Resilient adults are not created in a vacuum

It was a full day yesterday, blanching the garden beans, defrosting the freezer, and making applesauce long after everyone was asleep. It’s the beginning of the “squirrelling away” season. I imagine pulling out a bag of green beans in the dead of a cold winter, and it makes me feel downright like a frontier woman!

Today is a slow morning, my bones reluctant to start, but as I step outside into the refreshing air, my senses tell me it’s coming on that time of year again. 

The men are tinkering on the big green combine, readying it for its annual maiden voyage. The fields have turned into golden waves of produce, the corn tassels dancing in the breeze. The air is heavy with the scent of ripening gardens and waiting crops. Even the sun’s light seems golden, as if aged in the summer heat. 

The beginning of fall meant that school was right around the corner. 

I love this time of year, harvest the culmination of a season’s hard work. But with it also comes a strong sense of deja vu— memories of a time not that many years ago when the coming of fall spelled anxiety and uncontrollable, runaway thoughts of “it’s over.”  The beginning of fall meant that school was right around the corner. 

One by one, my kids left for university, and of course, we were so proud of them, but my momma heart was stuck in the mourning of letting them go. The empty seat at the supper table, the missing banter, the bedroom door ajar to a quiet space. All the everyday things that had become so routine that I forgot to notice them, were now screaming their silence. 

When we are in the thick of raising our children, we think it will be this way forever. They become an extension of who we are, our identity wrapped up in the lives of the little souls under our constant care. If we could only remember that we raise our children to let them go. 

But we have nothing on God. His love for our children is more than we could ever imagine

And perhaps a part of the struggle is our need for control. Not only might we assume that our kids couldn’t survive without us, but we assume that we know better what they need than even God does. Of course, we’d never voice that, but our actions show it. 

But we have nothing on God. His love for our children is more than we could ever imagine. His protection for them better than the most experienced helicopter mom. 

As parents, we do our children no favours if we protect them from pain at all costs. 

What we desire most for our family is that they find their own way, that they find their own love for God. We don’t want them only regurgitating what they have heard us say. This means we need to step back and allow them to fly.

Resilient adults are not created in a vacuum. It takes struggle, heartache and wrestling with truth for our children to find out who they are before God. As parents, we do our children no favours if we protect them from pain at all costs. 

Parenting is the fine balance of loving deeply —all in, then stepping back and watching your heart walk out the door. The time for instruction is ending, and the time for leaning more on your faith than on your influence has come, trusting that the God who has loaned us our children will continue to guide them, directing them in the way they should go. The most powerful thing we can now do for our children is pray.