Y’know what’s not a good sign? When there’s water dripping from the light fixture in your downstairs bathroom…when someone’s taking a shower upstairs, in the bathroom right above it.
Oy, vey.
Y’know what I would love? I would love it if mopping up the water in the lower bathroom were to solve my little-or-not-so-little problem.
But alas. I reside in the real world. (Denial is just a river in Egypt.)
So now, with my excess energy from working and parenting, my task was to unscrew the light fixture and peel down the ceiling tiles in the lower bathroom. Then probably the drywall above that, to locate the source of this little leak expanding in the dark interiors of my home.
And I kind of wish this wasn’t a metaphor for parenting, too?
Because my kids’ behavioral problems (or, ahem, mine) rarely just all go away by me addressing the exterior drips, so to speak.
As humans, our hearts tend to leak.
What lies beneath
Take that child o’ mine who’s been mouthy lately. And consider Matthew 12:34: Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.
I love Amy Carmichael’s thought on this:
For a cup brimful of sweet water cannot spill even one drop of bitter water, however suddenly jolted.
So if my kids’ hearts are a glass of lemonade, so to speak, they don’t suddenly spill vinegar. They only spill what’s inside of them. There’s no real “I didn’t mean that.”
Sometimes, my escape from a label–that’s not who my kids really are–is just a thinly-veiled excuse. A classy ceiling tile hovering over a real problem.
So when it comes to your kids’ behavior, chuck denial. Keep asking your kids, and yourself, three levels of why, each one taking off another layer concealing the true heart-leak.
Maybe it looks like this:
- Why did they feel the need to mouth off? What heart attitude was beneath that?
- Why was this their attitude?
- What idol–something prized more than God–were they guarding?
Denial: If only the problem were just the bathroom
Truth: My own leaks—like my clawing for others’ approval, my insatiable appetite to be significant and to achieve—have been some of the most destructive forces to myself.
(In fact, they may lead to my own denial! Sometimes I don’t want to confront what’s really going on in my kids, because “What does their weakness say about me?”)
And I wish it stopped there. But they, or more appropriately I, leave so many people, so much damage, as my untreated leaks rot.
Denial helps no one.
Parenting and the realities of my own heart find me wobbling between courage and defeat. I waver between gratitude that the trajectories of my leaks and my kids might be repaired…and just wishing I could spend a few days at the beach, alone, parts of my body buried in the sand.
Most specifically, my head.
Keep looking deeper
God’s reminded me of the utter blindness sin bestows on us toward our own junk.
Of course there’s a pattern of God covering, lifting, and making short work of shame. Weakness. Sickness. But I have yet to think of an example where first, God didn’t tell the truth. Nowhere do I see God showing us we should pretend weakness doesn’t exist.
I see people bringing their seizing kids or shriveled limbs to Jesus, and stating it openly. I see a pattern of both utter truth and utter trust; of forbidding a false self and exalting a true one.
In fact, one of my favorites is the story of the dad who comes to Jesus. (I think the guy and I might get along.) The dad’s muscled his way through some crowd, no doubt, desperate for his son who convulses and foams at the mouth.
But he lays himself bare: “I believe; help my unbelief!”
The father confesses his own lack of faith. But Jesus? Jesus heals the kid anyway.
I understand, better than I wish I did, the reasons you might be avoiding what lies beneath your child’s behavior.
Instead of denial, let’s be brave.
Maybe courage looks like
- Searching your kids’ internet history.
- Getting real about the reasons your kids tell white lies or whoppers.
- Digging into the emotions beneath their anger (a secondary emotion).
- Asking good questions about why they feel the pressure to impress, succeed, achieve, or find perfection.
- Exploring the real reasons they can’t sleep.
- Facing that possible behavioral diagnosis.
- Taking them out for ice cream to talk about what’s behind their constant anxiety.
- Scheduling a visit with a counselor (for you or them).
Let’s search for truth about our kids, ourselves, our bathrooms. And embrace it.
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