Sermon Note #16

 #16: Don't make pain avoidance a dominant principle of your parenting.

Pretend for a moment that it's the day your child is born. You are given a book that details her entire future and then you are handed an eraser. You're allowed one opportunity to read through the book and erase anything you don't want to happen. You see that there will be a lot of happy and joyful moments, but you also read that your child will fall off her bike and break her arm when she is five. A few pages later, you see that she struggles with reading until middle school. In high school, she is bullied by mean girls and she is crushed when no guy asks her to her senior prom. In her early 20's, she is diagnosed with a chronic illness and will need to spend the rest of her life on medication to manage the symptoms. She falls into a deep depression. In her 30's, she lands a great career and falls in love. You see that she gets married, buys a house and they thrive financially. Over the next decade, she has three children; one is born with Down Syndrome. Later, you see that her marriage ends in divorce when she is 50.

What do you erase?

If you could take away every failure, disappointment, and painful circumstance, would that be a good thing? Or could it be that some of the things you want to erase are the things God will use to transform the heart of your child?

God doesn't take away the pain, suffering and trials of His children, because he knows there is something good on the other side. Yet our culture is filled with parents running around with Magic Erasers desperately trying to eliminate every challenging circumstance for their children. 

James 1:2 says to "count it all joy" when you face trials because the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. 

Failures, disappointments, shattered dreams. These are the very things that build character and resilience.