Do I Have To?

"Awww, mommm, do I have to?"  The phrase rang out through the house and I felt my heart become heavy.  I had been forewarned that parenting wasn't easy, but exhausting?  No one had quite worded it that way.  The days run together and the divergence of them leaves me with my mouth gaped open some days.  The same child moves from, "Let me help you, Mommy" into "Why do I have to do that?", sometimes within moments.

Is there anything that can fully prepare one for the will of a child? 

Experience and God's truth are the two strongest allies that I have found.  I have learned better over time how to stand my ground like a soldier in battle -- somehow it can seem I need permission to stand up to my children and speak the awful "NO" word.  Culture and secular parenting resources attempt to seduce me into the lie that if I discipline my children in any way, other than delightful, I am ruining them for life.  Adam and Eve were tempted with fruit that promised more than it could offer, too. 

Clear instruction that God offers is not for the faint of heart.  When I am told to, "Discipline your children while you still have the chance; indulging them destroys them" (Proverbs 19:18), I sense the urgency that is being communicated.  I have limited time to work with and although my goal is to be a loving, joy-filled mother, that does not exclude me training up my children in the way they should go.  Enough water has travelled under the bridge of my parenting experience to know that this means HARD WORK and SAD KIDS some days.

I have shared it before and I will share it again -- Our goal with our children is not happiness, it's holiness (quote from the Ezzos).  Some days I feel that I need to find a permanent marker and write that on the foreheads of my children.  I have to keep that in front of me!  I love my children, I believe as much as any mother could;  and training them, instructing them, calling them to obedience is no task for the faint-hearted. 

C.S. Lewis once said, "If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair." 

Do I see how this applies to my parenting? I ask myself.  I grapple with the learned precision of a tight-rope walker, for that is what I feel I must become.  I know that I am called to be a mom, as it says in Galatians 5, who is full of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (the fruits of the Spirit); but I am ever aware that I can't neglect the warnings that God has laid out for me.  I don't want the despair in the end. 

Peace and delight will come to my soul, IF I discipline my son or daughter (Proverbs 29:17). 

I am told not to withhold discipline because it saves my child from death (Proverbs 23:13).

The day closes and I am amazed -- each of my five take their turns with their heads nuzzled in close to mine -- they each share whispers of their own variations of committed love and appreciation.  After all that, they don't despise me?  NO, far more than that, somehow in God's incredible design, it is because of the discipline (when blended with love) not in spite of it, that there is rich, deep and secure love.

"The Lord disciplines those He loves."  Hebrews 12:6