Me: Very cute baby pictures!
Prodigal: Yes, sometimes it is hard to imagine how children have changed.
Me: I agree and sometimes we struggle with our children.
This is from John White’s Parents in Pain
At one point I wondered whether to deal with the different kinds of trouble children get into: drugs, alcohol, crime, homosexuality, secret marriages, pregnancy/paternity and so on. Yet I realized that in one sense it makes little difference what the nature of the problem is. Parental reactions run along the same lines. Shock is shock. Mistrust is mistrust. Rage is rage, weariness is weariness and despair, despair. Whatever the cause of our struggles, our human reactions follow similar patterns. And it is these you need help with. I want to give you a hand in getting up off the floor to live, even to experience joy again.
My goal is higher still….I would like to open a door for you, a door of hope…through which you may enter a fuller and richer life than you could have known before. For the God I believe in specializes in bringing good out of evil, strength out of pain and joy out of tragedy.
The goodness begins when you face the truth squarely, however much it sickens you. As much as you want to walk away and live someplace else, you did marry. You did produce children. They are alive and they are yours. The problem won’t go away by pretending they are not there.
The problem includes your feelings–your hurt, your rage, your panic, your disappointment, your shame, your humiliation, your alternate wish to yell at someone (your spouse, your child, your child’s friends, the school teacher) and to lock yourself in the bathroom and talk to nobody. Look at them all. They exist. They are part of the problem you face. Even the sense of despair. And to look at them, to be able to face them fully and honestly, and to size them up is the first step in solving them. You cannot solve problems you close your eyes to.
Proverbs 21:2
Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the heart.
Jennifer Van Allen
www.theprodigalpig.com
www.faithincounseling.org
