Little & Big Loss--consequences

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"No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it." Hebrews 12:11

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“But Momma, I didn’t choose to chase after her, it just happened, I did it without choosing it! I didn’t think about it, I just did it,” Wyatt sobbed in frustration as he ramblingly explained why he left the yard on his Razor motorcycle to go chase a neighbor girl baiting him into a game of chase down the street.

“I know you didn’t think about it, but that’s the problem. You got really excited because Alyssa wanted to race you on the motorcycle but you didn’t stop to think if it was something you were allowed to do or not. You know you are not allowed to leave the yard on your motorcycle without permission,” I explained.

In my mind I had total sympathy. I know exactly how it had gone down, Alyssa threw down the challenge with a simple ‘you can’t catch me’ and it was all over from there. We thrive on challenges in this house and well, we just aren’t very good at backing down.

That combined with a love of speed and Wyatt was all too eager to race ahead. Alyssa and Wyatt consistently egg each other on with their quick smiles, wit and silliness in way that often makes me smile. I figured there wasn’t a snowballs’ chance in Hati that Wyatt would have thought to ask permission before leaving the yard under these circumstances.

Although I sympathized, I knew I was going to have to pull him in for this. I had learned about the incident from his brothers who were all to happy to report his escapade.

No more motorcycle for a week and he was inside for the rest of the night. Though I completely sympathized with what drove him to break the rule, I saw the bigger picture for the pattern of self-control I wanted to teach.

“Wyatt I’m really sad that you have to come in from playing now and can’t ride the motorcycle for a week. I wish you could stay outside and play with your friends. But in life there are going to be lots of times when you are going to be pulled to break a rule and not think about the decision you are making. My job as your momma is to help you to learn to think about those decisions before you make them.

Right now when you are little you are just losing your motorcycle but as you get bigger the things you lose get bigger and more important when you don’t stop to think before you act. I know how sad I am that I can’t let you go back out and play but I want you to work on learning this lesson now when what you lose is small,” I explained.

He sobbed and begged to go back out. It seems to be a common thread right now---decisions that Wyatt regrets after the fact and the ensuing tears that accompany the consequence. I sent him away to finish his sobbing upstairs because of our standing, ‘you’re not allowed to wreck the peace down here’ fit rule.

As a child all Wyatt sees is day to day. As a parent I see into his future. I’ve often heard it said, ‘start with the end in mind and work your way backwards to build it.’

Well, my end in mind is a godly man who will choose faithfulness to his wife 25 years from now when his marriage is stressed and temptations pull him away.

End in mind is a godly man who will hold strong against the pressures to ‘bend the rules’ in his job in situations that start small but cumulate into the collapse of businesses.

End in sight is a godly man who will lay aside his desire to be right and win to replace it with a desire for reconciliation.

End in sight is a godly man who keeps open hands towards giving when loads of trinkets scream for his attention and devotion.

All these come with a cost. All these require deliberate choices for what does not come easily or naturally. We are working to disciple the boys towards this maturity, knowing that it requires constant discipling.

My biblical commission is to provide the training, his response to that training is between him and God. I am accountable to fulfill my commission to train; he is accountable for what he does with that training.

So feeling like we have had this conversation several times over the last several months I began to question if any of the message was sinking in.

Weeks later we found ourselves all in the family room at the end of the night watching an O’s game for a little while before bed. We were having some ice cream but Wyatt had lost ice cream for some earlier infraction that I’ve since forgotten.

“Wyatt I wish you could have some ice cream now, it makes me sad that you can’t enjoy that with your brothers,” I said.

“Yeah, me too Momma. But I know that it’s little things I miss out on now and when I get big it’s gonna be bigger more important stuff than ice cream,” Wyatt said.

I almost fell over. All the conversations we’d had about this topic, mostly accompanied by a lot of tears that really made me question if anything was sinking in and here we were! These tears often pulled at my hearts strings and caused me to want to cave on the punishment. I wanted my son to have dessert, to race his friends on motorcycles, to get to stay up late and enjoy a baseball game---but even more I wanted him to be able to enjoy the blessings that come into a life when one obeys God.

He had heard and he was processing the training. It had made a tiny dent and he was beginning to understand. Would it prevent his next impulsive action---99% sure it will not! However, we mature step by deliberate step and I'm celebrating this one small step towards maturity!!!

Ravens Monster--testosterone

Ravens Monster

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"All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work." II Timothy 3:16-17

"Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path."

Psalm 119:105

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Do you ever have those almost out of body experiences with your kids that leave you questioning your ability as a mother and wondering, ‘how did this happen in the first place?!”

I had one of those recently and God continues to teach me that discipling my boys will never be the predictable, rolling path I’d like. Instead it’s raucous, winding and requires continual prayer for strength to survive it at times.

My boys are 8, 8 , and 9 and I guess I thought by now Bible time, which most often happens at our breakfast table, would have calmed down by now, not so! Rather I have begun to go with the flow more. Swimming upstream against this flood of testosterone has worn me down!

I share this discipling moment with you to encourage you that studying God’s Word with your kids doesn’t have to look calm and contained for God’s Word to be piercing their little hearts. In fact, it seems with kids it’s just the opposite!

Several months ago, I was surrounded by my boys chasing each other around the kitchen table and running the loop of our first floor. Tad had a Raven’s blanket thrown over his head and he was chasing his brothers around yelling, “the blanket monster is coming, the blanket monster is coming!!!!!” William and Wyatt raced wildly through the house yelling and laughing wildly the whole time. I sat at the kitchen table and thought, ‘how did this happen? Exactly 30 seconds ago we were all sitting calmly at the table, eating and reading a Bible story from our children’s Bible. How did that all unravel so quickly?

(a different Bible time using Cheerois we counted out the prophets of Baal vs Elijah, the one prophet of God---we do not have to fear, even when odds seem insurmountable!)

As I watched them chase each other around I mentally back tracked to find the point of origin for the current chaos that was my house at that moment.

We had been reading about Lot and Abraham making choices re where they would split land up. We thought it was odd that the younger nephew, Lot, chose first instead of the patriarch Abraham.

We talked above motives for choices we make. Who are we honoring with our choices, God or ourselves?

We landed on the realization that sometimes we pick what appears best, and it actually ends up backfiring when we don’t consult God. Then i realized it--at some point in the progression of the story about Sodom and Gomorrah, I had made an exaggerated gesture reading the story with emphasis and that it it! IT WAS ON!!

My mild exclamation had been the catalyst for the current craziness in my house. William made the first crazy surprise face in response to my own (looking a lot like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone). Each boy followed suit and the gesturing magnified with each re-enactment. They all screamed ‘woooh’ someone jumped up and the rest is a blur!

Cut to Tad, aka the Blanket Monster, chasing the twins around the house. In the past I would have seen this as defeat. I would have tried to get them back to their seat immediately and then been frustrated the rest of the time, most likely unable to keep them seated or get their attention back to finish the story.

But I’ve grown and realized, these testosterone surges usually need 1-2 minutes to run their course in our home. (granted they’ll happen 12,000x a day) Then I can wave the checkered flag to bring them all in to pit row, aka our table, and finish what we started. Crazily, it worked! When we had dogs we called this crazy, impromptu surge of running “the rips”---it’s the same thing with little boys!

We picked right up where we left off. No chastisement needed, they were ready to focus again. We continued talking about Sodom and Gomorrah when Tad asked, “Momma, do you think if Lot had let his uncle choose first and Abraham had picked Sodom and Gomorrha, all that horrible stuff would have happened there?”

As a mother who wearies from the barrage of questions that all 3 of my boys feel compelled to ask EVERY day, I was stunned. This wasn’t the typical irrelevant, non-sensical question that doesn’t really have an answer! I get asked at least 40 of those a day by each boy and often wave the white flag of ‘I don’t know’ in response. This was the kind of question I’d been waiting for!

The kid who was the raving Blanket Monster exactly 1 minute earlier was now not only showing me he understood what we had just read, but now he was internalizing it to the point of hypothesizing about how history could be changed based on one decision!

Just in case I thought this was a fluke, God gave me another one of these a few months later. After a loud family dinner it was time for clean up. Tad went to the family room to receive the ‘go deep’ sponge pass then asked while cleaning the table, ‘how come Solomon didn’t ask for sin to be gotten rid of when God told him he could have anything he wanted?’

These are the break throughs that show me the power of God’s Word in my boys’ lives. I have always felt compelled to make God’s Word relevant and real to their daily lives. I’ve never been content to read a story and call it done because I want to teach them to probe.

God showed me Tad was probing the depths of His Word. His Word comes to them at the oddest times and in the oddest ways, because He will not submit to human plans for a little box living. Instead He reaches into all our craziness and says, ‘find Me here! I’ve got something I want to show you!’

Limps vs Struts--God Dependence

(REPOSTING of this blog that has disappeared from the site. I'm re-posting for the same 2 reasons I post everything to this blog---1) so my boys have a record of how they were discipled to know the Lord when they are all grown up! (and they'll understand why some songs are burned into their memories forever!) and 2) to encourage other moms in honesty who've been a tremendous encouragement to me!

“While we were children, our parents did what seemed best to them. But God is doing what is best for us, training us to live God’s holy best. At the time, discipline isn’t much fun. It always feels like it’s going against the grain. Later, of course, it pays off handsomely, for it’s the well-trained who find themselves mature in their relationship with God,” Hebrews 12:10-11.

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Mothering was zapping all my resources. Uncertainty seemed to wrap around every decision I made. Confidence was a thing of the distant past that seemed to only mock me now as a mother to three little boys all under 2.

I wanted to go back to simpler times---being newly married to my best friend, working in a career that was full of reward, hanging out with friends whoopin’ it up till the wee hours of the night, shopping sprees, going out to eat, Saturday mornings spent sleeping in then playing tennis, apartment living with no maintenance….quite simply, back to the life that was all about me and Chris.

I wanted be able to watch Johnson and Johnson baby commercials without feeli

ng like I’d been duped. I wanted the squeaky clean dream without the reality. I was bitter at the miring disillusionment which was showing no signs of releasing its strangle hold.

My home was not the place of peace I’d known the previous 7 years of marriage before children.

The home Chris and I had worked so hard to create, the kind I thought couldn’t really exist in real life, was slipping away into chaos, diapers, exhaustion and sick babies. Doing the work of maintaining our marriage was taking a back seat to the pressing demands of our babies. Fear set in because the place of hope I had known the last 7 years, a home that I longed to return to at the end of the day, now seemed to be morphing into a giant ball of stress and fatigue.

The question that haunted my mind while sitting up with sick babies in the middle of the night was, ‘how far of a slip was it from where I was to the home life I had known growing up?’

Growing up, home was a place where hiding was the safest, thus most appealing option. There were far too many visits from Social Services, police and other well intended, but somber faced, bad news bearing officials.

College was my break free and fly time. I was the first person in my whole family to attend college---so the waters were unchartered, but full of promise and I hoped my ticket out. And that’s exactly what college was for me—an escape and a soft place to land. It was there, in that soft spot, that I also realized it was not a college degree I needed to rescue me, but a Savior.

Chris and I married ¾ of the way through my college years, after a complete renovation of our relationship, but that’s another story, for another day! We created a sweet little home for ourselves in a one bedroom/bath apartment full of GoodWill furniture and a lot of joy. I was so excited to know that life could be full of promise and home could be a place you anticipated returning to with joy instead of fear and anxiety.

Looking back, I think God gave me those pain free years, college through the first 7 years of marriage, as a soul strengthening time. A time to plant my feet solidly in His kingdom before He would begin to turn my world upside down as the mother to three little boys in a year and a half time frame. Life would never be so neat and manageable again. Predictability was out

the window!

I look back now on those years of transition and know God was doing a great work in my life. Not one I signed up for, but a great work none the less. Growing more into who God desires me to be is not a pain free process. Before those years of life with babies, I knew how to live in pain apart from God (growing up), and I knew how to live a life of peace with God (college-marriage before kids) and now I had to learn how to live ALL of life with God.

Now I see how God was gracious to bring me through each of these stages like a loving Father does, knowing when His children need a little extra push to keep growing. Walking with God did not mean I would be spared the turmoils of life; it meant He longed to develop his fruit of the spirit, which needs as its fertile growing soil some pretty sordid times. I shouldn’t have been surprised by this---God’s finest creation in Genesis begins with dirt.

Rick Warren suggests God would rather His children have a perpetual limp from a thorn He’s given, to a perpetual strut of independence. God knew my dependence had grown on my own ability to rise up and meet each challenge square in the face and He needed to teach me that it was not by my strength that I had been set free.

There would be challenges that, regardless of my ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ mentality, I would not be able to meet on my own. God was teaching me to hold onto Him, which meant letting go of the fairy tale that two people who loved each other and God would avoid miserable times in life.

Contemporary worship music has been a consistent component in my journey to know God more. It has fed the life of His Spirit inside me and brought me to my knees countless times. It has helped me to quit clinging to the fleeting so I could hold onto Jesus.

Sara Groves ranks up there as one of my favorites primarily because of her honesty. Her music has an incredible truth telling quality about it that cattle prods my selfish heart straight to His refining hand more times than I’d like to admit. She reveals God in our lives right in the midst of when we’d chose our own comfort over His character development. She exposes. Man I love her music! I saw her live last winter---she is the real deal!

If you are looking for a CD that's gonna stick with you and draw you closer to Him---check her out! “Painting Pictures in Egypt” still brings tears to my eyes, 8 years later from the time when I jotted down the notes that I would one day write up into this devotion. Sarah recounts how the Israelites pined for the very slavery they had begged for release from while they journeyed in the desert. That passage of Scripture has always struck me as ironic, the Israelites begged Moses ‘take us back.’

Yet, here I was, pining for simpler times that didn’t require so much of me. God was teaching me during these broken years (see “Poop Stained Lessons” devotional) to know Him more in the path I’d chosen. I’d sing/shout these lyrics in the car as an offering and acceptance of where I was as a mother. The song didn't take away the struggle, just validated it and helped expose my desire for comfort over character building.

(My boys have patiently endured hearing this song probably 100's of times over their lives now at 8,8 and 9! Often times the twins join in singing it with me from the backseat!)

"I don't want to leave here, I don't want to stay. Feels like pinching to me either way. And the places I long for most are the places where I've been, they are calling out to me like a long lost friend. It's not about losing faith, it's not about trust. It's all about comfortable, when you move so much. And the place I was in wasn't perfect, but I had found a way to live. It wasn't milk or honey, but then neither is this. I've been painting pictures of Egypt. Leaving out what it lacks. The future feels so hard and I wanna go back. But the places that used to fit me cannot hold the things I've learned. Those roads are closed off to me while my back was turned."