If you’re a child of the 80’s or, if you’ve ever watched The NeverEnding Story, then you understand my title’s rhetorical nod. Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in the swamps, not of sadness, but of impatience. And the worst part is, I can’t just hit a dismiss button. As I’ve alluded to before here on Jay Jones: Mom-A-Grams, there are no buttons. No hacks for parents, not really… Because actual parenting is laying a belief system down as a foundation for your children. And that doesn’t happen overnight, like figuring out a more efficient way of making lunches. It happens over years, and you only see your successes in years that haven’t happened yet. Then – in the future – we’ll also see the gaps. Knowing that, we pray as parents, so God’s peace through prayer will garrison and mount guard over our hearts…in Jesus Christ (Philippians 4 AMPC.) Knowing that there are some things we’ll forget to say and, things we’ll teach our kids that we never wanted them to think, we thank God in advance for showing Jesus Christ in our roles and in our situations. We thank God for manifesting the glory that Jesus Christ has given us and for glorifying the Father…by hearing our requests as parents and giving us what we ask.

But right now, I’m sifting through the quicksand of impatience, searching for my role as mom and leader in the storms of life, which sometimes present as whining.

I have to sift through it all, as much as I can – reaching into my true identity within the Son of God – for tolerance and grace and forbearance. If I don’t sift through it all, I can miss the diamond that I need in order to parent the children God has rewarded me with – confidence. I want my kids to confide in me. I want them to tell me if someone is hurting them. I want them to show me the ways that they think and process data, so I can help guide their thinking and know better ways to pray for them. In other words, I want my kids to feel like they can talk to me…knowing I’ll listen.

Impatience makes us unable to listen for the gems that allow us to be good moms, dads, and guardians. A chief tool of any leadership role is the ability to listen – with a hearing heart. Otherwise, we’ll be like the very devout folks whom Apostle Paul encountered who had no idea of the true identity of God (Acts 17:22-31.) We can worship, but we need to know who God is. Likewise, we can parent. But we need to know what’s happening in the the world in which our kids live and understand that world from their unique perspective.

Right now, I’m grappling with another thing familiar to Paul – doing everything he didn’t want to do (SEE, Romans 7:19.) I don’t want to yell, but I’m yelling. I want to be tolerant and gentle, but I see myself teasing and berating the kids for whining. I’ve threatened to use an app on my phone to record their antics, so I can play it all back and show them how whining is a rotten cherry on the top of any day. I’ve made the decision not to spank anymore; I walked away from that for a few reasons, and I can’t justify going back to spanking. Though the threat of spanking still gets their attention, my yelling has increased. That’s a totally unscientific observation and a correlation that doesn’t amount to causation; the yelling might be connected to my hormonal situation at 25 weeks in 🤷🏽‍♀️ to my 4th pregnancy.

I don’t feel like this is the way to parent. I’m not proud of it. I don’t advocate it. But God is telling me not to allow my sense of failure to eat me alive either. And I’m not giving up. I’m relying. On Jesus Christ. On the glory He has given me. On His existence in me and my life IN HIM. Amen. This race is not over yet!