I heard a sermon by Pastor Danny Silk with the following illustration. “What if your 5th-grader comes home with an ‘F’ on his report card. What happens now?
A long-standing pattern emerges in my soul: Shame – Anger – Control. I feel ashamed that my son is “a failure,” so I get angry with him and come up with new rules to try to control him. And what will more rules do to my son? They will make him angry, too!
Danny proposes, “Instead, what if your response was something like this: ‘Son, don’t you worry. Your mother and I have talked, and we want you to know that we are not mad at your poor grades. We also want you to know that we will love you no matter how many years it takes you to finish the 5th grade. That’s right. In fact, in a couple of more years your little sister will be in your class, and y’all can study together, and go to birthday parties together, with all of her little friends. It’ll be just great.’
“Your son will look you in the eye and say, ‘Years! Years! It’s not going to take me years to finish the 5th grade!’ And lo and behold, ownership of that problem lands squarely in the heart of the one who needs to own that problem.”
Now, there’s something to think about. What do we automatically do when confronted with the failure of our children? It will always have at least these two elements.
Emotionally: Disappointment. Anger. Fear.
Behaviorally: We start planning a plan; fixing a fix; scheming a scheme to GET THIS KID UNDER CONTROL!
When we “own” the problem we go to Shame – Anger – Control. When my son owns the problem, he starts studying.
As we said in the last posting, this reveals a broken principle of Love: That which we love, we try to control when their behavior disappoints us. We make this mistake of controlling, because we first make two other mistakes in our mind.
First, we make the mistake of fearing that our loved-one’s sin is more powerful than the grace of God to fix it. When our children make bad grades, or get mouthy, or get slack in their Saturday chores, then we immediately(?) go to anger. But since Anger is a secondary emotion, what was the primary emotion? Pain. We felt the pain of some past shame of our own, and we feared that our child would turn into a public disgrace. Out of our pain-anger-fear we become driven to control the child. We feel it is our job to “fix” the child, instead of finding a way to cooperate with the flow of the grace of God toward that child.
Second, we make the mistake of believing that God is just as afraid as we are. Sadly, our fear overwhelms us and we think that if we can’t fix the child, then there is no hope. We ascribe to God the same impotence that we adopt.
Notice the pattern: 1) My own Pain and Shame gets triggered, 2) I get Angry at my child for their failure, and then 3) I get full of Fear and come up with new rules to Control my child.
What if we could be like God in the face of the failures of our loved ones? What if we did not go to Shame, first off. What if we did some healing work on our own childhood shame, so that we didn’t get so angry at our children for their mistakes and public displays of failure. For it’s our Shame that is a part of the problem. Then our shame is followed by Anger and Judgment, leading to the punishing of our loved ones.
What if we could make an agreement with Grace, and get some healing of our own hearts, and begin to manifest a spirit of Love, Power, and a Sound Mind (I Tim 1:7). What if our own healing led to a greater control of the Holy Spirit in our lives, so that we could continue to quietly love our spouse no longer how long it takes them to change. What if we could get healed so that our children know that we will love them, no matter how long it takes them to finish the fifth grade.
Jesus was not afraid of sinners. The Pharisees were. Let’s keep doing our healing work on the shame in our hearts, so that we can love our children when they sin, and not be so afraid of them that we have to control them.
Carter