up to them to get it and live it. Their world is a competition for scarce resources and everyone needs to be their best self to get what they need or want. Siegel has deeper things to say than that, but I think even he would say that is a realistic assessment of what drives people.

Those fears drive Christians too. A hyper-responsible worldview may drive you when you are parenting, even if you don’t admit it. You may want to believe that trusting God is a live option for your child, but, in fact, and in the schedule, life is all about preparing them to succeed in the world as it is, according to the stranglehold the “economy” has on most of us.

Our view of God matters when we parent

To be honest, most Christians have a “helicopter” God who is the main example for their helicopter parenting. For many, God is the hyper-parent who does not see them for who they are, but sees them for who they ought to be (and who they have never been). As a result, Siegel’s book will just add more pressure to “show up” properly. You may already know about this demand to “show up” and have not fulfilled it yet, either, just like all the other things you have not accomplished.

The power to show up will be a result of trusting God the Parent who showed up in Jesus and continues to show up Spirit to spirit. I’m not sure how much Siegel’s reparative idea will help unless parents are Parented by the God revealed in Jesus. We love because God first loved us, not just because we had a good idea and implemented it well.

Our view of God, our Parent: Father/Son/Holy Spirit in a loving family system, Jesus as our pioneering older brother, makes all the difference in the world when it comes to showing up. We show up for our children and have the spiritual and emotional depth they need because we experience God showing up for us in Jesus. If we show up as weak examples of God showing up, we still know that God will, personally, show up — and that is a lot better than whatever I might provide.

Image result for ron reagan atheist

Last week many of my friends were talking about Ron Reagan. The old atheist advertisements from the Freedom from Religion Foundation were rerunning during the Democratic Party debate. He notably signed off in them by saying he is not afraid of burning in hell.

His view of God is faulty. He got the message that God is the ultimate helicopter parent scrutinizing people and weighing how well they have matched up to the ideal set before them – an ideal of which they are well aware yet to which they are still not conforming. The people I talked to knew what he was talking about, since many of them have that God, or know people who do. I think Siegel has a similar “god” when he is giving his good advice.

It is hard to make sure your children feel safe, seen, soothed and secure, as Siegel advises, unless you feel safe, seen, soothed and secure. I, personally, see no hope for myself feeling or offering those vital experiences to anyone unless I have a constant relationship with God who saves me, sees me, soothes me, and makes me feel secure in a world which constantly demands more of me than I have. So that is where I am starting again today, giving over to trusting my trustworthy Savior, rather than mostly trying to get good enough so I can trust myself. Then I can hope to show up.