Being a Father
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Tom Rockwell
June 16, 2024
Matthew 7:7-11
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
9 “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 11 If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
I wanted to do something related to parenting for Father’s day. I’ve got three step kids ranging from 24 to 16 and a child of my own who will be two years old in two months.
I settled on a passage that feels very straight forward and helpful, but that has a lot of depth when you get into the complexities. “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? The face value of this statement to me is that parents love their kids and want what is best for them. I wish that loving people and wanting the best for them was straight forward. In my experience it is not so easy.
The complications in this case come in two forms: what if your child thinks they’re asking for bread but are really asking for a stone? And what do you do when you aren’t even sure what bread is for your child?
Here are some examples of a child asking for a stone:
There was a large knife at the table that my twenty two month old was repeatedly asking for, grabbing at, and greatly desiring. She thinks it’s a cool new toy, I know it is an unpleasant emergency room visit. She thinks it's bread. I know it’s a stone.
Slightly more complicated: say you just foolishly moved to a house down the street from a Dairy Queen like I did. Now every time you pass you of course get the question: “can we get Dairy Queen”. Now I enjoy a chocolate dipped cone as much as the next fellow - or perhaps even more than the next fellow - but I’m aware that a daily Dairy Queen visit is going to help neither my waistline nor my wallet. Ice Cream certainly seems like bread to a child - and in fact sometimes it is, we all need little pleasures and ice cream is a good one. It’s only when it’s an everyday occurrence that it becomes a stone. I’m the one who has to be the downer and say we can’t get ice cream every day.
A little more complication still: your child decides that the best thing for him moving forward is to give up school and become a professional video game streamer. He is prepared with a slideshow featuring the earnings of a number of notable streamers. You are hopefully sage enough to know that they are unlikely to be one of those notable streamers. But they’re getting older, they have some gifts in that area and they need to make their own mistakes and learn from their own life and all the sudden you have to decide how long can you even stop your kid from picking a stone? And are you overstepping your role if you do that forever?
In fact, there comes a point that when you’re kid asks for a stone thinking it is bread, you sometimes just have let them have the stone and figure it out for themselves. Navigating when to make those decisions seems decidedly not simple and most of us are likely to make some mistakes.
If a big part of parenting is convincing kids that what they think is bread is actually a stone. then eventually recognizing that you will not be able to convince them and protect them forever is part of that process
So our first complication is trying to make sure our kids can recognize bread and stone, and keep them from mistaking the two.
Our second complication is the situation where the line between bread and stone is blurry even for us.
A simple example: your kid is sick, when do you take them to the doctor? They might get exposed to something at the hospital, they might take meds that come with side effects but little benefit. The line between bread and stone is not super clear.
Getting more complicated: for divorced parents, trying to work with a parent you are separated from, maybe a new partner who is being introduced into the situation, and kids who are having responses to all of it, you quickly find yourself in a quagmire of responses. Kids start asking for things that they say are for themselves - more time with one parent than the other, say - but really it is something to please the other parent. You have to decide and it is never very easy. What’s bread and what’s stone becomes supremely unclear.
Another example, one of the harder ones I’ve experienced: if your kid has challenges with school or a disability. Where do you draw the line with challenging them? Their experiences are not the same as other kids, how can you even compare to have an idea of what to do? Should they do the same things as all the other kids? Should they do less? Spend more time in a more heavily supported classroom> Maybe your kid is so miserable in school they’re refusing to go and you have to make them.
Sometimes in situations like these it feels like there isn’t even bread to give.
I think Jesus' parable is for a simple situation: when your kid is hungry you give them food.
It can work on a more complicated level if we’re willing to navigate the tension and complications. But if we move forward pretending the complexities aren’t there, I think we run into trouble.
It gets really problematic if we allow this story to play out into what we might call “God’s plan” theology: basically that God knows a good option for us all the time. As parents it should be apparent how this is problematic. You can’t always know what is best, and sometimes the best option is still a pretty unpleasant one.
The idea that God always has a good option for us is, I think, a false one. Bad things happen to good people. Some things are so horrible in the world - violence, abuse, war - that there is nothing really good in them. Returning to wholeness from those bad things is normally a pretty unpleasant process. While most of the time we have good options, sometimes there are only the best of bad options. To say there is always a good choice is an idea that dismisses too much suffering in the world.
I think our situation is similar as parents, we can’t always give a good option, and as far as it’s in our children’s power, they may not always make the best choices.
I do think God has a good option for everything in the long run, a view best encapsulated in the idea that in the long run the arc of the world is bending toward justice. God can’t prevent every bad thing from happening. God can’t make everything good right now. But God has set in motion a change in the world that will end in the world coming to wholeness.
Similarly, we as parents have the right idea in the long run, it’s just challenging to get it right in every situation, there are going to be mistakes and missteps. But generally our love for our kids leads us in the right way even if we don’t take the right step every time.
I think what God offers us is constant encouragement towards the right option, a constant leading to go in the right direction even if it's not always an ideal option.
Which i think is mirrored in our parenting, my goal is to provide constant leadings in the right direction, recognizing that there are going to be some missteps and especially once you get to the teenage years there are going to be times when the best bread is cast aside for a pretty unfortunate stone.
But we can accompany and support our kids in these times even if we can’t fix them. We can share our own experiences of failure so that our kids know they are not alone. We can show unconditional love for our kids even when they do something stupid or harmful. We can have the long-range perspective to have faith even when our kids experience a devastating failure and struggle to see how things can get better. We can remember God's grace for the ways that we are limited and offer them that same grace. We can ask God's forgiveness for harms and mistakes we’ve made with our parenting. We can know for them, that God is the ultimate parent who loves us and our children and is with us through everything.
Queries:
· How do we distinguish between our kids wants and needs?
· How do decide when our urge to protect others is keeping them from the freedom they need to grow?