I was reading a devotional to my boys….well let me stop right there. My oldest (P) is almost 8, my second-born is newly 6 (A), and my third is almost 4 (R). Any serious discussions we have, I’m usually talking mostly to P, A catches some of it, and R is simply present in body, haha. But anyways, the Scripture we were focusing on was incredibly hard to explain to young kids!! It was Luke 9:23-25 (NLT):

“Then he said to the crowd, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross daily, and follow me. ²⁴ If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. ²⁵ And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but are yourself lost or destroyed?

Oh my, how on Earth do you speak of its application to such young kids? I asked A what he cares about most, and he settled on “family and friends.” I said, “Well, Dad and I let you down at times, right? We can be harsh with our words or tone sometimes and it makes you sad. That would be a good time to pray and thank God that He never lets you down, that he loves you perfectly. And that might help you not be so upset, and you can ask God to help you focus on loving Him and loving others, no matter what hard circumstances are around you.” (Not to be confused with thinking this is our way out of apologizing, ha! We do apologize when appropriate 😉 ) That still felt like it might have been hard to grasp, but you never know what sticks and what doesn’t. I was trying to explain that even good things that are good to love cannot take the place of loving God – everything and everyone besides God are BROKEN. True restoration comes only from God.

The author of the devotional (Dave Buehring) explained it this way: “Dying to self is when we choose to lay aside our selfishness to serve God and others.” Well, we had some real life application help with that one later that day! We were all in the pool with my sister and her kids, and my cousin and her kids. We were playing Monkey in the Middle, kids vs. adults, and at one point, we adults were in a conversation and not playing quite as attentively, and P was starting to get irritated, asking us with impatience if we’re still playing. And this was not the first time that day that he was not a fan of how things were playing out. In the car, I gently applied this situation to the Luke verses we studied together, not to criticize, but what good is our time learning from the Lord without trying to actually apply it? I told him that when we feel ourselves losing peace and wanting to lash out at others, it’s a good time to stop and reframe the situation. It would have been a good time for him to pause and think to himself, “I do not like how they are playing right now, but I’m going to put aside my own wishes for this moment, and I’m going to take up an attitude of serving others.” I told him that’s not to say you always need to just let others dominate – but P really doesn’t need help in the category of speaking up about feeling wronged, haha. In fact, I right then and there brought up how A tends to have the opposite weaknesses in this area – that I’m often having to coach him to speak up and stand up for himself. I told him strengths can often also have weaknesses attached, how strengths can get taken too far, becoming a weakness. How a strength of his brother’s- going with the flow and showing kindness to others and their desires – has a weakness attached when he gets upset when others are making all the calls, leaving him feeling like he’s not being cared for – not standing up for what HE wants. I just wanted to remind P that though we are discussing a weakness of his in that moment, not to forget this is often a strength of his, so I’m not trying to come down too hard on him, but rather, wanting to help him through the weakness side of this strength.

Well, isn’t it interesting that, fast forward to the next day, when the woman who commissioned a painting from me was going to pick it up a mere two hours after this moment I’m sharing with you. And I was frantically adding to it and trying to fix things I didn’t like – which is a bad habit of mine! The day of due date is not the day to make changes, yet I just can’t seem to help myself! It’s always a frantic energy, too. So by doing this, I was literally making it worse, and time was ticking, and it’s not like I was in a vacuum…we never are!! We still have people and life around us when we are in these stressful moments, and we are called to love others, not take out our inside stress out on them; even non-believers know this to be true. Well, I was failing the test, because ANY words uttered by my kids to me were automatically given the title “nuisance” to my spastic self and I was not responding in love. And we had to leave for an event we were supposed to attend, and even in the car when the paintbrush was no longer in hand, I was just so agitated. P asked me to put a song on and I barked back that I didn’t want to.

The themes from “Show Them Jesus” continually ring out in my head, especially in these moments when I want to just call it a bad day and move on. How can I do that when I am continually bringing up my own kids’ areas of needed improvement?? So I turned off my own music and sighed heavily. And I said to my boy, “Okay. Now I need to do my own application of the study, don’t I? Remember P, how I was just talking to you about having to reframe your thinking when you feel yourself losing peace and lashing out? Well, I am having a hard day with my art. I was obsessing over it, it wasn’t going well, and I could tell I was losing my peace, know what I mean?” And P said, “yeah, when we take it out on others.” I said, “Exacty. I was making an idol out of my painting looking good. It’s okay to want my painting to look good, that’s a good thing in and of itself, but it’s important to stop and recalculate when we start noticing ourselves lacking love and speaking angrily. So I need to continually be identifying idols, as well. I am sorry.”

And wow, it’s amazing how quickly a moment like that causes your anger and frustration to dissipate. THAT is the power of the Holy Spirit inside of us. And I don’t know about you, but if I were a kid, I’d want to know my parents are constantly getting it wrong, too, and needing prayer and needing God’s transformative power.

I want to close with Curtis Chang’s words in “The Anxiety Opportunity” that defines and describes these themes in a helpful way:

“Jesus underlines the fruitlessness of striving to avoid loss by saying, ‘If you love your life, you’ll lose it. ‘Love your life’ doesn’t refer to the way God wants us to properly value life and its many treasures—the people we love, thoughts we have, and experiences we feel. Read the Gospels, and you see in Jesus a human being fully alive and loving life in all its manifold and embodied glories. ‘Love your life’ in this passage means idolatry—the way I was so committed to avoiding the loss of provision that I threw my anxious arms around my company instead of God. If you try to preserve your life by relying on idolatrous ‘love,’ Jesus is warning, you will lose everything. Avoidance via idols won’t work, and you’ll waste a great deal of your life. You will ‘lose your life’ trying.

Like a good poet, Jesus employs dramatic contrast to depict an alternative to the false and fruitless ‘love’ of our idols. He promises in John 12:25, ‘If you hate your life in this world, you’ll keep it for the life of the coming age’ (NTE). Jesus often uses the word ‘hate’ as poetic hyperbole for repentance from ‘false loves,’ where we have elevated otherwise good things to idols. For example, when he says his followers must ‘hate father and mother’ (Luke 14:26), he’s talking about rejecting the way that fear of losing parental approval (which was especially powerful in ancient Jewish culture) can supplant allegiance to God. He wants our love of parents and everything else in our present life to be properly ordered loves and not be elevated into idols. To ‘hate your life in this world’ means you can tolerate the loss of your idols.

Some parents lead well by being a good example – exhibiting the fruits of the Spirit….getting it RIGHT, because God helps us get it right. And I pray for more of that. But I see God using me when I get it wrong, because I sure do, a lot. Having kids has really highlighted to me, that I can be such a flawed individual. Thank God for grace.