Present, not Perfect

By Jonathan Brozozog

When it comes to knowledge and wisdom, God never gives us everything at once. He gives us information slowly, methodically and incrementally, so we can learn to handle it properly before He dumps more knowledge upon us. Learning is a process, even when it comes to spiritual things. God doesn’t dispense all His wisdom in one fell swoop.

Occasionally, I take my children to Chuck E. Cheese, a place where kids can really be kids. When I buy tokens for my children, I hold onto them and dispense them gradually, a few at a time to each child. When one of my children runs out of tokens, he or she will come back to me for more. This allows me to control the situation and make my kids accountable to me.

When it comes to spiritual things, God interacts with us in a similar way. He doesn’t give us everything at once. He works in our lives in ways that compel us to keep coming back to Him for all our needs and to continually seek Him for more knowledge, wisdom and understanding. People who seek the wisdom they need from the sources that God has made available will acquire it and be great parents and godly, effective disciplinarians.

Because I am a pastor, I spend an exorbitant amount of time with people. I observe them carefully so I can understand them better. Over the course of time, I have come to realize that most people are convinced they have what it takes to be good parents. After all, they were kids themselves. They tend to think that parenting is easy and natural.

But when they actually become parents, and the concept of parenting shifts from the theoretical to the practical, reality sets in. They quickly realize that parenting just might be a little more complicated than they thought. And when a young couple like this realizes how much they don’t know, they usually start doing the work required to figure things out.

Fortunately, Joanne and I figured out pretty early that we needed a lot more knowledge and wisdom than we had, so we started searching the Scriptures for those passages that directly pertained to those areas. We also started searching for mentors—people older than us who could share their insights and personal experiences with us, so we could avoid making some of the mis- takes they had made with their children. And of course, we learned the most through experience—the trial-and-error approach of doing things the wrong way in order to learn how to do them the right way.

Each step of the way, as we have learned new things about the awesome responsibility of parenting and the tremendous power of discipline, we have continually wished that we had implemented these things earlier in our children’s lives. We have always felt a little sorry for our older children, who weren’t privileged to benefit from the accumulated knowledge that has made life so much better for their younger siblings.

But that’s the point: learning to be a good parent and an effective disciplinarian takes time, and it’s hard work. Despite what you’ve been told, it doesn’t come naturally, and despite what you may have thought in the past, it isn’t easy. Because parenting is so eternally important and so personally fulfilling, it takes everything you can give to it.

Great parents will tell you that success as a mother or father isn’t dependent on one’s perfection. There are no perfect parents. Instead, there are present parents, and the simplest first step you can take toward successful parenting is choosing to be “present” in your children’s lives. Absentee parenting is one of the biggest problems in our society.

There are at least a million distractions that can sidetrack us. Too many parents today are simply disconnected from their kids—and vice versa. This makes discipline a moot point. A healthy home atmosphere is the foundation of a strong family—and the only environment in which parental discipline can have any kind of positive effect.

Keep in mind that we don’t have to be physically absent from our children in order to be “absent” parents. Parents can be absent while they are sitting in the same room with their kids. Some studies even report that typical American families spend about 90 seconds interacting with one another each day. Far too often, parents and children are engaged with everything around them except one another. They are watching television, playing games on a tablet or adjusting the earbuds that are synced to their iPhones. In today’s world, there is precious little eye contact, conversation or true interaction. We can be present without actually being present.

Family life doesn’t just happen because we’re all in the same house, and parenting doesn’t just happen because we all happen to be in the same room. It’s tragically easy for families today to become like ships passing in the night. Every member of the household is doing something different, operating based on a different schedule.

Each adult and each child has his or her own interests, activities, friends and plans that have nothing to do with the other members of the family. But when life is over, and the children you have raised are addressing the mourners at your funeral, they won’t remember their childhoods by recounting their scores on Samurai Warriors 5. Instead, they will remember (or be unable to remember) the simple moments of togetherness and family interaction that helped shape them as human beings.

Winning at any worthwhile pursuit, particularly parenting, doesn’t happen by accident. It takes a lot of hard work, a focused desire, and consistent effort. Unfortunately, in these modern times, too many parents aren’t willing to make that kind of investment. Instead, they shuffle their children off to school so that other people can raise them while the parents pursue other, more “important” quests.

One of the greatest tragedies I can imagine in life is winning everywhere else—business, finances, ministry, in the respect of one’s peers and competitors—while losing at home. All else will mean absolutely nothing at the end of your life if you don’t succeed in raising children who are good, moral, productive people who love God and are destined for heaven.

Let me conclude with a simple question: what does success look like to you? What is your greatest goal in life? If you are like most people, it’s hard to boil the answer to that question down to a single sentence. Why? Because life is complicated—multifaceted! We usually have goals for our health, finances, spiritual lives and families. However, to live a truly fruitful and productive life, you should be able to describe your ultimate purpose in one simple sentence.

For Joanne and me, success is going to heaven with our children and our grandchildren. Every- thing else must fall beneath that overarching goal or contribute to it, because we’re not just raising children; we’re raising little men and women who will be parents themselves one day. We are raising future husbands, wives, entrepreneurs, leaders and voices of authority in the realms in which God chooses to place them. How will they turn out? Will they be “up” for the task, or will they be ill-equipped and ill-prepared? That is largely up to their parents.

As you clarify your own vision for life, I encourage you to consider your priorities, and the primary importance of your role as a parent. While your children will have many opportunities and relationships beyond the boundaries of your home, they will never have another father or mother.