Loving Parents

I saw a video in my reels the other day about a parent who assigns chores to her kids' friends once they've been over a few times, and it took me back to my tween years.  When I was in middle/high school, my best friend's mom was that way too.  Their door was almost always open to anyone who wanted to come over, but you had to pitch in.  The first couple times, you got to be a guest, but after that you were family, with all the privileges and work that came with that.  Their house was where I learned to bake from scratch, where I learned to speak up if I wanted to be heard, and where I spent hours exploring the woods.  I've also adopted much of that mom's parenting style (mainly her orders to "Only call me if someone's bleeding or dying" when my kids are wrestling), because as an only child, I didn't have an example of how to navigate raising multiple kids.

One of my pastors often says (I'm paraphrasing here), "God loves you enough to meet you where you are, but he loves you too much to leave you there."  Just like a parent who embraces her kids' friends as family, God is a parent who embraces us and wants us to be functioning members of his family, not just guests, siting on the outside looking in on the how the family does life together.  Families are work, and God's family is no exception. Loving parents don't just sit back and let their kids do whatever they want.  If their child makes a mistake, they correct them, and they help them correct their mistake and show them how not to make it again.  If a child is in a destructive behavior pattern, they do what they can to help them out of it.  They don't just let it continue.  So why should God just let us stay where we were when we first came to Him, wallowing in sin and destructive habits?  That's not helping us grow.  That would not be a loving God.

So why do we resist so much when God tries to correct us?  For the same reason that kids resist us so much when we try to correct them.  They want to do what they want to do and they often won't see the harm it's doing until much later.  We have life experience to show us that selfish behavior will cost us friends and defiance will cost us jobs, but kids don't.  Likewise, God sees the big picture.  He knows if what we are doing is causing harm to others or setting us up for failure in the long run, but we can't see what He sees.  We just have to trust that what He is doing or telling us is for our good.  It's not easy, but it's so worth it, because He is always steering us toward the best outcome and preparing us for what is coming, just like Pam unknowingly helped prepare me for raising 3 hooligans.