Parenting

TUES., APR. 20, 1982, 5:15 AM
FARM, STUDY

It should give you pause, o son, to realize, as you do in this moment, that you have not reviewed My teachings to you sufficiently to know whether this title has been used before. Let this be a stimulus to use one morning a week, to review the volumes. You are right in feeling that it is not wise just to “churn these out” and be unaware of what you have neath these multi-colored covers.

Parenting has been one of your life roles for a number of years, and, you know, it is not finished yet. It never will be finished, as long as the sons are alive and in relationship, including need, but it does change as each assumes adult roles and moves out from the family home. You are experiencing both, now, and long for the demise of this directly responsible role. Have patience, o son, and do not run from opportunities that are uniquely yours, even if they seem unpleasant.

Being an active parent is an opportunity to exhibit the self that is yours, to play a role that may be dissonant with that self, and to grow from the experience of balancing these, which can only be done with spirit directing (successfully, that is). Being a parent also is seeing lives develop, over which you have had influence, and having both good and bad feelings about what you see and feel in them.

Your assessment of yourself is essentially correct. You have done better at being yourself than at playing the authority role. You have not done much with the opportunities to be a direct educator, the one who knows and tells. You do not glory in conflict, so you did not seek such often, and opportunities were left unfulfilled.

You are ambivalent about your feelings concerning the “success in life” of your sons. On the one hand you wish they could be more successful… and at least be successful in what each seems headed to do (at least as successful as you have been in your little niche). On the other you wish them only to be in direct relationship with Me, following My direction for them, whether it leads to a life successful in American terms… or something less. You know that the latter is the feeling I favor. From My perspective successful parenting is playing some role in moving the spirits that are in your children into an active interaction with Me. I can use worldly success, and I sometimes do, but I certainly am not bound by it.

As Jesus I was not what the world, even of that time, called a success. Some of My disciples had been successful in worldly terms, but this was not told in the Scriptures. Fishermen and a tax collector… couldn’t I have done better?

You really do not wish for more success for yourself. Consider carefully the judgments you make concerning your sons. Share with them now, particularly in writing. Accept them for what they are and are becoming. Do not wish too fervently for them to be as some others are.