Matt 19:24-26 "...it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God....Humanly speaking, it is impossible. But with God everything is possible."
Our feelings are God-given, we are created in his image. We have a right to feel everything that we do. While we have this right, it comes with the obligation to show those feelings and the emotions that come with them appropriately.
This last Sunday, I was talking with a friend before leaving church.
This friend was telling me about what is going on between her children and her. The whole time she's talking I'm hearing myself say the same things in regards to Kelsey and myself.
I explained that at one point (for a lot of years!) I was unable to express anger. I went on to say that expressing anger is no longer a problem. The problem now is expressing it appropriately and when needed, not otherwise.
The point that I needed to resolve the problem of how and when to show anger and when not to had been driven home by Kelsey's choices and by this excerpt from "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen R. Covey:
"And what about a parent's relationship with a child? When children are little, they are very dependent, very vulnerable. It becomes so easy to neglect the PC work - the training, the communicating, the relating, the listening. It's easy to take advantage, to manipulate, to get what you want the way you want it - right now! You're bigger, you're smarter, and you're right! So why not just tell them what to do? If necessary, yell at them, intimidate them, insist on your way.
Or you can indulge them. You can go for the golden egg of popularity, of pleasing them, giving them their way all the time. Then they grow up without any internal sense of standards or expectations, without a personal commitment to being disciplined or responsible.
Either way - authoritarian or permissive - you have the golden egg mentality. You want to have your way or you want to be liked. But what happens, meantime, to the goose? What sense of responsibility, of self-discipline, of confidence in the ability to make good choices or achieve important goals is a child going to have a few years down the road? And what about your relationship? When she reaches those critical teenage years, the identity crises, will she know from her experience with you that you will listen without judging, that you really, deeply care about her as a person, that you can be trusted, no matter what? Will the relationship be strong enough for you to reach her, to communicate with her, to influence her?
Suppose you want your daughter to have a clean room - that's P, production, the golden egg. And suppose you want her to clean it - that's PC, production capability. Your daughter is the goose, the asset, that produces the golden egg.
If you have P and PC in balance, she cleans the room cheerfully (In our case, without fussing, whining, crying and screaming.), without being reminded, because she is committed and has the discipline to stay with the commitment. She is a valuable asset, a goose that can produce golden eggs.
But if your paradigm is focused on production, on getting the room clean, you might find yourself nagging her to do it. You might even escalate your efforts to threatening or yelling, and in your desire to get the golden egg, you undermine the health and welfare of the goose."
When I read this portion of The 7 Habits, it sat me back on my butt and slapped me in the face as if to say, "What do you think your doing?". What an eye opener!
I am making the changes I need to, now, so that Kelsey can make better choices too. We are in the testing phase right now, meaning that Kelsey is seeing if she can make me angry or not. With this testing, I see, little by little, that Kelsey is starting to make those better choices.
Back to last Sunday. I'm hearing me speaking through this friend. The kids have no toys left in their rooms and the rooms are still disaster areas.
I called Kelsey over and had my friend explain again what she had explained to me. Then I looked at Kelsey and asked her if the story sounded familiar. Kelsey said, "Yes."
I let my friend know what I had discovered, about The 7 Habits, about how stressful the change can be (You try editing you mouth and see what happens.) and that things now are changing - slowly, but surely - for the better.
Think about this. Things are spiraling downward, between Kelsey and I, even while I'm getting training in the The 7 Habits so I can get myself on the right path, be the parent I know I can be and the person God wants me to be.
As if being a parent, good or bad, isn't humbling enough. Now I'm learning and trying to figure how to balance being a good parent, while I'm still making mistakes. Boy what a learning curve!
If not for God's grace and a childlike faith in him, I would be that camel mentioned in Matt 19:24-26.
Abba, thank you for being in control, for your grace, for humbling experiences and for providing the way. In Christ Jesus' name I pray. Amen :-) XOXOXO
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