Aren't grandparents the cutest thing ever? They stand in the background with their eyes sparkling as their grandchildren toddle around making strange cooing and gurgling noises. They buy way too much stuff for the kids at Christmas and then brush aside their own children's complaints with comments like, "Oh, dear, it is a grandmother's job to spoil her grandkids." The whole thing feels reminiscent of the Norman Rockwell painting, Freedom from Want - warm, fuzzy, and lots of good food.
If you had grandparents like these, count yourself lucky. If your own parents are like these, your kids will have a richer and more joyful childhood because of them. Loving grandparents are one of life's great blessings, and our kids are likely to grow up thinking that our parents are perfect.
The reality is, though, that we know our parents weren't perfect. Hopefully we can all assert that they did the best that they could (and, tragically, there are those among us who can't even affirm that), but even the greatest parents failed as parents in one way or another. And as cute and wonderful as you think your grandparents are, they had their problems too. You may have already started learning some of the "family secrets" it seems like every family has - those stories that show the all-too-human side of those cute, twinkling eyed grandparents.
You may have also started to notice certain traits that seem to be present in all three generations. These may be good things like a love for cooking or a passion for fly fishing. These may also be negative and sinful things like a being a hot head with an explosive temper or a worry wart with a tendency toward anxiety. Like ripples spreading across the surface of a pond, parenting is by its nature multigenerational.
The Bible tells us to be intentional in our parenting, so that the ripple-effect of our lives will lead our kids and our kids' kids to know God and come to love him. So how do we center ourselves on the gospel in such a way that we create positive ripples - and pass on the positive traits we received from our parents and grandparents? On the other hand, how can the gospel help us to minimize the negative ripples of our own sin and those of our parents and their parents?
The gospel is the good news that while we are more broken and sinful than we dare imagine, we are also more loved and empowered in Jesus than we dare hope. This is a hard truth that leads us to repent of both our sin and our good. This is also an incredible grace that enables us to hope for nothing short of God's glorious best. Jesus is the heart of the gospel and he came as the embodiment of both grace and truth - and we need both in order to intentionally engage the multigenerational effects of parenting.
Some of us need to forgive our parents for being flawed, sinful humans - a brokenness that we share in common experience. It is in the truth of our common brokenness that we become able to extend the grace of forgiveness. And it is only in grace that we can silence the harsh ripples of favoritism, abuse, neglect, and disappointment.
On the other hand, some of us need to allow our parents to not be perfect. We need to release the idealized and unrealistic image of our parents, recognizing that as great as our parents were, they were not perfect. As we come to release our parents from perfection, we can come to also release ourselves from the demands of perfection as well. It is in the truth of our brokenness that we can be empowered most truly by grace.
The gospel is the solution for quieting the ripples of the past. It is only in the tension of embracing the truth about ourselves and our parents and extending grace to them and ourselves that we will silence the voices of criticism and justification. And silence them we must if we are to hear the voice of God.
The gospel is also the key to purposefully creating positive ripples in our children's lives. But that will have to wait until another blog.
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