Words from a PK

Here are some words to chew on from a dear friend.

http://lindseywingo.blogspot.com/2014/03/from-one-pk-to-another.html

She gives an excellent perspective on growing up as a pastor's kid and how it shaped her as a child and into adulthood. This family has three daughters and two of those three are married and have already become mothers. The daughters seem to want to imitate their own mother in so many ways and I know their mother continues to be a godly influence in their lives. I am pretty sure most girls love their mothers, but these girls really like their mother, too. The parent/child thing has moved on to a friendship. I look at this family and I think, "Something is still being passed on here. Relationships were fostered both vertically and horizontally. This marriage is not just a marriage, but a thriving friendship. These parents are not just Bible-believing parents, but parents with active faith. These are not kids who felt stifled and are now eager to pull away and keep a safe distance, but kids who breathed the fragrance of Christ in their own home and want to pass that aroma on to their own children." Sadly, so many of those things are sometimes lacking in other staunchly religious homes or homes that had vocational ministry at the center.

Rules and morals can be great way to distance yourself from your children and keep from investing too personally in their inner worlds. This is why sometimes it's the "good" kids that end up in a lonely place with the harshest strongholds and the parents are none the wiser. The rules are in place! Church attendance is impeccable! Our kids behavior is not perfect, but is sufficiently glossy! All must be well, right? It just isn't necessarily so. Good behavior can be a wonderful cloak, but the heart can wither away all the while.

I tend to be very reactionary, but I pray God would keep me from sinfulness in this area. I love being a passionate person who tends toward transparency. But the flip side of that is that I can be a short-fused person or a person who overreacts when I should just listen, suspend judgement, and listen some more. And keep listening. Be QUIET! And why do I pray against this reactionary quality of mine? Because I don't want to push my kids away and create well-behaved people with inaccessible hearts. I want them to sense the freedom they have to tell me stuff and to be completely who they are without fear of my reactions. I can talk all day long about how they are free around me and how I love them unconditionally. But if they don't sense it, they won't practice that freedom. It's my responsibility to foster that freedom and not just announce it.

We want to pass on faith to our children. The just shall live by faith. We want to pass Christ on to them. We want to fatten their souls and not just clean up the clutter in their behavior. The law without grace is just a skeleton. No one wants to live around a bunch of bones. If it isn't living and breathing in our own hearts, we can't expect it to be so in our children. If my faith in God begins and ends with a daily devotional time and doesn't seep into the mundane moments of my life and doesn't seep deep into my personality where all my quirks and "little" sins mingle with the big ones, then all I'm doing is passing on a stinky Pharisee and not the fragrance of Christ.