Take the Long View
On potty training and long division
Because I highly value my children’s privacy, I’m not going to give you details to establish the truth of what I’m saying. So you’re just going to have to trust me when I say that I really deeply understand the challenges of parenting through struggles. God, in His amazing kindness, transplanted our family and brought us to the church community we needed just before we could have had any idea we would need it.
I will never forget our pastor, when he came to our home for a pastoral visit, looking very intentionally at me and telling me to “take the long view.” Not all parenting books and programs are bad, but having participated in programs which offered me 5-step plans (which did NOT work as promised), it was a totally different experience to be part of a community which did not even try to offer any easy answers. Our struggles might be because of sin, neurology, nutrition, etc., but none of them were going away overnight. Sometimes I now say to people, “You aren’t going to fix your children’s sin issues overnight anymore than you’re going to fix your own sin issues overnight.” It’s a long haul.
My friend with many children has given me various bits of wonderful advice in many different ways, but whenever I’ve talked to her more directly about the real parenting struggles, she says the same thing, “Pray, and God will show you.” I’ve come back to that many times.
It’s hard to be patient with growth and sanctification. You might as well get out a lawn chair and watch the oak tree grow. You could sit out there for months and not notice it getting any bigger at all. Check back a year later and it might not even look like much of anything has changed. But compare pictures over decades and you can reminisce.
Maybe it seems obvious with an oak tree, but for some reason we tend to think it should be faster with our children. It applies in so many contexts. Moms everywhere are freaking out right now because their 3-year-old is still wetting his pants, their 6-year-old can’t read yet, their 7-year-old is suddenly very disrespectful, their 8-year-old won’t respond politely to strangers, their 9-year-old is kicking and screaming on the floor about long division, their boys are trying to kill each other, and their 12-year-old can’t write a coherent paragraph. They’re extrapolating this moment right now onto the future, certain that their child is “behind.”
And how many of us just read that paragraph and compared it against our own children, relieved about the ones which didn’t apply to us, and looking down our nose at some other child who is clearly not being trained well? We have visions of children who don’t need parenting, houses which don’t need cleaning, food which doesn’t need cooking, and we’re sure somebody somewhere else has figured this out.
What if I re-wrote that paragraph, but took the ages off? What if I made the ages even older? How would our perspective shift? If I said the 10-year-old was still wetting their pants, you wouldn’t assume it was bad parenting. You would assume there was a physical or developmental problem there. Why is that? Because somehow all normally developing children figure out potty training, sometimes in spite of others’ anxiety.
I hear your objection. They don’t all automatically learn to speak respectfully or write coherently. They don’t all learn long division. That’s very true. But maybe we should do a survey of how many authors were writing masterpieces at 12.
I once heard Sarah Mackenzie tell about the time she asked a math teacher for advice on helping her son with a math concept. She said she was walking away before she realized that the math teacher had never asked her for her son’s age. It wasn’t relevant. All he needed to know was what her son did understand… and what her son didn’t understand. That determined the next steps.
It’s complicated. I know that. Sometimes your child isn’t able to read yet because they need more time. Sometimes they have dyslexia. Sometimes they’re hungry, or tired, or stressed. Sometimes we are too. How do you know the difference?
Pray, and God will show you.
Seriously though. He’s probably not going to show you the plan for the next 5 years. But after you sit in your car crying and praying about it, He might have a friend call you and mention just what you needed to hear. And you might not even know that was what happened until you look back on it 5 years later. Take the long view and trust that He knows what He’s doing. He knows what you need. He knows what your children need. And His ways are much higher than ours.
