Unwrapped Gifts
By Charles Rush
In Collaboration with Michael Usey
April 30, 2000
Proverbs 22: 6
was lunching with some four-and-a-half- year-olds and I realized how
alive you are at that age. They don't edit themselves like adults do,
so you heard some great stuff. I hear their opinions about life, food,
God, and every thing in between. One of them told me that there are
two kinds of boys--truck boys and action figure boys. His good friend
Cason is a truck boy, but this young man, he himself was an action
figure boy. At this same lunch I heard one of the boys say, "I hope we
get to paint today. I love painting! I could paint all day." I've
been to this boy's house, and his parents have encouraged this
budding Picasso. Their refrigerator is covered in artwork, and, when I
was picking up a child from a play date, the boy was beaming when he
showed his pictures to me. Despite what they think, four-a-half is
really very young, but already this boy was experiencing the pleasure
of doing something he loves to do. And his parents are already
enjoying watching the self-esteem and confidence of
The Hebrew language is a difficult one to pin down.
Consider, for example, the key verse for this morning, Proverbs 22.6.
There are at least three different ways to translate this verse, and
all of them make sense. One way to translate this verse is the manner
in which you are probably most familiar:
Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old, he will
not depart from it.
In this understanding, "the way he should go" is the way of moral
instruction. The time to impart your values to her is when she is
younger. Then is the time to teach that, as followers of Christ, our
character is important. So we who are serious about being a Christian
try to train our young children in our ethics, our morals, our
character traits. We do this in a myriad of ways--we model it for
them. We don't just say, "Prayer is important," or "Reading is a big
deal." Instead we let them see us praying or reading. We also tell
them stories about heroes (both male and female) and saints tha
Another possibility is a warning:
Allow a child to grow up in the way he wants to, and when he is old, he
will not depart from it.
This too is pretty obvious. Allow a child to raise herself up, and
she will become selfish, cruel, and petty--and nothing you can do will
change her when she's older. There are a spate of teenage films out
now that make this point, pretty clearly. I'm thinking of "Cruel
Intentions" among others. In all these films, adults only hover in the
background like props, but all the real action, all the real decisions
and intrigue take place with the teenagers, who appear to be nearly
autonomous, with access to considerable means. If a child makes the
crucial decisions for himself, most of us will do whatever we can to
avoid pain and to maximize pleasure. As you know, quite a few adults
like by this creed--minimize pain, maximize pleasure. This is one of
the reasons there are so many character disorders in our society
today--you know, people who are narcissistic or m
A child needs loving and caring adults to raise her up, and this love
and care needs to be there early and consistently so that character
flaws have little chance of taking root. This is not just the parents'
job, but all of us who love children and teach them and are around them
to help them grow. If I let my children make all significant decisions
about their upbringing, Jessie would eat candy at every meal, and Ian
(when he was a baby) would have been climbing on the roof with
something sharp. I remember my Godson, when he was about 3 years old.
I came home and the boys had all made themselves heaping bowls of ice
cream, with chocolate sauce and whipped cream, even as dinner was about
to be served. I came in the kitchen, took all the ice cream away. My
godson starts crying (who is now 6'4" and weighs about 240) "you've
ruined all my happiness."
As you know, this is a critical problem in our society at present. It
is a multiple vector problem. On the one hand, a greater percentage of
us have the resources to give our children a wider range of
opportunities and gifts. On the other hand, we have less and less time
to spend with our children because our schedules are tighter. In the
place of our time, we give our kids structured activities that will
enable them to succeed in the classroom, succeed on the playing field,
gain entrance to college, and manage the next generation.
There is a receding lack of solidarity among parents from Middle School
onwards which means that we tend to withdraw from setting limits and
boundaries, essentially allowing our children greater and greater
autonomy over their budding adolescent lives. It is producing a number
of unintended consequences. There is the perpetual allure of sex and
drugs that have plagued young teens since time immemorial. The only
difference today is that with less total supervision (there is always
someone's parents who are not at home), with greater social permission
(that comes through the Movies, TV), with an increased influence from
their peers that grows in inverse proportion to the lack of total
parental structure- they are allowed more opportunities to experiment
at younger and younger ages. As a society, we have decided to let our
children decide for themselves the parameters of their sex lives and
their drug use. Little surprise what paths they will take.
And there are indirect consequences to this as well. When they are
given so many things, so many opportunities, combined with such a wide
autonomy to choose for themselves, they grow up with an expanded sense
of entitlement. I'm mulling this idea over in my mind so I invite your
help, but I am tempted to say that this sense of entitlement is likely
to bloom into something that is very nearly the polar opposite of
gratitude.
Hand in hand with that sense of entitlement is an indifference towards
authority in general. You get a lot of attitude, a greater percentage
of young people that don't take the rules seriously, don't seem to have
any reverence- let alone fear- of the principal, the police officer,
their teachers.
I think all of these trends are apparent, not just in your family, not
just in Summit but across our nation. They are a reflection of broad
changes in our social mores and should constitute some concern. We
intended to empower our children but at precisely the same time, our
generation had increasing demands on our time- from our jobs, our
divorces, not to mention our own increased opportunities- the result
is, we have given our children more opportunity for self-direction than
they can handle.
We ought not
allow a child to grow up in the way that seems right to her,
because
when she is old, she will not depart from it.
This sermon is not about this truth either.
The first two are general truths about child rearing, which simply says
the patterns that we set for children during their early years will
eventually take root in their lives and become their own. So if we
teach our children compassion, kindness, respect for others, diligence
and responsibility, eventually they will internalize those values.
Obvious, right? As with other scriptures, this passage is not a
promise--it offers not guarantee that our children will respond to our
training positively. It is however a clear statement about how life
works, and what we can expect.
But there is a third slant on this verse:
Raise a child in the way she ought to go,
according to her interests and abilities. Perhaps this proverb is
challenging us to help children discover and develop their natural
aptitudes, their core motivations, and competencies. In this view,
training up a child "in the way he should go" means helping that child
discover the path in life that is best for him or her.
Beyond offering our children massive amounts of love and appropriate
limits, I believe the next great gift we can give them is a gradual
drawing out of the special abilities that God has given them. This
allows children to sense at a young age, "I'm very good at this
activity. I enjoy using these skills. I have competency in this
area."
As children grow up and move into the world, they will be attacked,
insulted, criticized, and undermined from many different directions.
Those children who have already established a core of competence on
which to build self-confidence will have a tremendous advantage when
they face verbal and psychological foes.
I knew an architect who was one of the best in the city. He was my
age, and I knew he enjoyed his work. He told me once, "Going to work
feels like going out to recess. I love it almost every day."
I asked how he ended up in that field. He said, "When I was seven
years old, my dad saw that I had mechanical interests and construction
abilities. So he bought me every kind of building set he could find at
the toy store. Later he helped me draw plans for a tree house, and he
personally supervised me in building it. Then he made sure I took
mechanical drawing classes in high school, and helped me get into a
college with a great architecture department. After graduating, I did
more work, and had to work hard to establish myself. But my dad is the
one who got me started." I asked him, did he think he would have been
able to find this path on his own. He said, "I doubt it. I had never
heard of architecture, nor had I met an architect. I was just a boy--I
didn't know there was anything special about my passion for designing
things. Unless my dad noticed it, I doubt I would have ever taken it
seriously."
I went to school with a girl named Leslie. She told me much later that
the whole time she was growing up, her parents had noticed two things
about her: that she loved books, and that she was always the
ringleader of all the neighborhood kids. Her folks use to say,
"Leslie, if you're awake, you either reading or leading." That was
important for her to know, especially as she grew older and thought
about a job. Today she is senior management in a major book publisher.
So how important were her parents' observations? She has built her
life on those observations. To me, this is a great example of
"training a child in the way she should go."
This is where I think that parents who adopt a child have an advantage
over birth parents. Those of us with children born to us often have
these crazy expectations that our children turn out like us: that our
birth son will like baseball, like their grandfather does; that our
daughter will like backpacking, just because her birth mother does.
Those of you with children haven't you found yourself in this trap?
Giving a gift, for example, that you would have liked as a child, but
one that your child has little interest in. But parents who adopt know
there will be not genetic links between them and their child. So they
tend to see their son or daughter as a gift to be unwrapped with
surprises around every corner.
On my best days as a parent, I'm convinced that every child
is a gift from God to be wrapped and cherished. Each of our children
came with more preferences and opinions than I would have thought. I
knew children were not
tabla rassa
; I never thought they were a blank page for us to write on. Even so,
each person has gifts in both interests and abilities that can help us
live with passion. Even small children have interests and
abilities--and it's a wise parent, teacher, or caregiver that knows
both about a child. I know children can have deeply destructive urges
that much be acknowledged, controlled, and healed--I genuinely felt
empathy for those parents of the kids that did the killing at Colombine
High School. There is no guarantee that things are going to turn out
okay with our kids. Probably the best we can hope for is that we pay
attention to them, water their interests, and see what comes.
In our church, many children are in our care as the family of God. We
make a pledge every time a child is baptized in our church to help to
raise them as a follower of Christ, and to support Mom and Dad in their
wonderful and difficult task as parents. We've taken this pledge over
and over again, as each new child appeared in our midst. I had one
father who just whispered to me before the beginning of a service how
important that pledge really is. I asked him why? He explained that
his own father was emotionally absence due to his alcoholism-- and that
when he was young Christian men in the church helped to parent him and
love him. They pointed out his interests and abilities. It is what we
can do--to ooh and ah over each new gift in our midst.
Recently, I saw a bookmark that had the four rules of parenting,
according to somebody: Love them, Limit them, Listen to them, and Let
them go. It's a good guideline for all of us as we deal with the young
people in our midst. A colleague told me of a youth program they did
at their church called
Seen and Heard
, in which the adults listened to their High School aged young people
in our midst, to find our what was important to them, and why. They
listened to them to remind themselves that young people have their own
joys and fears that they daily deal with as well.
I hope each child comes to church with the knowledge that they are
loved and appreciated here. It is so important that we get this
right. Doing so requires great discernment, hours of observation, and
deep wisdom from God. But when we do get it right, we can help each
child discover his or her motivated abilities. In helping them
discover the mix of their God given gifts and passions, we give them a
huge blessing, nourish their self-esteem and build their confidence.
In doing so, we give ourselves a huge blessing too. Nothing in
ministry is better than watching children use their gifts and pursue
their passion. One of the reasons I love being the pastor of this
Church is that you are committed to helping our children discover their
uniqueness. So we wait and watch and water and encourage and teach and
listen and love, waiting to see what each child will become: Heidi,
Jack, Scott, Sammy, Corriane, Evan, Fiona, Clara, Warren, Emma, Andrew,
Max, Jasper, Caroline, Kathryn, and many, many others. We're God's
children, surrounded by presents, unwrapping our gifts, discovering the
presence of our God in our children.
Train up a child in the manner of her gifts and abilities, and when she
is old, she'll know her way in the world.
Amen.
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