I sat alone at one point, praying something like, “Wow, I honestly thought I’d do okay at this parenting thing, but God, I feel like I am messing up and I really, really need Your guidance right now to help these kids.”
In the Bible, the Apostle Paul said, “When I am weak, then am I strong” (II Corinthians 12:10). And as awful as human weakness feels, in many ways it’s not a bad place to be—especially in relation to parenting. To realize you can’t do it on your own opens the door to seeking the divine presence and listening for God’s guidance. In that moment, I had a deep desire to reflect the Father-Mother’s parenting of our children, to put what I understood of the truth of God, myself, and my family into living practice.
And that night God did help me. I heard three things about parenting from a spiritual foundation that I needed to learn. I’ve been growing both in my understanding of those things and in my ability to put them into practice ever since. The three things were to wait on God, nourish the wheat, and release the child to God.
Wait on God
This scriptural instruction speaks to the value of pausing human words and actions and reaching out in prayer for divine Love’s leading.
To pause, to be patient, allows the God-with-us presence of the Christ, the spiritual idea of divine Love, to be felt, and thus in that space of waiting and listening to God, we remember that we are not parenting alone.
When things are difficult with kids, error—or what Jesus called the “liar”—suggests that we on our own have to do something and that it has to be done right now. In the heat of a difficult moment, it can feel as if between what a child is doing or saying and the need to respond to it, there is no space to choose how to respond, no time to wait on God. However, in truth, between stimulus and response there is always a choice—there is the God-given right to pause, be patient, listen in prayer, and then proceed when inspired. It doesn’t have to be a long process. The pausing-listening-receiving can all happen in a moment.
Waiting on God allows us to be confident that our response in a given situation will be constructive. Part of this is admitting to ourselves that we, as Mary Baker Eddy taught in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “[find] all in God, good, and [need] no other consciousness” (p. 264). Pausing allows one to consider how God sees the child. And then, seeing spiritually as God does allows us to make the separation between inappropriate actions or words and the child’s God-created identity.
From the foundation of understanding children as representatives of God, it’s possible to see that difficult behavior in kids is not a personal offense against us but actually an imposition on them—on their God-created, spiritual identity. Then we are able to understand what they are doing as a cry for love. From this standpoint, we can affirm in prayer that they can hear directly from divine Love that which meets their deeper needs.
It is each individual child’s God-given right to feel divine Love’s communication and to be responsive to it.
Nourish the wheat
The next of the three things was to focus on what the answers are, rather than the problems. Jesus taught about this in his parable of the tares and the wheat, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew (see 13:24–30). In this story Jesus tells about someone spreading weeds (tares) in another person’s field in order to destroy their crop of wheat. When the farmhands discover what has happened, they ask the owner of the field if they should pull out all the weeds, but the owner surprisingly says no, because the grain might be pulled up too. Instead, he says to let the weeds and the wheat grow together until harvest time. Then, the weeds would be clearly discernible because taller and darker than the wheat.
As parents, rightly correcting one’s children is more about following this biblical guidance to nourish the wheat than it is about pulling tares. When the good is nourished it grows, and that which seemed so difficult in the moment fades into something that never actually had any reality or power to destroy the good. To nourish wheat is to see the divine idea, the God-created child, and to actively affirm the good that child expresses. Being all good, God does not know the problems. Instead, God knows and shows the answers to both the parent and the child.
This kind of parenting is putting into practice scriptural guidance to “hold fast that which is good” (I Thessalonians 5:21). And Mary Baker Eddy spoke to how Christ Jesus held to the good—to the spiritual—and the effect that it had when she wrote: “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick” (Science and Health, pp. 476–477). It heals everything else, too. That’s why parenting from a Christian Science foundation must be on that basis—the basis of beholding the God-created idea and knowing that the child is enabled by God to hear and act upon that which is good.
Here’s what I found to be an important component in being able to do this. Parenting in its purest form, in its spiritual form, is not something that we as human beings are doing on our own. Good parenting is reflecting what God, our divine Father-Mother, the Parent of us all, is doing. From that place of understanding, good parenting isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable and natural.
Release the child to God
It is of tremendous value to have the willingness to mentally turn a child over to God, and trust them to divine Love. That does not mean neglecting the child’s needs, including giving appropriate guidance, but parents can trust and witness to the truth that God is communicating just what is needed to enable their children to move forward in a constructive direction.
When I was a child, my mother read the following poem in a Christian Science Sentinel, and she learned it by heart in order to pray with it for me and for herself each day. When my wife and I had children, I learned it, too.
Release
Beloved child, beneath His wing,
Beyond my mortal mothering,
May I have grace to see you so
And only what God knows, to know.
Oh, let me loose you from the bands
That sense has forged from false demands,
My finite fear, desire, design,
With which I’d bend your will to mine.
Instead, to His authority,
Whose love upholds both you and me,
May I surrender human will,
And, yielding, find you closer still.
(Abigail Joss, September 29, 1962)
To turn one’s child over to God is to consciously expect good for them, to expect healing change, to “unself” parenting, and to know the powerful presence of God, Father-Mother Love. To release them to God is also to trust that even if it feels like we have gotten it all wrong in the moments before, in truth God’s love is sheltering, instructing, purifying, strengthening, them and us, and will see us through.
Understanding that Spirit alone is unfolding our children’s lives and that Love is embracing them on every step of their journey allows us to go forward in our parenting roles with humility, hope, and grace. So, wait on God, nourish the wheat, and mentally release them to divine Love’s ever-present parenting. The result will most certainly be blessing and progress.
