Graduation Day – Final Sermon

* This is the manuscript for my final sermon as Youth Pastor at Chestnut Grove Baptist Church. After much prayer and thought, my family has stepped away from full-time pastoral work so I can pursue a career as a writer and speaker. I’ll have another job too (it’s almost a necessity) but my main focus is on expanding my writing and speaking opportunities.

To all of you who have supported or helped me in the ministry over the past fifteen years, please know that I am grateful for each of you. Your contributions, far more than my own, were the reason that God was able to transform so many students. Thank you for being such a blessed part of my service as a pastor.

*****

“For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.” – Romans 8:29

There’s a book that’s been sitting on my nightstand now for almost a month. It’s less than a hundred pages thick, and the stark white cover almost mocks me every time I walk by.

“Risk is Right” it tells me. John Piper says so.

I’m not a very risky person. Never have been. When I was a kid, my idea of taking a risk was dunking an Oreo into milk after I’d taken a bite, thus allowing for the potential of tiny black cookie crumbs to contaminate the pure white milk. It was my brother who jumped off the house with only a shopping bag for a parachute. It was my friends who snuck out of the house at night to sit on their front porches and feel the rush of the cool night air combined with the knowledge that they’d broken a rule. It was the heroes in my comic books that dared to do things that common sense and insurance agents said was, to put it bluntly, stupid.

But not me. I was the good kid. The (semi) obedient one. I set the example. I toed the mark. Always have.

Sure, there were times when I did things that were risky. Once, when I was about 15, my friends convinced me that it would be fun to camp out in my neighbor’s yard as a cover for sneaking down to a store that was rumored to sell cigarettes to under-age kids. I didn’t smoke, had no interest in smoking, but I was the straight-arrow, so they figured I could just walk in, be my normal polite self and procure a couple of packs of smokes for the heathens. The plan, they said, was flawless.

Except for the fact that I froze up. I couldn’t go inside the store. I had visions of the police being called, of my arrest and incarceration, of my parents sobbing as the judge threw the book at me and derailed my chance for college, which would derail my chance for a good job, which meant that I was inevitably headed towards a future of riding the rails like the hobos in Hardy Boy novels, destined to either help Frank and Joe solve a mystery or be a shadowy figure who foretold their doom.

So my friends took my learner’s permit and went inside to try and by smokes anyway. The clerk kicked them out, laughing. I was relieved until, as we crossed the street, I got hit in the knee by a car that didn’t have its lights on. I was knocked head over heels into a drainage ditch, convinced that my leg had been severed as punishment for being so stupid. I just knew I was going to die in that ditch, becoming a cautionary tale to other kids and a source of embarrassment to my family.

“Poor Jason,” my grandparents would say as they sat on the carport shelling peas. “He seemed like such a good boy.”

Obviously, my leg was fine. My knee did swell to the size of a mini-basketball, but I hid it from my parents by wearing baggy pants for two weeks and pretending my limp was just some new kind of strut. It is entirely possible that I was responsible for starting the gangsta lean. I should’ve thought to trademark it.

But that’s just not who I was.

I could tell you more stories, stories about how I didn’t take the right kind of risks, stories about how the risks I did take were either coldly calculated to the point that there was no risk at all, or wildly impulsive, resulting in a day-after sense of shame and regret that made me burrow deeper into myself. Bottom line is that I’ve never taken the right kind of risks. Never figured out that there are healthy and productive ones to be taken.

Which is why I picked up that book, “Risk is Right”, in the first place. I needed to know how to do what God was telling me to do.

I needed to know how to leave this church, step out in faith, and see where God would take me.

It’s funny that this is all coming together on Graduation Sunday. A lot of people are here to celebrate and acknowledge the preschoolers and high schoolers and college folks who’ve put in their time, completed a major season of their lives, and are moving on to other things. New things. Scary things. I look at Austin and Madison and Cody and Brandon and Jon and Haley and Victoria and I remember what it felt like to walk in their shoes. After high school, the choice was simple: college. After college, the choice wasn’t so simple, especially for me.

There’s not a lot of people banging down the door to hire English majors. Though there are a lot of English majors banging down doors to deliver you a fresh, tasty pizza in 30 minutes or less.

It’s funny that this annual ritual comes around and we stand in front of these kids and extol the virtues of risk, of stepping out, of change. We tell them to chase dreams and find their passions, and we slip them a couple bucks and we wait for the inevitable: for them to do what so many of us did, and settle down, find a job, start a family, and leave risk behind.

Change, for some of us, is best left to the younger. Or to the marketers behind clever political ads.

And yet change is at the very heart of what it means to be human. From conception onward, we are constantly in flux. Life is steady progression from one stage to the next, only we stop acknowledging it at some point when we feel safe. Maybe it comes when we make “enough money”. Maybe it comes when we get that dream house. Maybe it comes when we find a church we like that has people like us and we feel at home. I can’t say what it is for you, but for some of us out there, you know what I’m talking about.

You find that comfortable spot and you set up camp and you say, “This is where I’m supposed to be. I ain’t moving.”

Which would be great if life worked that way. But it doesn’t. We’re not meant to become static. We’re meant to be ever-changing. Just look at what Paul is saying in Romans 8:29 – we are meant to be conformed into the image of Christ.

Conformed. It’s a verb. It means continually shaped. Molded. Remolded. Occasionally taken back to the drawing board and started over again. It’s the truth about our lives and character: we are constantly being remade by the One who made us, the One who doesn’t have to be remade.

Have you ever thought about that? That God doesn’t have to be remade? I grew up hearing that “God doesn’t change” and while that’s true, it’s misleading. It makes God sound stale. It makes God sound like the old man who lived in my former neighborhood and threatened us with a shotgun for walking on the neighbor’s side of the property line.

“You’re almost on my grass! Do it again and I’ll shoot! Whippersnappers!”

The reason that God doesn’t change isn’t because He’s crusty, it’s because He is infinite. He is all things in all times to all people. That’s why He’s just as accessible to people today as He was in the time of Moses. That’s why His word still has wisdom and power in our modern world just as it did when the majority of people thought that sailing too far would make you fall off the edge of the planet. Because God is infinite, which means that He is always sufficient, it means that He never has to grow or change or learn. He simply is and that’s always enough.

So when we, who must change, decide that we’re not going to anymore, we establish ourselves as equal with God. The Bible says that’s blasphemy.

Our comfortable, familiar lives are blasphemous.

Now that’s a powerful thought. It’s no wonder we resonate so strongly whenever we hear speeches that implore us to strive for more. We are built for that kind of thing, and when we become too entrenched in a blasphemous lifestyle of complacency or apathy or fear, we sense deep within our hearts that God not only means for us to do more than just sit there, He is grieved by our self-satisfaction because it means we no longer listen to Him.

I was in that spot. I didn’t want to risk being obedient to God, which sounds pretty dumb for a pastor to say. But obedience to God meant walking away from a sure thing; it meant leaving behind friends and family and security and hope for a future. It meant stepping away from students that I’ve come to love very, very much. It meant defying conventional wisdom that life is better when we mitigate risk, settle in for something comfortable and dependable, and only consider stepping outside that zone if we’re sure that there’s something better waiting on the other side.

In fifteen years of preaching about having faith in God and obeying Him no matter what, this is the first time I’ve followed His leading without knowing where I’m going to land. It’s the first time I’ve truly put my life and the life of my family into the hands that formed the universe and said, “Okay. Show me what you’ve got.” It’s scary. There are days when I wonder what the heck I’ve done. There are days when I want to say, “No! I take it back!”

It’s like falling in love with the person you’re meant to be with for the rest of your life: there is no safe. It’s all risk – but you never feel more alive than when you take that chance. And you never feel more certain that you blew it than when you let it pass by.

Jesus knew all this stuff, of course. He knew when to push, when to withdraw, when to challenge and when to comfort. As it says in John 13:3, “Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God.” Jesus knew who he was, whose he was, and what he was supposed to do. This is the image that we’re being conformed into: it’s not one of weakness or timidity, it’s of power and love and sound judgment; it’s not one that is easily defeated, but it’s more than a conqueror; we are not conformed to the things of this world, the ideas and beliefs that tell us to settle and hold tight, but we are conformed to the image of the One who didn’t think equality with God was something to hold onto, who instead submitted Himself to death on a cross so that His Spirit might echo in our hearts, telling us the will of the Father is for us to “Go.”

So I’m going. It’s Graduation Sunday, after all.

What if you chose likewise? What if you didn’t accept the premise that safe is best? What if you put your hand into the hand of God and said, “Show me what you’ve got?” What would change? What would be different?

Because here’s the thing, and it’s unavoidable: the world is changing. Grayson is changing. The things that people hold as right and dear and true are changing, and we are called to be witnesses to them. But how can we tell them with a straight face, much less convicting power, that the greatest Truth in the world is that God loves them and wants to change them into the likeness of His Son, if we ourselves are content to sit tight and not change a thing?

Risk is Right, Piper says. So says the Lord. What will you do with that truth today?

When Anything Was Possible

This morning, because he was climbing the walls, I put my son in my car and took him for a drive. We ran an errand for work first, then headed down Highway 78, eastbound. We passed through Loganville, Between, Monroe…and as the mile markers swept by, Jon asked me where we were going.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I’m going to take you to where I went to college.”

“You’re gonna take me to your college?” he repeated.

“Yeah. The University of Georgia.”

“The Yoo-be-nursery of…how do you say it?”

I smiled. “The University of Georgia.”

“Oh. You’re gonna take me there?” he asked, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

“Yes.”

“Okay. Can we get ice cream?”

The great thing about my alma mater is that it’s less than an hour’s drive, yet feels like going to another planet. As we turned onto Milledge Avenue, Jon immediately started asking questions. “Why are there so many houses? Why do people have couches in the yard? Why do they have bulldogs on everything?” It was non-stop.

I turned into the Butts-Mehre Building parking lot, thinking that I’d take him to the sports museum inside and show him the glory, glory of old Georgia. We walked in and in quick order took pictures with the 1980 National Championship trophy, Herschel Walker’s Heisman Trophy, and a very nice lady who knew where the restrooms were (that was Jon’s idea). But all of that lasted less than a minute; suddenly, Jon wanted to know where the scientists were.

“I want to see the scientists, like me.” (Special thanks to my brother- and sister-in-law Terrell and Julie White for sending Jon a Big Bag of Science Experiments for his birthday. My kitchen floors will never be the same.)

So we left the Butts-Mehre, went down by Foley Field (Jon had zero interest in the baseball diamond), turned by Stegeman Coliseum (he wasn’t interested in that either) and zipped over towards the Biology, Chemistry and Food Sciences buildings. He begged me to find a place to park so he could “see the scientists make stuff up”, but I couldn’t find a spot, and wasn’t sure we could get into some of the labs anyway.

“That’s sad,” said Jon. “Don’t people want to see scientists?”

I’ve yet to tell him what Bear Bryant said on that issue: “80,000 people never showed up to watch a chemistry test.”

We turned left on East Campus Avenue and drove behind Sanford Stadium. I turned left again on Baldwin Street and showed him Park Hall. “That’s where daddy spent most of his last two years of college.”

“That looks boring,” he replied.

We turned right onto Milledge once more, and then made a right onto Broad Street. I parked downtown near the Arches and we took a stroll across North Campus. We looked at squirrels, trees, the Chapel Bell, the Law Library Atrium, and the inside of the main library. I walked him back down to Sanford Stadium and made the mistake of telling him that’s where all the dead Ugas are buried. After that, he wanted to talk about nothing else.

It was a nice trip, despite the fact that the campus looks almost nothing like I remember it. Fifteen years after I left, the university has become what former president Charles Knapp had dreamed: a top-flight center of education. I marveled at how young the students are compared to when I was in school; how many of them still think they’re invincible enough to smoke; how many of them seem far more determined than I was when I roamed the same grounds.

As we walked back to the car, I took Jon to Park Hall, where the English and Classics departments are headquartered. I snapped a picture in front of my old haunt, and recalled when a professor stopped me on the front steps and told me that, with a bit of revision, some of my pieces would be press-ready. And then the professor offered to send them to his friend at The New Yorker – and could almost guarantee they’d see print.

I stood there and watched that memory play out one more time: I shook his hand and told him thank you, but no. I wasn’t prepared to face rejection. He asked me to reconsider; told me that of all the students in my “Writing for Publication” class, I was the only one to demonstrate real potential.

I told him no a second time. Then I walked away.

It’s been fifteen years, and I still remember that. In college, so the saying goes, anything is possible. You’re not who you were, not yet who you’ll be. You’re a bundle of potential and passion and purposeless energy. You’re waiting to be aimed somewhere and to see how far you’ll go.

At least, that’s the way some people were. I wasn’t. I’m 37 now, and am just finally reaching my “anything is possible” phase. It took me this long to realize the things about myself that are good and worthy and deserving of people’s attention. Today, I wouldn’t hesitate to take that professor’s hand and say, “Let’s sit down and make those revisions now. Why wait?” I would whole-heartedly accept his offer and be so excited about even the possibility that I might get read, much less published.

But I am that person today because I wasn’t that person then. I am a husband and father and writer today because I couldn’t see myself as any of that then.

Sometimes, we take the path we think we’re supposed to take because we have a hard time imagining ourselves take any other path. We choose what we know because we’re afraid of what we don’t. And sometimes, we discover that we end up where we started; we come back to the path we turned away, prepared to take it and see what happens.

That’s what I felt today, standing on a campus that isn’t the same as it was fifteen years ago. But then again, neither was the man standing there. Today, with my son in tow, I went back in time and realized I hadn’t missed my moment; I’d just been preparing for it.

Carpe diem, right?

Anything is possible. Even today.

God Isn’t Fair

I’ve been reading Andy Stanley’s book Deep & Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend. It’s a good read. If you’ve not picked it up, head to the local bookstore and flip through it a bit. Andy’s every bit as engaging on the page as he is in the pulpit, and the first section of the book alone is worth the read.

I’ve been Tweeting different lines that I think are particularly solid (don’t worry, I’ve been giving Andy credit) and today I came across something that really resonated with me. Here’s the line:

“Read the Gospels and you will have a difficult time finding even one example of Jesus being fair.”

That gave me pause. Jesus isn’t fair? How can that be? Isn’t he the fullness of God made man? Isn’t God fair? So wouldn’t that necessarily mean that Jesus had to be fair too? What the heck is going on here?

But Andy goes on to cite ample evidence from the Gospels: Jesus didn’t heal everyone, didn’t feed everyone, didn’t offer everyone immediate entrance into His Kingdom. He didn’t train everyone the way he did the Twelve, and even among that select few he pulled aside Peter, James and John for even deeper relationship. He was hard on the religious, gracious to the sinners, and constantly spoke in folksy stories that concealed the truth. Jesus waited until Lazarus died, then got on to Martha when she scolded him for waiting. He healed the blind man at Bethesda and left the other injured, broken people to simply watch the miracle pass them by. Heck, he let Judas pretend to be a good guy and steal money from the poor.

So what do you know?

Jesus isn’t fair.

This immediately made me think of something that I’d read earlier this week on CNN.com; it’s an iReport from a woman who is raising her children without religion. It’s fairly standard stuff, but what stood out to me were two things: first, that people had flagged the story as inappropriate and CNN, after careful review, rightly reinstated the story. The editors even went so far as to post a disclaimer that the story was flagged by readers as offensive and request that they stop doing so.

Second, the story stood out because the mother listed as one of the reasons she didn’t teach her kids about God is because God isn’t fair.

Here, read for yourself:

If God is fair, then why does he answer the silly prayers of some while allowing other, serious requests, to go unanswered? I have known people who pray that they can find money to buy new furniture. (Answered.) I have known people who pray to God to help them win a soccer match. (Answered.) Why are the prayers of parents with dying children not answered?

If God is fair, then why are some babies born with heart defects, autism, missing limbs or conjoined to another baby? Clearly, all men are not created equally. Why is a good man beaten senseless on the street while an evil man finds great wealth taking advantage of others? This is not fair. A game maker who allows luck to rule mankind’s existence has not created a fair game.

Between this mother’s view and Andy’s statement, I’ve been wondering: who says God is fair? Why do we think that? And if God isn’t fair, then what does that mean for how we understand him?

So what is fair? Most people think that fair means an even playing field, that no one person gets a leg up on anyone else. And that definition is true. (See here if you want to read what else fair means.) Fair means that no one gets special treatment; no one gets to circumvent the rules. My kids are masters of this concept already: if I allow my son to technically eat less than my daughter and still get a treat, Ella is quick to point out that my decision isn’t fair. “Why do I have to eat everything and he only has to eat something?”

I could point out that Jon’s smaller, therefore his belly is smaller. I could point out that Ella enjoys eating and always has, so the “clean your plate” standard for her isn’t exactly an onerous burden. I could even go so far as to say, “I’m the dad and I make the rules.”

The reality is, she won’t care. Because she will still feel slighted anyway.

And the truth of the matter is that, from her point of view, I am NOT being fair; but I am being just. Jon physically can’t eat as much as she can because he’s younger and his stomach’s smaller. Jon also is a painfully picky eater, and so getting him to meet even the relaxed standard I’ve set for him is a remarkably hard thing to do (and truthfully, he rarely ever meets it).

The problem, and it’s the foundation for what Andy was talking about with his “Jesus isn’t fair” observation, is the tension between truth and grace. Truth says that all people are under the same standard: we are measured against the holiness of God, a standard by which no man can be found righteous. Grace says that God will overlook our failures and count us as righteous by his Son. So on the one hand rules, but on the other one, grace. And since God made the rules, he knows and understands them best. So that means that, sometimes, he isn’t fair. Sometimes one person’s prayer is answered while another one isn’t.

But it doesn’t mean God is unjust. He can’t be. It would violate his character.

Look, I’d be a lying dirtbag if I said that I didn’t think God was unfair sometimes. I’d also be a lying dirtbag if I said that I didn’t want him to be unfair; the truth is, I want him to be unfair. I just want him unfair in my favor. But God isn’t like that. His justice won’t allow it. And so he doesn’t answer every prayer exactly the way we demand/expect/want. He doesn’t give everyone unlimited resources and perfect health and all of the other things that we want but don’t get (and secretly think we deserve); things that – once denied – lead us to labeling God unfair.

But no matter what we think, no matter how we frame it and present it, the reality is that if God is as Christianity and Judaism and Islam assert – the source from which all life flows and is sustained – then only he knows what is right and just and true and fair. And what he knows is beyond our limited capacity. And if we take Scripture at its word and believe the things that it reveals about him, about his nature and character and will, then we must admit to ourselves that he will do things we cannot understand. A limit that, for us, makes the trials and tragedies and triumphs of this life intense and powerful and beautiful.

There will be people who read this and rip it to shreds. I understand. I’m not trying to write a thesis here, no matter what the word count may tally. I’m trying to wrap my head around a tension that too often derails us as followers of Christ, as children of God. It’s a new area of thought for me, and so I welcome the challenges/opposing viewpoints/vicious trolling. The comments are open for your viewpoints and I welcome you to leave them. I’ll respond as I can.

I guess in the end, I come back to something my friend P. C. Frailey said to me on Twitter the other day: most people spend their time attacking a God that doesn’t exist. They point out flaws that God doesn’t have, because they define God as something he hasn’t revealed himself to be. In the end, they are beating against the air.

God is just. God is gracious. Sometimes that means he isn’t fair.

I think I can be okay with that.

Sometimes, You Just Need to Listen

I’ve worked with teenagers for over 13 years now, and if I’ve learned anything it’s that whenever something happens to one of their own, teens take it very hard. There is an internalization of tragedy that the teenage years magnifies by a thousand, and the need to explore that internal struggle is vast and immediate.

So that’s why my phone blew up yesterday afternoon. Lots of people needing someone to talk to. Or, more accurately, someone to listen.

Really, in a situation like this – when a classmate is murdered, perhaps over something as trivial as shoes – the best thing any adult can do is listen. And not just the way we sometimes do, where we nod our head and say “Uh-huh” a lot while waiting for a break in the monologue during which we will impart our vast, adult wisdom. I mean really listening. Because when you listen, you hear some amazing things.

The uncertainty of life. The tenderness of hearts. The capacity to ask the big questions of life. The idea of mortality.

When you are really listening, you hear that our students aren’t asking for us to make the world perfect; they’re asking us to help it make sense. They want to know that there is comfort to be found inside the madness, to know that the big, bad world won’t swallow them whole. Profundity – even when genuine and truly insightful – isn’t as helpful to them as sincerity. And when you sincerely listen, you earn the right to share the profound thoughts later on down the road, when they can really absorb them.

Last week, the tragedy in Newtown opened up all sorts of conversations to be had with our kids about everything from guns to mental illness to safety to death. Yesterday, those same questions came home to Grayson, and were magnified in the death of Paul Sampleton.

I won’t presume to tell anyone how to parent, because you know your kids far better than I do, but if I may offer one suggestion to those who are uncertain about what to do, it would be this:

Give your kids a chance to talk, and listen to what they have to say. You’ll know where to go from there.

Good luck with the conversation.

Raising A Better Tomorrow

Yesterday I received a question via my Stump the Chump page, and it was so intriguing that I’ve decided to write two posts about it. The first post is written from a general parenting perspective, and it can be found on my Patch blog. This is the other post, and I want to approach the question from a pastoral perspective if I may.

Here’s what came in:

Question: this is not so much a question for You as it is meant for ALL parents…………. How do you plan to raise better children? (i.e. children with morals, dignity, respect, ability to think rather than repeat, etc.)

I want to start off by addressing the shaky premise of the question: that parenting alone is responsible for how an individual turns out. People are people. You can be a great parent and still have your child do things that break your heart. Likewise, you can be a horrific parent and have a kid who turns out to be a gem. That’s the thing about people: they are more than the sum of their parts.

But it would be foolish to dismiss the question outright. After all, there is something to be said about the power and influence of parenting. My parents helped shape me significantly; there is no better example of this than my inability to call an older adult by name without including a proper title – Mr. or Ms. Drives some folks nuts, but it’s just something that my dad ingrained in me and I can’t escape it.

Naturally their influence comes out in other areas as well, because a parent is the formative voice of a child’s early years. How a child understands the world is determined by the world their parents present them and how their parents guide them through that world.

King Solomon understood that idea very well. In Proverbs 22:6 he wrote, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”

The question is, and I believe it pertains to the question above, though phrased differently, is “What is the way s/he should go?”

For the last couple of decades, the way was fairly obvious; so obvious, in fact, that it garnered the title “the Traditional Family.” A husband, wife, two kids, a dog, two cars, little house with a nice lawn and a white picket fence. Chances are they were Protestant, though not necessarily aggressively so, and they lived a good moral life being nice to neighbors and striving towards the American Dream. They were polite, well mannered, and well groomed.

Nowadays, that’s a stereotype. One that gets made fun of. A lot.

In a world where family means almost anything we want it to mean, where morality is no longer fixed upon a certain set of ideas or a certain social code or based in the character of an unchanging God, what is the way our children should go?

Do we even have a clue?

We can run to the Bible and start pulling out verses helter-skelter to try and support our old way. We can thunder from the pulpit that this generation needs to quit rebelling and just learn to do as they’re told. We can impose laws and restrictions and limits to try and curb what we see as disturbing patterns of behavior, but the reality is that none of that is going to do a bit of good. A generation that is used to blowing up standards and rules and regulations isn’t going to be phased by newer, harder, more better penalties.

They’re just going to push back that much harder.

To answer the question as simply as possible, in order to raise a better tomorrow, we must go back to the example of Jesus. We must get into the lives of our children and teach them who God is, how God loves, and why it all matters to our lives.

We must start at the beginning, on their level, and disciple them. Teach them. Show them what it means to live a life in right relationship with God. That means we must show them our relationship with God. We must show them humility, submission, forgiveness, grace, mercy, justice, self-control. We must lead them into moments of prayer and contemplation of the Word of God. We must train them that what we believe is not “cleverly devised fables” but reality, Truth with a capital T.

A better child will not come from brow-beating. It will not come from intractable thinking and uniform standards that cannot be changed. We must follow the example that God set before us in Christ: that, while we were still sinners, He died for us and forgave us of our sins (Rom. 5:8). True, God’s standards are universal, but His relationship with each person is individual. He comes to us where we are and shows us who we can be, then helps us become that person by His great strength.

Should we not imitate our Father?

Jesus said it this way, when speaking of the faith a child has, and how it is imperative for the Kingdom of Heaven: “If you give them a hard time, bullying or taking advantage of their simple trust, you’ll soon wish you hadn’t. You’d be better off dropped in the middle of a lake with a millstone around your neck. Doom to the world for giving these God-believing children a hard time! Hard times are inevitable, but you don’t have to make it worse — and it’s doomsday to you if you do.” (Matt. 18:6, The Message)

Granted, Jesus is talking about how we treat children in matters of faith, but don’t those words apply equally well to other matters of parenting?

Disciple. Love. Teach. Train. Give them the best of ourselves, because God gave us the best of Himself. If we want a better generation of children, we must start by being a better generation of parents. And that begins by leaning hard into the wisdom and will of our Father, and learning from Him.