[Adapted from the archives]

When my boys are men, I’d love them to look back on their kid-years and say – about me –

‘She got some things right. She got lots of things wrong. But she definitely ENJOYED being our mom.’

Maybe, like me, you want that kind of guarantee of parenting success but you need to keep things simple because you’re suffering from a severe case of overwhelm. I’m thinking we’ve all got capacity to ask ourselves just this one simple question:

Do I *light up* when I see my kids?

Does my (sighted) son see on my face (and does my visually impaired son hear in my voice) that I’m delighted to see them?

I totally want my boys to learn nuance and tone and all the textures of God-given human emotion. I don’t want to be fake-faced – manically cheerful – when gravity or grief or reprimand is necessary and appropriate.

But too often they walk off a playground or into a room and I greet them with sighs and eye-rolling. My tone-of-face can chill the ambient temperature down to uncomfortable degrees of Hurry-Hurry and What-NOW?

But –

Our greatest success as parents is surely to show our children the Father.

In fact, just showing them the Father? That will be enough.

Along the way, most of us get it more-or-less right to make sure our kids are literate and able to fry an egg and iron a shirt. Yet our biggest parental win is to give them a picture of their Heavenly Father, who is mighty to save, sings over them, calms their fears and is relentlessly glad to see them.

In whatever season of parenting we find ourselves, let’s make it our mission – one conscious decision-of-the-face at a time, on days when it’s easy and days when it’s not – to light up for our kids, the way our Father lights up for us.

. . .

Happy weekend, friend!

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