Tag: Tension

All Joy//No Fun

It has been a while since I’ve posted here. One of my goals for the new year is to get back into a rhythm of blogging.

So we begin with a new reflection on parenting. Since the last time I posted anything both of our kids had birthdays, and so we now have a 3-year old and a 1-year old. Which is crazy. Where did the time go.

Anytime I think about parenting I think about the title from Jennifer Senior’s excellent book.

Some people freak out about this title because it feels sacrilegious to question being a parent at any level. Others roll their eyes in a jaded, sort of, “tell-me-something-I-don’t-know” way.

I find most parents, especially of younger kids, tend to go to one of these extremes. Happy-to-be-doing-this roboticness, or totally unsubtle resentment that these little people have robbed them of their “old life.”

Is there a better way to hold the tension?

Parenting is certainly not “no fun.” I have so much fun with my kids. Especially now that they are able to do a lot more and play and jump and talk (well more so the older than the younger, but they are both very interactive in their own ways).

But it is hard.

Our youngest has had a much more difficult time with teething than the older and I’ve spent a few midnight moments in the kitchen trying to rock him to sleep with the help of the humming refrigerator. Precious moments in some ways, but not exactly fun.

Discipline: incredibly important, but not a hoot!

Parenting is also not “all joyful.” There are some painful moments of recognizing one’s own selfishness and broken patterns of behavior.

There are painful moments of seeing those patterns show up in your kids.

There are painful moments of seeing selfish and broken patterns show up in your kids that you know didn’t come from you. They’re just there.

There’s an incredible potential in these tiny humans to break our hearts and if you have any kind of imagination you can see that potential early on.

And yet, there is so much joy. Dessert Friday. Visiting Grammy and Papa and G. Going to the park. Playing catch. Jumping Jacks. Reading books. Dinner together. When the oldest disobeys and then says to you: “Daddy, I want to be in right relationship.”

Live with that paradox parents. The old life is gone, this is a new stage, a new season. And it’s messy and frustrating and thrilling and boring and good.

And it will be transformative, if you let it.

Acts, Church, Tension, Beauty, etc

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Acts recently (see yesterday’s post). A common reaction to Acts is to look at all the exciting and crazy things that happen (3000 people joining the movement, healings in Jesus’ name, angels letting people out of jail) and to ask: “Why doesn’t the church look more like this today?”

I can sympathize with that a bit. But, I also am overwhelmed with how little has changed. People fight, disagree over little things, lie, criticize, and quit. The mission is always in danger of getting derailed by something that, in the grand scheme of things, is not all that important.

When I look around today and hear some of the criticisms about the church, I hear, at times, the “We just need to go back to Acts” sentiment. To people who say that, I ask: “Have you been involved in a church lately?”

When you are deeply involved in a community, and when you are a healthy person, you should see both sides of the Acts coin…the good and the bad…the beautiful and the ugly. Churches can be amazing: people finding their way back to God, great stories of transformation, miracles, serving the community, and on and on. But church can also be agonizing: fights, losing the mission, distractions, criticisms, and on and on.

Acts makes it clear that both of these realities are true of the church in a broken world. The challenge for me, as Acts has reminded me, is not to let idealism or cynicism win the day. The beauty is in holding the tension of these two realities. Church is where the miraculous happens and it can break your heart. God help me to live in to that truth.