Category: Parenting Page 1 of 3

Can I Trust God With My Children?

On April 14, 2025

As a mom, do I have a control problem? Maybe. Do I have a responsibility problem? Definitely.

I’ve taken the StrengthsFinders assessment twice in the past twenty years; both times, responsibility was way up near the top. If I agree to do something, I will do it, and I will do it well, so help me God – or lose my sanity, my sleep, or my good sense in the attempt.

Raising teenagers makes me lose all of the above.

I tried so hard to do All the Good Parenting Things. I made them drink Kiefer, read countless books with them, prayed and played, showed and shared. I taught them to come when I called; I re-learned pre-algebra twice; I put limits on their screen time. I take my job so seriously. I am the Responsiblest Mom of them all.

And now I have four teenagers, with adulthood lurking around every corner, and I feel the desperate urgency looming over me that my time left with them is short. So Gil and I made an Adulting List that they must check off, and we are teaching them to drive, interview, clean, and budget. As they begin to make their own choices, I warn and cajole, nudge and prod.

*I’d like to point out that nobody in this house got cavities when I brushed their teeth and controlled their diet.*

Yet every time they feel lost or do something foolish or don’t show integrity, I feel responsible. Somewhere, at some time, I must have made a wrong parenting choice.

Do I feel more weight of responsibility because I am an adoptive mom? I chose these kids. I was responsible for plucking them out of the trajectory of their lives, giving them a new story. If they struggle with their identity, if they feel alone or rejected or out of place, and if that propels them to make a bad choice, it must be my fault. I pull back the curtains and peek under the rugs, searching for my responsibility.

So I ruminate. Maybe we should have come back to the States earlier. Or later. Perhaps we should have chosen a different schooling option. Maybe we should have moved to a different city, or a different school, or a different neighborhood. If only I’d read The Connected Child a few years earlier. If only we’d found that therapist four years ago. If only I could go back and emphasize this, tweak that, add a dash of this.

Of course, this does nothing to change anything about the present.

I decide they just need reminding. Oh, I must not have taught them that well enough. I must not have gotten through to them the previous fifty times. Obviously, I need to tell them again. In a different way. With a different emphasis.

This often doesn’t go well. “Don’t scold me, Mom,” he says, frustrated. Scold you? Here I thought I was giving you fantastic advice that plainly hasn’t registered yet.

So I try harder to keep my mouth shut, and all those unsaid words settle into my stomach and languish there, gurgling and squeezing.

Then, one morning, she comes bounding over to me with a giant lightbulb hovering over her head. “Mom! I realized that I have so much energy the next day if I don’t go to bed too late!” Or another time: “Mom! I realized that if I finish all my homework, my grade goes up!”

I wish I could say I responded with, “How lovely, dear. Good for you.”

But no. Instead, I deadpan (sarcasm oozing out of my pores). “Wow, how unfortunate no one ever told you that before.”

Seriously. If the reality is that they have got to figure these things out for themselves, why do I even try? Well, duh. Because I Am Responsible.

I can pretend that all this responsibility makes me a good mother, but what it really comes down to is that I don’t trust God with my children.

I’ve come a long way in learning to trust God with my own life. Over 48 years, I’ve come to a point of steady peace in his provision and his purpose.

I might not immediately trust him with whatever life throws at me, but again and again, I’ve learned to rest on what I know to be true. God is good and in control. He loves me. He knows what is best for me. I am convinced that no matter what I experience or how much of me has to die, resurrection is coming. I stake my life on this. It defines my existence.

But I do not trust God with my children. Because no matter how much I scour Scripture for reassurance, I find no guarantee that he promises their lives will be redeemed. There are no promises that they will have happy marriages, become contributing members of society, or avoid drugs-porn-gambling-divorce-abuse-prison. I lament with Jesus-loving friends who are a decade or two beyond me and grieving these exact things for their children.

And the hardest part? I cannot save my children’s souls. They are their own people. They must choose for themselves who they will serve. I can provide all the nurture, exhortation, and encouragement in the world, but at the end of the day, they will stand before God alone, without me.

I’ve told God, on more than one occasion, that this is unacceptable to me. God can’t expect me to spend twenty years raising these children, wringing out my heart and hanging it out to dry, and then be okay with the notion that they still may choose to turn their backs on him. That God, in his sovereignty, might not save them.

So instead, I, in my puny finiteness, choose to take matters into my own hands. I must be responsible for the outcome of my children’s souls.

Of course, when I write it down like that, it sounds incredibly stupid. But it doesn’t prevent me from trying. I try and I try and I try and I think that if I can just get this parenting thing right, I can save them.

Responsibility is an admirable quality until it becomes an attempt to be God.

I must accept the agonizing truth that these children have never been, and never will be, mine. And that’s not just because I adopted them. God gave them to me for a time to love and discipline, teach and nurture, but he knew I would be finite and imperfect. He knew that I wouldn’t make all the decisions correctly; he knew that there would be hundreds of circumstances outside my control; he knew that there would be many, many aspects of their story that would not be in my jurisdiction to write.

I am only part of their stories – granted, a big part, an important part, and it is right that I take it seriously. But I am not the author.

This doesn’t mean that it is sinful for me to bear the weight of concern for my children. I find it poignant that Paul lists his “concern for the churches” as part of the list of intense trials that he bears, alongside hunger, prison, and torture (II Cor. 11:28). And in contrast, he says, “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth” (3 John 4). If Paul’s emotions can rise and fall based on the spiritual condition of his spiritual children, then certainly the same is true for all kinds of children.

But there is a place where my responsibility ends. I cannot, and never will be, the savior of my children.

Releasing my children to God’s story for their lives is, perhaps, the greatest struggle of trust I have ever faced or ever will. Yet somehow, I must. God may allow them to hurt or fail and make terrible mistakes to show them why they need grace and why they need him. Even then, I must accept that they may come to that point when they are flat on their faces and still do not choose him.

Yet God is still God. He is still good. He is still in control. And I can beat my fists against his chest and plead and scream and demand, but in the end, I must submit to the truth that he is the King of the Universe, and I am but the creation. Somehow, I must still trust him, even with my children. Where else would I go? He holds the words of eternal life.

Trust God with my children — *I stole this one from Eugene Peterson.*

Raising Up a Child in an Age of Deconstruction
Have I Failed My Children?
What Have I Done to My Children?

To My Sunshine

By Amy Medina

On May 24, 2024

In Adoption, Parenting

My dear Grace,

Raising you has been one of the greatest privileges of my life.

From the first day I laid eyes on you and you gave me your radiant smile, you have been sunshine in my life. Happy and fearless—that’s the way I would describe you from the time you were a baby. You sang “Amazing Grace” to an entire school full of kids when you were just two years old. Dad taught you to do backflips into the pool when you were three. You are always ready to jump into the next adventure with both feet.

But one of the most special things about you is your love for people. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone more people-oriented than you. When you were a toddler, I remember showing you the HOPAC school yearbook and being flabbergasted by how many names you knew of students and staff. As you grew up, whenever you met a new friend, you would always run into the kitchen and grandly announce, “I love [this person!] and I love her mom too!” I don’t know if you’ve ever met a person you didn’t like. God gave you the gift of loving others enthusiastically. 😊

This is What 50 Years of Faithfulness Looks Like

By Amy Medina

On June 16, 2023

In Parenting, Thoughts on Missions

My parents, Kim and Margaret Coutts, have been married 50 years this month, a milestone that only 5% of American marriages achieve. They have extraordinary lives, worth writing about.

My dad was serving as a pharmacist at a military hospital at Fort Dix, New Jersey when a fellow officer knocked on his door and asked, “If you died tonight, would you go to heaven?”

My dad was irritated – angry, even – but couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was just one of many instances in their early adulthood when God inserted Himself into their story, and it wasn’t much longer before they turned their lives over to Him. It wasn’t a flippant decision. It was the beginning of an entire re-orientation of their priorities.

About four years later, my mom and dad attended a missions conference at First Baptist Church in San Jose – the one whose foyer boasted the spiral ramp that surrounded the two-story fountain. When the speaker gave a challenge, while the background music played, they walked forward to the altar to offer their lives in missionary service.

They spent almost a decade of service in missions in Liberia and Ethiopia, despite my mom crying every single day for the first six months. It was a sacrifice: her own mother refused to write or speak to her for the entire first two years. My mom taught elementary school, and my dad served as head pharmacist at ELWA Hospital, then as hospital administrator.

The year we returned, while still working as chief pharmacist at Kaiser, my dad went on to revolutionize the missions program at Hillside Church in San Jose. He started the partnership with Tanzania that changed the course of my life and dozens of others. He began a missions prayer ministry that has continued for three decades. He led numerous other short-term trips and developed several other overseas partnerships.

Meanwhile, while my mom taught kindergarten, she launched a ministry in the low-income neighborhood down the street from our church. Thirty years later, that ministry has flourished and is thriving. My mom invested in scores of children in that neighborhood, including taking in two of them for several of their college years, enveloping them as surrogate daughters.

My parents have done some big things in their 50 years of marriage. But what strikes me the most is how they have been faithful in the little things, the things that most people don’t see.

Have I Failed My Children?

By Amy Medina

On March 1, 2023

In Adoption, Parenting

“It’s such a shame that they failed two of their children.”

I was in college, and my friend was referring to a Christian family with adult children, two of whom had gone off the rails into drugs and unwed pregnancy.

My friend had young children of her own, and as someone several years ahead of me, she was a mom I greatly admired. She and I both knew that she would certainly not fail her children. I tucked away this lesson: My children’s choices would be a reflection of me.

***

Around the same time, I attended a large children’s ministry conference where a seminar speaker declared that ADHD was not a real condition – a child who couldn’t pay attention or sit still was the sad result of bad parenting. As an elementary teacher, I suspected the speaker was wrong, but it didn’t stop me from being marinated in the idea that I was responsible for my children’s behavior.

“First-time obedience” was the mantra of my era of Christian parenting. None of this “count to three” stuff; you were not a good parent if you had to ask twice. If they didn’t obey, it was on you. Being a responsible, perfectionist person, I took this seriously. I was up for the challenge.

When I first became a parent, this worked. I’d been trained as a teacher. I knew how to hold children to high expectations without raising my voice or losing my cool. And my stubbornness could match the most strong-willed of children. I remember a fellow mom responding with amazement at how quickly my kids complied when summoned from the playground. Yep. I was not going to fail my children. No siree.

It worked, that is, until it didn’t work. Then it became a dumpster fire. And demanding “first-time obedience” became the gasoline that made the fire explode. With one child in particular, the more I dug in my heels and expected obedience, the more the opposite happened. As I increased the consequences, so did my child’s unhinged behavior.

On Transracial Adoption

By Amy Medina

On January 16, 2023

In Adoption, Parenting, Race and Diversity, Re-Entry to America

There was a lot I didn’t know when I adopted my children.

Since then, I’ve wondered a hundred times if we did right by our children when we adopted them. Adoption heals a wound, but I underestimated the depth of the wound and overestimated the ease of healing it.

Several months ago, I was asked to do a webinar on my advice for raising adopted children overseas. I turned it down. I can’t give advice on this because I’m still raising my children. Ask me again in ten years, and I’ll see if I have advice. Maybe only once I’ve heard what my adult children have to say about it.

For the bulk of their childhoods, Haven of Peace Academy shielded my children from the pain. They were different by being raised by white parents, but lots of children at HOPAC were different for lots of other reasons. Most were born in one country and raised in another, many were biracial, almost all knew what it felt like to navigate various cultures. My children were stuck between worlds, but so were all their classmates.

I ripped my children from Tanzania and dropped them into America in the spring of 2020, when the world had shattered into uncertainty, and racial anger that had festered for decades was exploding to the surface. We lived like hobos that spring with no place to call home, and the night in June that we arrived at my in-law’s house, there was a curfew over all of greater Los Angeles because of George Floyd rioting.

I wondered what world I had brought my Black children into.

Imagine telling your children about the things that people who look like you have done to people who look like them in the country you brought them to live in.