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. 😊
I remember the indignation I felt over the miniature potted plant.
I was eight years old, and it was Sunday School at the big Baptist church on the hill. The fluorescent lights flickered as we squirmed in our metal folding chairs while the teacher asked us to raise our hands if we wanted to invite Jesus into our hearts. She reminded us that every head was bowed and every eye was closed because, apparently, this was a secret decision. We peeked behind fingers laced in front of our eyes.
A brown-haired girl was summoned behind the room divider and reappeared a few minutes later, surrounded by the approving gaze of the teachers. She seemed rather flippant for one who had just done something that required the rest of us to sit so solemnly with every-head-bowed-and-every-eye-closed.
I knew what had happened behind the room divider; the drill was familiar, even with only eight years under my belt. The teacher would have recited a prayer; the girl would have repeated it, and presto: Jesus was now in her heart.
When the brown-haired girl emerged, she was holding a fake miniature potted plant: a prize, presumably, for raising her hand. Jealously flamed. I loved anything miniature, and I briefly contemplated raising my hand too. Yet I was caught in a conundrum: I had learned that you could only ask Jesus into your heart once, and I had already done so with my mother when I was five years old, right next to the record player that sat under the dining room window. There was nothing I could do to get myself that prize. I wondered, should this decision even warrant a prize? The unfairness planted itself as a memory.
By 12, my faith had grown with my shoe size. In Liberia, I was incubated in an extraordinary community of multicultural Christians. Why wouldn’t I want to align myself with their God? Every night, I sat on my bed and read five chapters of the Bible, framed by the old-fashioned brown-flowered wallpaper in my bedroom. I went straight through until I got bogged down in Isaiah and skipped to the New Testament. I wrote little notes with goals for myself on how to improve in one fruit of the Spirit each month. I cried when I prayed for my unsaved family members.
I told my Dad I was ready to be baptized. In Liberia, the school gymnasium was also the church, representing the worst of times (P.E.) and the best of times (Psalty musicals). One Sunday, I stood outside that gymnasium while the cover was pulled off of the small concrete baptismal, and I stood in line in the red dust with several others. “Why do you want to be baptized?” the pastor asked me. “So that I can show the world I’m a Christian,” was my confident reply.
But yet, I had doubts. When did I actually become a Christian? I had no dramatic conversion story; I couldn’t remember not believing. So was my faith legitimate? What else did I need to do? Fear of being Left Behind permeated my generation. How could I be sure I was in?
“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.
Josiah came home to us at nine months old and found the ping pong balls on the second day. They were the perfect size for his tiny fists and he crawled around the house with one in each hand, clicking on the tile floors.
His first word was daddy and his second word was ball and I’m not bitter about that at all of course.
All his favorite toys centered around soccer. On Sundays after church, we ate at P-Square and while we waited for our rice and beans and mishkaki (P-Square had the best mishkaki), he and his sisters would hunt around the plastic tables for bottle caps. Soon he had enough so that each kind was a soccer team – like, Fanta was Manchester United and Sprite was Liverpool. Gil made him a soccer field out of green pressboard and Josiah spent hours playing bottlecap soccer, arranging his “players” in perfect formation.
Every year for his birthday, the only gift he wanted was the new version of the FIFA video game. So every fall, we figured out a way for somebody to bring us FIFA 2014 or 2015 or 2016 out to Tanzania. His parties were soccer themed for six years in a row.
He mastered a diving header at three and a bicycle kick at four. He played soccer before school, at recess, and after school and usually came home with his lunch uneaten because he played then too. When I nagged him about eating lunch, he asked me to make him something he could shove down his throat in 30 seconds.
In Tanzania, I loved that Josiah loved soccer and I loved watching him play. He joined the HOPAC team and had a couple of practices and a game each week. Maybe twice a year, he had a tournament on a Saturday. Often, Gil was his coach. On Sunday evenings, families would informally gather at HOPAC and play together – all ages. Soccer almost always happened at HOPAC so it flowed easily into our lives.
Two years ago, we moved to America, and I started hating soccer. Josiah was quickly recruited for an AYSO club team, and we said yes because during the pandemic, we were eager to help him make connections. And thus, the full force of what it means to have a kid play club soccer crashed down on me, with evening practices and games almost every weekend – year-round.
I threw several little hissy fits last year. I seethed against the hurried family dinners and the lack of free time on weekends. I mourned our busyness and inability to spend more time in ministry. But then I looked around and other families didn’t seem fazed by this. Driving an hour to a tournament every Saturday was apparently normal life for American parents. I experienced serious culture shock.
Gil and I have never had aspirations for our kids to go far in sports. We don’t have lofty goals for college; we drive past the community college five minutes from our house and cheerfully announce, “Hey kids, wave hello to your future college!” I rail against this American culture that tells me I must push my children to reach their potential in every area, that success in school and sports or arts is the ultimate goal of parenting.
Josiah always said he wanted to be a professional soccer player when he grew up. And I would always smile condescendingly and say, “That’s a nice dream, Buddy, but it’s not going to happen. Choose something else.” This was usually followed by, “Get off your backside and do your homework.”
Unfortunately for me, this summer the coach of an elite team invited Josiah to be a starter on his team. He told us that Josiah could likely play for a Division I college. And possibly become a professional player.
“I never knew it would be so hard to win my children’s hearts,” recently lamented a friend with adult children.
In my younger parenting days, I idolized those parents who were five or ten years ahead of me in parenting. You know the ones–their kids were polite, respectful, happy, Christian kids. I longed for my little ones to grow up like them. But now I have teenagers, and those older friends have young adults. It’s been with increasing dread that I’ve watched these further-along families crushed under a mountain of sorrow over their young-adult children who are walking into destruction.
Not all of them, of course. But also not just an occasional prodigal; there are far too many to count. These are families who did all the “right things”: gave their kids boundaries, were actively involved in church, ate family dinners, limited media consumption, guarded against porn, played games together, were intentional about their kids’ education, taught family devotions. They trained up their children in the way they should go, but when they were old, they still departed from it.
