In an incredibly rare moment, I had the opportunity to sit around a table on Mother’s Day with my two daughters, my wife, my mother, and my mother-in-law. Two grandmothers, combining for more than a century of mothering experience, being celebrated but also providing wisdom that only comes from specific experiences. It was in that setting that I asked my mother what the most difficult moment or thing was about being a mother. Without the slightest hesitation, she offered up something profound: “Learning to keep my mouth shut when you kids made decisions that I disagreed with.”
Everyone has opinions, and we are frequently too quick to share them with people who didn’t ask for them. Certainly, the urge to do that with our children and the people we love most is even more compelling, making it nearly impossible to hold our tongues. And clearly there are times when we shouldn’t stay silent – but those times are significantly less frequent than we otherwise presume. What my mother was acknowledging was that the process of becoming a healthy, functioning adult required allowing people to make decisions after their own process of gathering information and then dealing with the positive and negative consequences of those decisions. For us kids to gain autonomy, she had to let go of her authority. When a parent keeps scripting those decisions and those moments, filled with ideas of what is best for their children, the opportunities for growth are stifled and the parent stays in control long after it is healthy.
A dear friend in ministry, Bruce Main of UrbanPromise, recently published a book titled “God Writes a Better Story.” The story that I would have written for my life would have looked very different from the life that I am now living – the life that I am loving. And part of the journey that got me to this place in life was making certain decisions that I know my mother would have been working overtime to keep her mouth shut about. It wasn’t that she would have tried to talk me out of becoming a pastor, but rather that the path that ultimately led me to become a pastor started with some very different decisions, with very different anticipated outcomes. Neither she nor I ever would have expected that I would be serving as a pastor when I first opted to move a thousand miles away from my hometown more than three decades ago to pursue a rather speculative venture (that never panned out). As Bruce points out in the many anecdotes within his book, the story that God writes is much better than the story that we would have written ourselves.
As a father, I so greatly appreciated the wisdom that my mother offered. My wife and I have raised our daughters to the point where they are now both college graduates. We have poured into them through our words and our examples, hopefully instilling in them a strong sense of morals and values, as well as an appreciation for critical thinking. I will encourage them when I should, and strive to keep my mouth shut when appropriate, because it is their life to live. But through whatever decisions they may make, and whatever situations they may find themselves in, I am simply going to trust that God has already authored a story of their lives that is so much greater than anything that I could have possibly scripted. Because God really does write a better story.
Peace and blessings – Pastor Aaron