Releasing Our Children
The pull to ensure the thriving of our children is strong, and that protective layer goes deep. As parents, this can consume us. We can base our decisions on them and their desires. Yet God did not tell us to make decisions based on our children but His clear Word.
Does this mean we ignore the Holy Spirit within our children and ignore what God is speaking to them? No. God put our children in our family on purpose, and they, too, have a call that we are to help cultivate. As our family unit prays, there are times when God has spoken to our children very clearly, changing our family’s trajectory.
It can, however, get tricky when we include our children in our prayer process. Sometimes, they try to have us make decisions based on their comfort level rather than on the Word of the Lord. Ultimately, we help them to discern the difference between their flesh and the Holy Spirit. This is a lifetime journey, and as their parents, it is our primary goal in parenting them because we are not always with them.
Over the last several years, we have yet to make a significant decision without praying as a family and allowing the Lord to speak to us about the next step. Ultimately, our choices will affect our entire family. We strongly desire to enable them to own the journey our family is on. Because at some point, the journey will get difficult, and it is vital to be able to go back to the word God had given us.
This has been vital, primarily as our children have grown older. Every time we moved, whether on short or long trips, we had to say goodbye to friends worldwide. Watching their hearts break over lost friendships has repeatedly ripped my heart out.
This is why I am so thankful the Lord said to make Pensacola home. Even though we will be gone for six months while Bruce is the Assistant Director for a Biblically-based film for the Aboriginal people and the kids and I serve within the Aboriginal community (Click Here), we get to come back to the exact location. When we say goodbye, it’s a goodbye with a “see you in a few months.”
But as I watch my older two struggling to connect in Pensacola, longing for the deep connections they made in Arkansas, my heart aches. I want to make it easier for them, yet all I can do is release them to the Lord. Knowing that God called us here and that He has always been faithful. And in the struggle is the most intimate place we can be. The struggle is where our character develops; we learn to go deep with the Living God. So, shielding our children from struggle stunts their character growth.
Dan Bowman, a YWAM missionary who had been put in prison for 9 weeks in Iran, had a praying mom. But her prayer wasn’t that her son would be released from prison but that Dan would stay there until God would be glorified through the imprisonment.
Wow . . . Wow!
Lord, help me to be at this place in my release of my children. Help me to be a parent who holds my kids with open palms, allowing the Living God to take them on the journeys He needs to take them on so they are ready to be used in a way that brings the King of Kings glory. As I write this, my eyes well up with tears. The full release of our children into the loving hands of the Father wrecks me because I know I hold my children more tightly than He’d like me to.
Especially when I see my children struggling or when they have health issues, Esperanza has had a brain tumor since she was three years old; she is now thirteen. She had brain surgery only months before we left to go into full-time missions and again only weeks before we moved to Pensacola. And we have had scares multiple other times. It would have been easy not to move forward with the call of God because of her health condition. People would have understood.
Yes, God put us on this earth to protect our children and raise them, yet they are never meant to be on the throne of our hearts. Yahweh makes this clear when he asks Abraham to sacrifice his son. God didn’t want the blood of Isaac, but He wanted to cut the unhealthy tie Abraham had developed with his son. Our loving Savior knows what is best for our children and for us. And yes, He gave us our beautiful children as a gift to steward well, but ultimately, they are the Lord’s. When they were formed, they were formed in the image of God, and they are not ours to hold on to too tightly. But they are God’s, and we are called to steward their upbringing so they can ultimately learn to have intimacy with the Living God.
So today, I choose to release my children into the Father’s loving hands. I trust that His ways are far better than my own. Will you, too, join me in this process? Let’s allow the Lord to direct our paths and not make decisions based on our or our children’s emotions but on the Word of the Living God of the Universe, who created us and knows the beginning and the end.
