Monkey-see, Monkey-do...

Wow, I just realised that my last post was the end of 2018! Talk about time flying...

This year we have hit the ground running. It's amazing how lazy school holidays very quickly morph into a routine of school and after-school activities that feels like you blink and are transported to the end of term!

This week is a bit manic, I am frantically working and trying to get some work done before the looming school holidays and add to that, it's Noah's 7th birthday this weekend! That means it's all the wonderful things like cleaning and baking and getting our home ready for 15 kids to run wild in a few days. I have managed to have all our kids parties away from home over the past few years. I just found it so much easier to eliminate cleaning the whole house from the list of party 'to-do's'. This year I'm keeping it simple and going back to basics with a very easy Beyblade party for a soon to be 7 year old who is over the moon at the thought of eating $5 pizzas and having  a Beyblade tournament with his buddies.

One of my self-proposed challenges this past month is to really connect one on one with my kids. It really feels like juggling eggs sometimes. You just feel like you're winning in an area or with a particular child and then another one plays up. I've heard it likened to that arcade game where you whack the moles. Quite a true picture. You just feel like you're 'winning' and then something else 'pops up'. What fun!

My default mode has in the past been fear. I immediately allow my mind to wander down the track of time and into a future world where the behaviour hasn't been dealt with. I only realised I did this fairly late into my parenting journey. Although it is healthy and even good practise as a parent to be looking ahead and preparing our kids of the future, it isn't healthy to allow fear to govern how you parent.

In saying all this, recently I've had some 'moles' pop up. I had to mentally block negative self-talk like 'I don't have time for this', 'not again', 'this is too hard' and choose connection. If we look at God the Father and His parenting style with us, I think that's a good place to start. I am adamant that everything we need to know as parents we can learn from God. Not what we've been taught about Him which may or may not be correctly portraying His heart, but what we learn firsthand from the Word and our own interaction with Him. I have come to know that God's goal is not behaviour transformation and modification, it isn't obedience with a slave-like mentality of 'obey or burn' but a relationship of respect and honour rooted in love. His end goal is connection with us. His heart is to walk with us, to talk with us, to lead us and guide us. Yes, discipline and consequences come into the picture, of course. But, the goal is to get us living in abundance and blessing which comes from unbroken connection with Him.

So this week I played the boardgame after their bedtime. I lay in the bed a little longer and played silly little games they came up with. I jumped into bed in the middle of the day for cuddles. I stopped cooking to play Beyblades. I found opportunities to communicate that each child is valued and important and very much loved.

This is not child-centred parenting. Parenting should be a leadership role, training, encouraging, teaching and showing by example how to do life. It is also not possible everyday. Most days I cannot (and won't) stop dinner prep and go play a game. Let's be honest, we would never accomplish anything! But I think as parents, we can sense and feel when behaviours are a cry for attention. We have 2 choices at this point. Either, get frustrated and bring consequences to the surface behaviour, OR bring consequences where needed but see beneath the surface that there is a heart there that needs connection, reassurance and love.

Deeper than this, I have been sensing more than just connection with us, this deep burden to facilitate my kids connecting with God.

I was getting frustrated with myself recently because structured plans of Bible reading and teaching the kids about God were falling off the page as the week progressed. Some nights cuddling on the bed at bedtime worked for us reading the Bible, other nights bedtime was a circus and it never happened. Some mornings were idyllic and peaceful and we prayed as a family, other mornings I was yelling at the kids to find their shoes and hooting at them from the car... I decided rather that I was going to actively seek opportunities in the day and embrace what they looked like. This was such a wonderful thing to experience. Staying in-tune to God to be able to speak into the kids lives at random times throughout the day has been an eye-opening experience. For anyone who has tried to have a 'teaching moment' with kids, you either have that gap in their attention or not. And if it's the 'not' times, you know no amount of explaining or stressing a point will make it sink in. We ended up doing an impromptu story of Jesus raising a girl to life around the dinner table, one night in the bath where the kids were getting restless I grabbed the Bible and we did the story of Joshua and the walls of Jericho. Another morning on the way to school we spoke about the miracles God did, how He made everything we see out of nothing, how He parted a whole ocean for people to walk through and how there is nothing He can't do. I think for me, as a parent, I've learnt the power in moments. Our schedules don't always accommodate 'moments'. Moments where the kids are asking questions that can lead into a lesson, moments where their hearts are open and responding to a situation.

One way I feel as parents we are always teaching is with our own life's example. I am reminded daily that how I respond to the things in my world that stress me out, make me worry or hurt me, are being watched, observed and modelled to watching, absorbing little souls. Being able to say 'Thank you Jesus for your strength and help today', when the kids are driving me nuts so that they hear and observe me leaning on Jesus. Letting the kids see me ask the Holy Spirit for help when I've lost something and then thanking Him when I find it. Hearing me pray for someone who was rude or obnoxious in traffic, explaining that maybe they've just got some bad news. Maybe someone close to them was hurt or sick? Even this past Friday's events. The tragic shooting that happened so close to home. I explained what had happened to the kids. They heard it on the news as it was unfolding and we had such a good (age appropriate) conversation about it. I helped explain that someone had a heart full of hate and that drove him to hurt a whole bunch of innocent people. Funnily enough, one of my kids initial response was to say, 'mum, I hate that man'. I could see it was coming from a place of feeling so sorry for the people who were hurt. I explained to them that they was just feeling really angry that people were suffering but that allowing any hate in our heart was exactly what that man had allowed to happen. We cannot hate people. We can hate what they did, hate their actions, but we have to choose to pray for them and love them. I was able to explain how Jesus had died for that man and even though he did a horrible, terrible thing, God loved that man and we needed to as well.

Real life in the end, is the real demonstration of what we believe. Whether God and the gospel and the Bible are just stories or whether they are so entwined in our lives that the kids see it as one and the same, is a different story and the ultimate goal. I pray they would never just be hearing all about what they 'should' be doing but come on the adventure of following God as a family, with me! Every day we should be hearing from God, listening to what the Holy Spirit is teaching us, looking for needs to fill, looking for people to pray for. Do they see us reading our Bible? Do they hear us praying when they're falling asleep or when they wake up? Our kids need a demonstration of the Gospel. They need to see us confident, fully assured and persuaded of the faith that we're raising them in, not just the moral code and values of an old book that helps us keep our kids in line. It's all about the heart and as much as parenting is about moulding and shaping our kids, it is about us moulded and shaped and humbled daily into a place of reliance upon the Holy Spirit.

I was privileged enough to grow up in a Spirit-filled church where we saw miracles happen. We saw people delivered of demons, legs growing, people in wheelchairs getting up in healing services. The reality of the gospel was a defining pillar of truth in my life. I am so aware that in a country as blessed as New Zealand, with very little 'need' on the surface,  that unless we go after everything the Bible promises us as believers, as parents, we will sell our kids short of the Kingdom they should be inheriting. If we are the Church, the Spirit-filled bride of Christ, then we should not be living defeated, beat down, broke lives and trying to enforce empty rules in our home.

At the end of the day, if we truly love God and spend time with Him, more and more, over and over again we will learn that He loves our kids more than we do. We will realise more and more that more than any other qualification our kids will receive, more than any pay-cheque they'll have deposited into their bank account, if we fail to demonstrate the reality of living in the Kingdom to our kids, we have failed in what matters in the great scheme of eternity. Now I say that in one breath and in the next thanking God that He is a God who redeems, a God who who strengthens and graces us to do what we need to do and who meets us where we are at. That leaves us with no excuse. It leaves us empowered and confident. It leaves us reminded that we are not alone and were never designed to go off on our own and try figure it all out. Closer than our next breath is our Father who loves us more than we can imagine and who loves our kids more than we do. A patient Father. A loving Father. A Father who teaches and helps us, who gives us every good gift.

I guess to sum up what I'm feeling at the moment is that rules and structured learning 'about' God will get us so far. It is better than nothing, lets be honest. But first prize and what I believe God intended for us, is to walk so closely to Him that the stress, the worries and the anxiety fade away. That in walking with Him, we will parent with a supernatural grace and intuition. In response to this closeness to the Father, we will by default demonstrate life from a position of victory to our kids.

Praying that all you awesome parents out there are reminded and encouraged today that everything you need, God is. Whether that's a councillor, a provider, a helper or even a co-parent. Everything you face tomorrow can be a learning moment (and is, one way or another) in teaching our kids how to do life. Praying that you are reminded that out of everyone on the face of the planet, throughout the corridors of time, God chose YOU to parent your babies, whether birthed or inherited.

Lets make a commitment to parent with purpose, to keep the main thing the main thing and to be aware that what we do matters.