Reading Time: 5 minutes

So I have a teenager, and another just about. Most of me is tickled pink about all the real conversations we get to hold, all the fun we have as a maturing family, all the crazy jokes they tell me that leave all of us laughing.

And there’s this leeettle part of it that scares the bejeebies out of me.

Seemingly separate note: I have recently acquired an agent for a non-fiction book I’m writing, which makes my heart do little cartwheels of happiness. It was a moment I wasn’t sure would ever happen.

Back to the terror: There’s nothing like teenagers to keep one humble and, well, pretty much groveling before God. (I make this sound funny, but I am serious as a heart attack.) As a former missionary recently remarked to me, “Once kids turn about eleven, you really start hitting your knees, realizing it’s their choice to follow God.” And indeed, every day, I am receiving the message, Do all you can to love and parent your child well. But ultimately, your child has to make the choice to make Jesus the center of his life. And it’s God who creates that desire in us. 

And trust me: I’m encouraged by so many signs of God’s life in a son I love. But as kids age, the stakes of their decisions only get higher.

The Questions

So as I seek to write this book, there’s this constant niggling. What in the world are you doing trying to help anyone? You are still waiting to see if your own kids will actually turn out.

My writing and parenting are an offering. And competence, as Tim Keller has written, is part of a good offering: “Competent work is a form of love.” He also quotes Lutheran businessman William Diehl: “‘Your work is your prayer.’”*

If this is my offering, I also long for this writing and parenting–any work, really–to proceed from a sense of peace and faith in God rather than fear. Will I have anything to say to these people? Do they want to hear it? Should I say it anyway? Will they think that perhaps their time may have been better spent reading that dusty, questionably hygienic book on the back of their toilet? Will it really help them see God more? If I write from a place of brokenness, will it be enough? (I love Andree Seu’s advice from Dr. John Frame: Let the fruit of the Spirit be your guide. Think about how love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, kindness, and self-control can inform your writing.)

I believe God was asking me to be a bit less safe with what He’d embedded deep in me–summon a little courage, already; get out of the boat and watch Him. It’s like having kids, in a way. If this was my offering, well, couldn’t I trust Him to provide for it? (A lot of you may quote “train up a child, etc. etc.” to me here–but I’d offer this is not a promise God makes. See this explanation.)

“What is it?”

A friend of mine told me her dad always said, “If you pray for potatoes, have a hoe in your hand.” I never figured out whether that was to work alongside God or to harvest said spuds. But I suppose both make sense. I feel like having something worthwhile to write or offer as a parent is like waiting for manna. It’s always showed up. But there are occasionally those (faithless) moments where your eyes drift around your house (or tent) and say, Well. I agree it (-slash-He) has always showed up. But if it doesn’t, hope the kids don’t mind rocks for breakfast.

So much of life is like manna. (On that note, my sister points out to me that manna means “What is it?” The Israelites didn’t even recognize the provision when it lay on the ground in front of them.)

So my mind drifts to a passage that packages a shiny little gem for me: to Ruth, one of my favorite ladies, despite that she is quite literally about 1000 times my age. I have thoroughly enjoyed Paul Miller’s A Loving Life: In a World of Broken Relationships, which continues to illuminate the depth of this ancient story.

Great, great, etc., etc. Grandma Ruth’s Tried-and-True Recipe for Success in Barley, Love, & Life

1. Trust God with the impossibilities of your life.

“Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

2. Seek to love well with your work.

“She also brought out and gave her [mother-in-law] what food she had left over after being satisfied.”

3. Get out there and bust your tail (still full of trust in God).

“She came, and she has continued from early morning until now, except for a short rest…” If you’re wondering about the tension between our work and God’s, I like R.C. Sproul’s answer here.

Even our work, though, flows from a spirit of rest and peace…not our frenetic control.  (See this post for more thoughts on fear-parenting vs. faith-parenting.)

4. God provides a mind-blowing, trustworthy result.

“So she gleaned in the field until evening. Then she beat out what she had gleaned, and it was about an ephah of barley [about five and a half gallons of grain! Wikipedia says one ephah is a donkey’s load. A tremendous day’s work for this young woman]…And her mother-in-law said to her, “Where did you glean today? And where have you worked? Blessed be the man who took notice of you.” (Naomi is clearly quite amazed.) But the big “wow” is this: God had so much more than even Ruth’s plucky vision in mind. As in, I’ve got a generous, upstanding, well-known guy who will love you. And to top it off–the Savior of all of history will come from you.

I love this pattern. It seems repeated in the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14–30), and seems to apply to so much of the Word: Our trust is the source of our work, and never the other way around.

God takes our faith, followed by our diligence (including our failure!)–and consistently blows our expectations out of the water.

So at this point, writing and parenting have given me one more reason to look to the Good Hand that keeps giving me what I need. It may not always look like what I asked for.

But I trust even that.

 

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*Keller, Tim. Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work