Our children grow so fast that we are always playing catch-up ball to discover who they are becoming. The infant becomes the toddler, the toddler the school-goer, the middle school child eventually becomes a teen, and the teen grows old enough to get a job and a driver's license, and suddenly they are working full-time or going to college, and then suddenly they have found someone, moved out of the house, moved away...
All these changes! At each new stage, we're asking ourselves "Where is the child I knew once? What are his/her new likes, dislikes, priorities, beliefs, values, dreams?" It takes a great deal of concentrated listening and observing, talking with teachers and other parents, or counselors, sometimes being the first one to send the text message or make the phone call to the student in a dorm. We do a lot of nail-biting and lip biting to LEARN to listen, to make comments and observations that are supportive, but subtly challenging when necessary. It's not easy to find our child, over and over, through these rapid growing years. They are continually changing, and we have to take a leap of faith to change with them.
It's not easy to find our children when they begin to enter adulthood. Growing pains are replaced by love pangs, and eventually maybe by labor pains. Our child may become a parent, and we watch with pride and maybe wistfulness as they struggle like we did to learn, one step forward, two steps back, what it means to be a parent. We can be floored by their new insights, surprised that they do not parent as we parented because so many new techniques and beliefs are in vogue that are radically different from what we believed and practiced. We struggle to keep up with what's taught today, and try to be supportive and understanding, remembering that there is, as old folk wisdom taught, "more than one way to skin a cat."
It's so easy to lose a child! To drugs, to unhealthy behaviors, to physical or mental illnesses, to depression, to friends who are a bad influence and lead them away from us. Suddenly we're confronted with situations we hardly know how to cope with! How do you reach a child who is struggling against an addiction or illness you've never experienced yourself? How do you reach a child who has emotionally cut you off? We can search, as Mary and Joseph did, for days, or weeks, or years, - and, when we find them, tearfully ask "Why did you do this? Didn't you know how we were searching for you, heart-broken, agonized?" And they can reply, "But didn't you understand?" Or, even worse, "You never understand!" And then we understand why the prophet Simon predicted to Mary that her heart would be pierced by a sword. Every parent's heart is pierced by a sword, sooner or later.
Sometimes we can rail against God "Why is this happening to my child? Why is this happening to ME, because I don't know how to deal with this!" We might even wonder why God gave us this particular child when we don't seem to have the personality or gifts, strength or insight, to be a good parent to him or her.
But God has promised us that God is faithful. Our patient Father/Mother God promises to give us the gift of patience, the gift of understanding, the gift of love, the gift of compassion, the gift of courageous confrontation, the gift of endurance, all these gifts we need to raise our children, to search for them, to find them, over and over again through the years. All that God asks of us is that we be a faithful parent to our children as God is a faithful parent to us. Even when we are in the depths of self-pity and unlikeableness, the depths of selfishness and sin, God does not leave us, does not cut us off, does not throw us away. Can we stand firm and not desert our children, even when they desert us? Can we still search, still pray, still let them know that the door will always be open?
What God has started in your life the moment a child began to grow in its mother's womb, the moment you became a parent, God will be able to finish. Even if that child dies "on your watch," you can believe that God is loving your child as a Parent in an eternity we cannot begin to even imagine. Slowly God is creating a wonderful human being in your child, even if there seem to be roadblocks in the way. And, through your years of self-sacrifice, of searching and finding, of love and patient endurance, happiness and tears as a parent, God is creating a wonderful human being in you!