Wellspring Women’s Ministry Blog and Online Community

We had such a good family vacation this year! As you have probably read from Jessica’s post last week, our entire family (all 14 of us!) spent a week at Holden Beach under one roof together — and we all still love one another!! Incredibly, we all want to do it again next summer. Some even want to extend the time to 2 weeks! Amazing, but true!! We had 8 adults and 6 children under 10 in one big house with 6 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, and multiple porches including a lovely sunporch. The weather was beautiful — not a drop of rain all week! — and the kids were great — we do have delightful grandchildren! — and don’t we all desire a sense of closeness in our family?

As the grandma of the group, I had the ultimate pleasure of spending lots of time with my grandchildren. I had individual time with each one and also time playing together with them in small groups. We put together puzzles (really an excuse for cuddle-on-the-lap time), read books out loud (more cuddling), and drew and colored pictures together. We also sat in the front porch swing and talked (while cuddling, of course), played on the beach and went out for ice cream. Have you ever cuddled a chocolate-covered 3 year old? It was wonderful!

I also got to watch my children parent their own children. What an intense pleasure that is! Both couples who have children are such diligent, loving parents! They work beautifully together as a couple to discipline and shape the characters of their children. I was impressed again and again with the patience and faithfulness and love it takes to be a good parent. The children, of course, tend to misbehave or have a crisis when the parents are involved with something else. Mom starts playing a game with the other women and dad picks up his Louis Lamour novel and almost immediately at least one child has a melt-down. It’s as though the parents’ restfulness signals the children’s misbehavior! One of the parents has to put down his (or her) own pleasurable pursuit in order to deal with the child. The truth of Proverbs 3:12 is demonstrated vividly: “For whom the Lord loves He reproves, even as a father corrects the son in whom he delights.” Only a great and unselfish love in the heart of a parent for his child can sustain the demand of faithfulness required by parenting!

This scenario recurred so frequently last week that another truth began to hit me: Father God was using parenting to shape the character of the parents as much as He was using it to shape the character of the children! The parents, because they love their children, are faithfully disciplining them. But, at the same time, because God loves them all so much, the hearts of the parents are also being stretched and expanded in the process. The capacity to love must constantly grow and be replenished in the parents or they will never be able to sustain the kind of faithfulness and consistency that is required to shape the character of a child.

The image of God being like the dairyman who squeezes and tugs and squeezes and tugs until He gets the last drop of milk from the cow comes to mind, doesn’t it! God’s dealings with us are not wasted on anyone who is involved in the process! Parent and child are equally impacted by the process. (Even an observant Nana gets taught and blessed as well!)

Many years ago, my husband as a young pastor had to go to a father in the church whose children needed discipline. His little sons were terrorizing the other children in Sunday School and we needed for the father to correct the situation. The father confessed that he could not bring himself to discipline his children. “I’m afraid they won’t love me if I correct them,” he said. “I never knew my own father and I want my children to know that I love them.” Michael showed him the scripture I just quoted but he was unable to see it and his children grew up having to “learn things the hard way” because they had not had a father who was willing to instruct them.

Years later, when one of the sons was grown, he came to see us for some counsel. “My father loves God,” he said, “but I know he has never loved me. Is there something wrong with me that my father can’t love me?”

“What makes you think your father doesn’t love you?” we asked.

“I know he didn’t care about me growing up because he never took time to correct me or discipline me,” the young man answered. “He let us children run wild and misbehave and even talk back to our mother without ever saying a word to us. Yet he was in church every Sunday and served the Church and the Lord in any way he could. I know he doesn’t love me because he never spanked me or corrected me in any way.”

This young man was suffering as an adult because his father had refused to discipline him as a child. He felt rejected by his father, the very thing that his father had feared and the very fear that had caused the father to neglect disciplining his son. How ironic! God’s ways are not our ways, are they?

I rejoice that my grandchildren are being consistently and lovingly disciplined by their parents. That correction is already bearing good fruit in the young lives of their children. If you are raising young children, I hope you are pressing into God for that heart expansion that makes the parenting kind of love possible!

And if you are a grandma like me, I hope God is blessing you with lots of cuddle time with your grandchildren! As for me, I can hardly wait for next summer!