Cathy has written a guest post for the brilliant not-for-profit company Madlug which donates a bag to a child in care, every time a customer buys a bag themselves.
Madlug believes that every child has value, worth and dignity.
Unfortunately children in foster care too often have to transport all their possessions in a bin bag when moving from one placement to another. This is degrading for them. It’s Madlug’s mission to see every child in care with a bag – which is a simple yet effective way to demonstrate to vulnerable children that they have value, worth and dignity. We think Madlug is a brilliant business and this week, Cathy has written a guest post for their blog.
Here’s a little excerpt…
Right now we have two tiny boys in the house; a one year old and a three year old. This is an open letter to the teenage version of them.
To my sons,
It may seem strange to you for your mum to write a letter to the teenage version of you when you’re only babies. Some might say it’s even a little premature. But it will be no time at all before you’ll be towering over me, and this is what I want you to know, and this is what I want to remember to tell you when the transformation from you being tiny tots to men-in-the-making takes place….
Having children is a shock to the system. There’s no denying it. We look back on life pre-children and wonder what on earth we did with all our time. How did we ever feel busy when we didn’t have children?
Of course that’s a simplistic way of viewing it, but there’s a lot of truth in it.
For many people and (crucially for today’s topic) many marriages – crisis ensues when children step on to the stage.
It’s ironic really. Children are so often the focus of so many prayers, hopes and desires, and yet when they come along life can get really difficult. The potent mix of sleep deprivation, altered routines, new levels of noise and a sense of changed identity can impact our marriages in ways that haven’t previously been experienced.
This kind of crisis can be serious for our marriages, which can have a huge impact on how we point our children to the gospel, as our introductory post pointed out.
So all we wanted to do in this post is suggest three things that might be useful to you when you face the ‘crisis of children’.
Keep a running conversation
Both of you – Mum and Dad – will be experiencing a range of emotions when a child enters your family. Joy, wonder, anxiety, frustration, impatience and anticipation, to name just a few.
Talk about them.
God has placed this child in your family. He wants you to lovingly nurture them and point them to him.
But this new dynamic doesn’t mean that your marriage is not important. No, it’s as important as ever – perhaps even more so. With all the competing emotions and demands on your time, you might find it easy to put the brakes on investing in your marriage, but don’t! Now, more than ever you need to keep investing. And a crucial element of this is… talking. It’s simple, but so important.
Talk about how you’re feeling. Talk about the new things you’ve seen in your spouse since they’ve become a parent, and how you admire, respect and love them all the more for it. Talk about stresses and strains. Talk about how things have changed, and what life is going to look like going forward.
Talk!
And listen.
Listen really well. Remember that your spouse is going through as many changes as you right now. Listen to them. Try to understand them. Ask questions to help you listen even better. Do all of this even when you’re tired, because it matters.
And when you’re working through all of this, make sure you do our second suggestion too:
Pray
Pray for your spouse. Pray with your spouse.
Your marriage matters, and keeping your marriage spiritually fresh is really important. It won’t necessarily be easy, but try to do it. Even if it’s only a 20 second prayer as you lie in bed at night, try to keep at it.
Don’t let your longed for children steal your spiritual intimacy. And if you never had that spiritual intimacy, now is a great time to start. It’s often at the times when we feel most at our wits end – most on the cusp of a break down or like we simply can’t do it anymore – it’s these times that we are often driven closer to God. So let that happen. And let that happen for you together. Let it strengthen your marriage, not weaken it.
And finally:
Keep Perspective
We could say lots of things here about keeping perspective. It won’t last forever – they will sleep through eventually (or leave home!). They’re only a baby for a short time – you longed for it, try to treasure it.
And so on, and so on.
But that’s not what we mean by keep perspective. What we mean is this:
Your marriage is a God-ordained one flesh union for life. Remember that, and protect it. Your children have sprung from that union, but don’t let them drive it apart.
One way that they could drive it apart is by becoming an idol. It happens so easily. You’ve dreamed about having children for so long. They’re so small and vulnerable and dependent. You have so many happy hormones surging around. They can quickly supplant all else in your affections, including your spouse and even God.
Don’t let them do that. Keep your eyes on Jesus. Love him more than anything. Obey his command to not let them drive your marriage apart (Matt 19:4-6), and don’t be fooled into loving them more than Jesus (Matt 10:37). In the end, it’s more loving to them to love them in their proper place (see our blog post on loving your child by loving them less for more reflections on this).
One of the key things God has given you to help you keep perspective, is church. He’s given you that community to point you back to himself, to remind you of the gospel and to love and care for you.
So even if you’ve not washed your hair all week, you smell of baby sick and you have a slightly crazed look in your eyes… try to make it to church. People will understand. And even if they don’t, don’t let that put you off. Because keeping perspective on the gospel will help you to perservere through this wonderful but tricky time, and keeping perspective on the gospel with your spouse will help you together have your eyes fixed on the right thing, and that can only be good for your marriage.
So there we have it. There’s no magic formula in this post, and no rocket science. But we do believe marriage matters, so do what you can to protect it during the crisis of children.
After months of planning, praying, preparing and producing, we are now super excited to be able to reveal to you our very first gospel-centred parenting product.
We are thrilled to introduce you to our Jesse Tree Ornaments and to offer you an exclusive discount as a gospel-centred parenting blog reader. More on that below…
What is Jesse Tree?
Jesse Tree ornaments date back hundreds of years, and are a bit like a Christian advent calendar. The name Jesse Tree comes from a prophesy in Isaiah 11. Each day through December in the run up to Christmas you’ll hang a Jesse Tree Ornament and read a section of the Bible with your child(ren) that points forward to the coming of Jesus.
We think it’s a wonderful tool to help keep excitement about Jesus at the centre of the Christmas period.
As you will know if you’ve read this blog before, we think that gospel is good news for both parents and children, and we want to help you to keep the gospel central to everything. Advent and Christmas should be times of wonderful, joy-filled, gospel-saturated wonder. Very often, however, the gospel gets crowded out with everything else that’s going on. Jesse Tree is just one thing that aims to help keep the gospel at the heart of Christmas, and that’s why we’ve decided to design this product.
If you decide to make a purchase, you’ll receive 24 ornaments which correspond to the first 24 chapters of the Jesus Storybook Bible*, or you can read along with the suggested passages from our Jesse Tree Guide, which comes free with your purchase. So every day, from December 1st, you will be able to fix your family’s eyes on the wonder of the coming of Jesus. You’ll be able to build expectation as you look at some of the wonderful ways that Jesus is anticipated throughout the Old Testamant, and you’ll enjoy the climax of the story as you read about the coming of Jesus, leading you right up to Christmas day.
The usual price is just £30.00, but purchase before September 30th, and use the discount code
blog-discount
and you will receive 10% off the purchase price!
This level of discount is only available to you as a blog reader, and only for this limited time.
We hope you love the design – we certainly do. We are blessed to be working alongside a brilliant designer from our church, Rory Henderson.
Each ornament is hand-printed with ink on rustic hazel wood, and comes pre-strung. We can ship it to you wherever you live in the world.
We’re also thrilled to be able to give 10% of profit to the work of Bible translation and distribution. This means that not only will your family enjoy this gospel-centred product, but you will also be contributing to work that will mean others around the world can gain access to the gospel too.
Our prayer is that your family will use these ornaments for many years to come. Through them, we hope that you will create some truly special memories that are recounted and repeated down the generations. And more importantly, our greatest prayer is that you will all grow in love for Jesus as you together see how (as the Jesus Storybook Bible*so memorably puts it) “every story whispers his name.”
Have you heard yourself saying that to your child?
You’ve asked them to do something – something very simple and very reasonable. But yet again along comes that three-letter swear word. “Why?”.
Because I said so!
I’m done with explaining things. Just obey, for goodness sake!
Thankfully, neither of our boys are quite at the stage of using the “w” word yet. At least not regularly anyway. So we’re not quite reaching the end of this particular tether quite yet.
That’s not to say they don’t try our patience sometimes.
But we love our boys, just like we’re sure you love your child(ren) too. It’s because we love them that we want them to have good behaviour (it’s not only because good behaviour is far less embarrassing when we’re out and about… though it does help!).
So when children disobey, it’s good and right that parents sometimes seek to help their children to see why obedience is the right path for them. (Incidentally we think that, on occasion, “because I said so” – said in a calm way, of course – is exactly the right response. They need to learn that we have authority and obedience shouldn’t be questioned. But that’s for another blog post!)
So, how do we justify it? What should we say to our children to motivate them to obedience?
Let’s consider the options.
We could threaten the consequences of disobedience:
Sit at the table, or no pudding. Stop teasing your sister, or you’ll have a time out. Stop wiping your nose on the arm of the chair (we’ve been there), or I’ll chop it off (we didn’t really threaten that, though… an empty threat if you’ve ever heard one!).
Or perhaps you could promise reward for good behaviour.
If you sit well in church today, you can have a sweetie in the car. If you go a whole morning without shouting, you can have some screen time later. If you brush your teeth, you can have an extra story at bedtime.
What about some of the other options for trying to get our children to obey us?
Being domineering and making our children scared of us so that they obey? They won’t step out of line if they know that we’ll be really angry, because they’re scared of us.
Talking about God – how he is holy and how he demands obedience from us?
Shaming them into obedience? Do this or don’t do that, or I’ll tell your friends that you’re a baby.
Talking about how we should obey as a thankful response to what God has done for us?
Or using praise? Whenever they do something good, going overboard in letting them know how pleased we are with them. This positive reinforcement and extra attention when they do good things is, for lots of children, very effective.
All of these techniques could be used to motivate good behaviour (some would be more recommended than others!).
But today we want to suggest to you another tool for the belt.
How about helping our children to see that God is good? That he’s a kind Father, who only wants what is best for our lives. That he is the Good Shepherd, who only wants to lead us to good pastures.
You see our children, just like us, often see the rules in their lives and the way that God calls them to live as a bad thing. A kind of straitjacket – prohibitive and restricting and stopping their enjoyment of life. They see obedience as a necessary evil – what we ought to do because that’s what God has said we should do, but not good. Just necessary.
But how much better is the reality!
In church recently we were looking at John 10, where Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd.
The Good Shepherd is just that. Good. He cares for his sheep. He loves us. He wants what is best for us. In John 10 he says this:
“I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture.The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
Pasture. Life to the full! That’s what Jesus is offering.
That’s not to say that living a life of obedience is easy. Nor is it to say that the good that Jesus chooses for our lives is the same thing that we would choose for ourselves. But when his good is different to our good, we can be sure that he knows best.
And we can say one thing for certain: the Good Shepherd went so far as to lay down his life for the sheep. He did it to bring us life to the full. Why then would he go back on that now? The life he calls us to is the best possible life, whatever it looks like.
So when we struggle with obedience, or when our children do, we could remind them of this. Obedience may be hard. It may not feel fun in the moment. But if the Good Shepherd calls us to live this way, we can be sure that it’s the best possible way to live. What a great motivator!
