Dear grace-girl,
Welcome to our final week of Parenting in Grace, our dive into creating a Jesus-centered family culture!
- In Week One, we talked about how Jesus is our source to fill any lack we feel as we walk through this culture-shaping process.
- In Week Two, we talked through what family culture is and two practical steps you can take this week to influence your family's culture for Christ.
- Last week, we broke down how to shape your family by grace.
- And this week, we're talking about how to lead our families with love, not fear.
Daughter #1 earned her driver's license this Spring, which means Ryan and I are taking two actions now more than ever before: (1) praying for her safety and that her guardian angel will be really on the ball and (2) checking Life360 when she's in the car. I never thought I'd be one of “those” parents who checks on her kid like this, AND ALSO, parenting a rookie driver means we're assessing her safety and skill more than we will in a month or two.
The bottom line is we want to know she is driving safely and that those around her are too. Being safe and caring about safety is not a bad thing. It's prudent. It's wise. But a preoccupation with safety is not all that great. As pastor and author Kevin Thompson says in Grace In Real Life Episode 69, “Safety has become a modern idol.”
An obsession with safety can lead to fear-based parenting.
Instead of teaching our kids how to use their devices, the internet, and social media responsibility, we say an overarching “no.” Instead of having open conversations and being a safe space for our kids to ask questions about gender and identity and worth, we turn off the news so our teenagers can't see what's happening or we ignore what's happening at their school.
[Please recognize that the two examples I give here are highly nuanced. Allowing your teens and tweens access to the internet and the news should be done with much prayer, guardrails, and guidance. My point is not that we expose our kids to everything. My point is that we don't turn a blind eye, but instead teach, counsel, and walk with our people.]
Mama-friend, our Jesus does not call us to create a bubble of safety for our kids. In fact, His track record is that of people in Scripture doing unsafe things: Abram moving out of his father's tent to go to a new land, Jesus speaking truth to power and overturning tables then dying for us, Ananias visiting with a known murderer named Saul, Paul sharing the gospel with Roman guards.
God doesn't call us to safety, but to obedience.
So how can we parent out of love instead of fear? Kevin and I talk at length about this in
Grace In Real Life Episode 69. Here are two practical ways you can parent from love (not fear) this very week:
