He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?”
Matthew 16:15 (NKJV)
Mid-life. A strange contemplative season in one’s life; a strange season in the part of life I’m in. Mid-life—how right that it’s often paired with the word crisis. I’m ready for rest as my children are entering adulthood and the long hard days of the little kid years are done. But rest is not here.
I was too eager for harvest season.
I mistakenly thought it would be the end of sleepless nights with littles. There are no longer cherub-like faces seeking comfort in the dark hours; now there are worries for a vulnerable daughter far away, and deep regrets at failures and lost opportunities in the lives of those I love waking me in the night.
The great irony of raising children is there’s no way to learn to do it but by doing it; and by the time you’ve learned something of it, you’ve made a ton of mistakes and the damage is done.
We all come into a world under a curse; our relationships are set at odds (Gen. 3:15-16), our physical needs are never fully met (Gen. 3:17-19), and we are alienated from our source of life (Gen. 3:10). My children were given to parents insufficient to their needs and as they enter their teen and early adult years, they grapple with the cost of that to them. They rely on us for everything when they are in their little years—we are as gods to them. And our shortcomings get all tangled up with their conception of God. And so mid-life, the harvest years, have been mixed with joy and pain as the fruit of my labor is revealing what I’ve sown.
I cannot believe for my children.
My children, as I had to do in my turn, find themselves in the disciples’ conversation with Christ (Matt. 16:13-16):
Who do men say that I am?
Or, who have your parents said that I am? Did I teach them a hard, cruel God, impossible to please? A God afar off barely noticing their existence? A God who required perfect obedience to earn love? Who did I teach them God is in my falling short of His glory (Romans 3:23)? Christ teaches in this question to first identify the false views of God we get from all around us.
And then He asks,
But who do YOU say that I am?
Will my child answer, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God! By the grace of God, I gave that answer when the time came for me to process the false messages I’d inadvertently been given by faithful but weak-believing parents.
My fervent prayer is that my failings will turn them firmly away from hope in me or anything in this life, and they will look to salvation in Christ alone. The curse guaranteed this earth would bring disappointment and frustration so we would be thwarted in our attempts to find salvation in saints, ourselves, or anywhere else.
What can we do?
Christ, the son of the living God, taught me what to do when my children come to me with the hurts I caused them. He opened Himself fully to the pain of the cross. He bore my sin and paid my debt; and so, like my precious Savior, I open myself to the pain of accepting the guilty verdict of my sin, and in the confidence of the forgiveness of my Father, I can ask forgiveness of my children. By acknowledging the truth of the false messages I gave, I can affirm with my children it is right to turn away from lies and look for the truth instead. If I turn away from the work of the cross, defending myself, as my flesh wants to do, balking at the pain of the cross, I deliver to them an idol I made with my own hands, and I become one of those who causes Christ’s precious little ones to stumble (Matt. 18:6).
Perhaps you are in the sowing years when you are seeking to faithfully love your children and your husband. May I exhort you to examine carefully who others have said Jesus is. And then learn fully for yourself who Jesus says that He is. Be careful to believe for yourself, and point yourself and your children ever to Him, all the while being faithful to embrace the message of the Gospel. Labor to enter into the rest Christ holds out to you. You are not your children’s Savior. To try to save your child is to make an idol of yourself in your child’s life. But “beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!” (Romans 10:15 KJV) You have the wonderful privilege of sowing the gospel of peace with God in the lives of your children, reaping good fruit in your mid-life.
