Repeat after me: There is no such thing as a perfect parent. No matter what others will try to tell you. No matter what lies the enemy will whisper in your ear. You will never be a perfect parent because God is the only one who has this parenthood thing down pat. (For more on God’s role as our Father, check out my post Children of God.)
Does that make you feel better or worse? Because to me, this statement is a two-sided coin.
On the one hand, it’s a relief. Children are difficult. Now I may not have children of my own quite yet, but I babysit my sister’s children during the week when she and her husband are at work. That’s over eight hours a day that I’m in charge of feeding them, cleaning them, and (perhaps the hardest of all) disciplining them. And it’s exhausting. Sometimes I feel a bit guilty about the relief I feel when they go home. Other times I’m too tired to feel guilty about anything.
But on the other hand, I want to be perfect. I want to never lose my temper. To never be too harsh or too soft. I want to be an encouraging and dependable fixture in their life. Yet over and over again, I fail. And then I spend hours mentally flogging myself and swearing I’ll do better next time.
I don’t do better next time.
And discipline is something I’m very insecure about. Am I too hard on them? Too easy? Am I spoiling them? Sometimes when I’m out in public with them, I worry that others are judging me for how I handle them. Maybe that’s an irrational concern, but there’s a lot of mom-shaming in this world. (I wrote about this in my post The Perfect Mom.) I see it all over social media.
The other day I was really struggling with this. The three-year-old and I have gone head-to-head a lot lately, and I fear I either give in too easily or I’m too strict. But a verse came to mind, not one that I’d expected.
…for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart. – 1 Samuel 16:7b
It took me aback for a moment. This verse comes from a passage where Samuel is wondering why God didn’t choose one of David’s brothers to be king, and God told Samuel that He doesn’t judge on appearances but on the heart. What does that have to do with parenting and discipline? But then I realized maybe God was telling me that others may judge how I handle the kids, but He could see the intentions of my heart.
Perhaps that’s all that really matters. That we try to be there for the children in our lives, whether they’re our children or someone else’s. All I know is that it’s important to point our children to God as the only perfect parent. Because we will fail them. We’ll mess up. But God never will. And introducing them to God is the best thing we can ever do for our kids.
So maybe we can’t be a perfect parent. But we can be a godly one, and that’s all that matters.
