This weekend is Memorial Day, and besides all the cookouts and pool parties we’ve decided as a nation it’s important to set aside at least one day per year when we remember. We remember those who have come before us. We remember the sacrifices they made — sacrifices which have enabled us to enjoy the lifestyles we currently enjoy.

As I’ve been thinking about what I’ll be preaching this weekend, I’ve spent a lot of time pondering what history is — and perhaps what it should be.

I love history, and I’m convinced that lots of you do, too!

After all, there’s a whole channel on TV devoted to nothing but history. Some of the most popular books, movies and miniseries of the recent past have dealt with history. Those Jim Burns documentaries are history, and they’re fantastic. Lots of you think so.

What’s not to love about history? It’s full of murder and betrayal, love and discovery. There are explorers launching out into the great unknown to find gold or rescue a damsel in distress. Kings and Queens. Sailors and soldiers. Spies. Double crosses. Noble deaths. Revenge. This is high drama!

So, how in the world did our high school history teachers convince us that history was boring? How did they manage to reduce history to a series of dates and dead people?

History is something more, isn’t it? Something bigger than a textbook. And it’s something vitally important — not just because of that great quote about how people who forget their history are doomed to repeat it. History is important for lots of reasons. For example, looking back into history allows us to discern the patterns that may help us successfully navigate the future. History reveals how we got where we are and, at least to some extent, how we’ve become who we are.

I know there are those who disparage history. They say that history is just a fable everyone agrees upon (I think Napoleon said that). They claim that history has always been rewritten by those who won wars in an attempt to justify their own cause and vilify their enemies. I’ll concede the point…a little. Objectivity is impossible, and historians always have a bias. But real events really happened, and historians with integrity seek to get as close to the objective truth as possible. At least they ought to.

Some say we should just embrace this new way of looking at history to the extent that we simply allow everyone to tell their own version of how things went down — with no regard for veracity. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, after all.

But I can’t buy that. I can’t buy it academically, and I can’t buy it theologically. That’s right: my theology informs my view of history.

Does yours? If so, how?

*Apologies to Stephen Mansfield for stealing the title of this post from his fantastic little book which all of you should buy.

This morning I’ve been thinking about how much I like my kids. I don’t just love them; I really like them. And maybe because I’ve just finished a three-part sermon series about parenting, it got me thinking about a post I wrote five years ago. It’s one of my favorite stories about my experience as a parent.

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We have a lot of bedtime rituals in my house. One of my favorites started with my oldest daughter Anabel but now includes all three of my girls. I go into their room just before lights out and say, “I love you, but only this much.” I hold my fingers apart about an inch.

They say, “No, Daddy.”

“Oh, you’re right,” I say. “I probably love you this much.” Hands about six inches apart.

“No, Daddy.”

“This much?” Hands getting wider now.

“No.”

And on and on it goes until I stretch my arms out as wide as they will go. “Daddy loves you thiiiiiiiiiisssss muuuuuuuch.”

“And more and more and more.”

It’s like a liturgy in my house. Every night the same thing, and every night we go through the whole thing.

One afternoon, my wife desperately needed some time alone, so I told her I’d watch the girls. She looked skeptical. “Are you sure you can handle them all by yourself?”

“Jill, I’m a grown man with a Master’s degree in Theology. I think I can handle three kids. Besides, the small one is asleep.”

She left, and I told the girls to play quietly downstairs. Then I settled in on the computer up in our office, leaving them to their own devices because I have a Master’s degree in Theology and am, in fact, a moron.

After about 20 minutes, I realized that it was really quiet downstairs -– too quiet, if you know what I mean. I came down to find that my three-year-old Eliza had taken an aqua-marine crayon and colored on every flat surface on the first floor of our house. The stove, the refrigerator, the bookshelves, the fireplace. When I entered the living room, there she stood — on the sofa — back to me — coloring the wall in big, broad strokes.

She felt the weight of my stare and slowly turned. She knew that she had sinned and that the wages of sin is death.

She suddenly threw her arms open as wide as they would go and said, “Daddy, I love you thiiiiiissss muuuuuuuuch!”

What are you going to do?

Sure, there were consequences — she had to clean it all up (and…yeah…I helped her), but here’s the point: Sometimes relationships are more important than rules.

Eliza knew what she had done was against the rules. She didn’t need me to yell at her or send her to her room for the next 90 days. At that moment, what my daughter needed most was to know that our relationship was too strong to be broken — by sin, by failure, by anything.

There’s another part to our bedtime ritual. As I stand there with my arms open wide, I ask them a couple of questions: “How long will Daddy love you?”

The correct answer is: “Forever and ever and ever.”

“What will ever make Daddy stop loving you?”

The correct answer to that is: “Nothing in the whole wide world.”

One of the worst things we can do to our children is bring them up in complete isolation, with padded everything, rescuing them from any and all consequences and shielding their eyes from the very real presence of danger and evil in our fallen world. I’m not suggesting you pin a 20 dollar bill to their vest and drop them off on the strip in Las Vegas to fend for themselves, but — at some point in time — they need to be exposed to life as it really exists. Small doses in safe environments at first perhaps — malevolent forces in fairy tales, for example. But we’re in danger of raising a generation of cry babies who are completely ill-equipped to deal with reality…and Christian parents are often the worst offenders.

If we give in to this urge, our children may never develop into the kind of strong adults they are made to be. And, again, Christian children are especially prone to underdevelopment and stunted growth.

John Westerhof (Will Our Children Have Faith) has written a great deal about stages of faith development in children. Using very broad strokes, he has discerned four distinct stages. The first, he calls experiential faith. That is faith gained from experience; interaction with other people of faith. Paul writes about his young companion Timothy, that his faith was nurtured by his mother, Eunice, and his grandmother, Lois. Infants being raised in Christian homes, have something of a relationship with God, in many ways, because it’s all they’ve ever known. A lifestyle of faith is all they have ever experienced, and the only people they have ever known as people of faith. The primary reason people in this stage believe what they believe is because it’s all they’ve ever believed.

The second stage is affiliative faith — growing through involvement in a faith community. It is sharing in the worship, ministry, decision-making, caring life of the faith community. Paul first encountered Timothy when he visited Lystra, where Timothy was highly regarded as a member of the community. Children whose parents include them in church-related activities have something of a relationship with God, in many ways, because all the people around them, all the people to whom they are connected have a relationship with God. The primary reason people in this stage believe what they believe is because they belong to a group of people who believe the same things.

The third stage of faith is inquisitive — a questioning phase usually occurs sometime early in adolescence for children raised in Christian homes. Paul took Timothy on one of his missionary journeys. Participating in Paul’s mission, asking questions and testing his gifts, Timothy’s faith was challenged and strengthened. This is the stage most Christian parents fear. In fact, some churches and families discourage this stage altogether. However, if this stage is not fully experienced by a young person, his or her faith will become stunted, or worse, aborted.

The fourth stage is owned faith — a developed faith that has been tested. At this stage a person’s faith is marked by a commitment to certain beliefs, attitudes and practices. In the Bible we see Timothy sent out to resolve problems in Corinth and then to Ephesus where he is a leader in the church. Until a faith is allowed to proceed through the inquisitive stage, until a faith is questioned, it will not be mature enough to be truly owned by an individual. At this stage, a person believes what they believe because their faith has withstood the crucible moments of life.

As parents, the one thing we want more than anything is for our children to possess an “owned” faith. We want our kids to love God, serve God, enjoy God, trust God, partner with God — not because of who their mom and dad are or because they’re in a church where that’s expected. We want them to do these things because they’ve made the choice to do so from the core of their own soul.

One point must be made here: parents cannot make this happen. We like to live as if there is some kind of law of linearity at work here — some kind of hard-and-fast cause-and-effect. You do certain things, and your children will own their faith. Like Francis Schaeffer’s image of God as a cosmic vending machine, we expect there to be a magical formula by which to raise children that will ensure their eternal destiny. Regardless of what anyone has told you, this is not the case. I’ve all read the verses in Proverbs; but we must remember that those are proverbs. They are descriptions of the way life usually works; but they are by no means to be taken as covenantal promises from God. Every human being is born with a will of his own. With that free will comes the ability and responsibility to choose which path she will walk. The more we attempt to manipulate the choices of our children — regardless of how well-intentioned we may be — the more we will do damage to the development of their faith.

Having said all that, there are things we can do to alter the trajectory of a person’s life — to nudge them in the direction of God or push them away from him. If it is important to us that our children have a fully developing faith, we should understand the four stages of faith development and that they must pass through each of the first three in order to get to the fourth. These stages are not always neatly divided, and the boundaries are often fuzzy. But it will be helpful for those of us with children to be aware of which stage our child may be in so that we can keep an eye out for what may lie ahead.

There are lots of books written by lots of authors offering lots of techniques which produce lots of mixed emotions about the topic of parenting. You want to get your child to sleep through the night? There’s a book for that. You want her to eat her veggies without complaining? There’s a book for that. You want him to be fully potty trained before school starts? Get better grades once school is in session? Retain all that information over summer vacation? There are books for all that.

Christian authors are big into writing parenting books, too. Many of these well-intentioned books take as their theme a verse from the Old Testament book of Proverbs: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Then they spend 13 chapters explaining in sometimes meticulous detail what “the way he should go” looks like with the promise that if you’ll just do it this way, your child will turn out healthy, wealthy and wise — a morally upright, productive member of society — an upstanding citizen who will be involved in church activities for the rest of his life.

But the often untold truth is that is sometimes doesn’t work out like that.

Sure, sometimes it does. Sometimes the parent does the right thing, and the child responds the right way and becomes the right kind of person.

Sometimes.

But not always.

See, the book is called “Proverbs” — not “Promises” — it’s a general description of the way things usually work.

But when we make Proverbs 22:6 (which isn’t at all talking about the morally upright “way”, by the way, but that’s a topic of discussion for another day) into some sort of promise, we set ourselves up for negative consequences. If our child turns out well, we’re prone to pride (“Of course she turned out like that; we raised her right! Everything she does is because of us! She’s great because we’re great!”). If our child turns out not-so-well, we’re prone to unnecessary guilt (“Where did we go wrong? Her failures are our failures! She shouldn’t be held responsible for her actions because somehow this is our fault! God is punishing us through her!”).

But parenting isn’t math. Parenting is harder than math. There’s no equation for this. I wish there were. I wish I could say, “If you’ll always do x, when your child does y, then the result will be z (and z = happy).

In parenting, there are no guarantees. You might do everything right, and your kid might choose to rebel. Or you might get it wrong more often than you get it right, and your kid might become the next Max Lucado. There’s some mystery involving the human will and God’s sovereignty here.

I told people Sunday, “You can never be such a great parent that God is obligated to save your kids. But you can’t mess them up so badly that they fall beyond the reach of God’s amazing grace.”

I don’t know about you, but my parenting needs grace a lot more than it needs math!

I know the title of this post may seem strange, but please hear me out.

Here in America, we spend somewhere between 18-24 years raising children. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that when we’re done, that’s precisely what we have: children.

Physically, they’re adults, but emotionally-, psychologically- and spiritually-speaking they’re children — or at least they’re childish, woefully unprepared for life in the real world.

Life in the real world requires skilled, mature adults who are less concerned about following rules and more concerned about making wise choices.

Now, I haven’t changed my name to Chicken Little, and I’m not saying that the sky is falling (except in Iceland where it kind of is). Most kids seem to be doing fine. They’re not in jail at least. The vast majority of kids go to school. They get jobs. They don’t carry concealed weapons or deal drugs.

But there are some — some days it seems like most — who aren’t doing so well. They’re aimless and anxious, sad and sullen, fearful and I can’t think of another thing that starts with F.

The sad truth is that many of our children reach adulthood seriously lacking the life skills they need to navigate adulthood. They can’t cope with pressure. They don’t know how to make decisions. They’re intellectually impoverished and spiritually bankrupt.

And the worst part is, few of them are even aware of this.

We’ve been raising children, and it’s not working out so well. We’ve got to stop raising children and start raising adults.

Question: How would you parent differently, if you began thinking about how to raise an adult instead of settling for raising a child?

We’re starting a new sermon series at Shannon Oaks this Sunday called “Hearts & Minds”. It’s about parenting, but it’s a bit of a twist on the parenting theme.

See, I’m going to try as best I can to avoid recommending any techniques for how to get your child to sit still at the dinner table or use his manners or come home before curfew. I’m going to try to help parents look beyond behavior to try to discern how to instill a way of thinking and feeling about life. Hopefully, if we can do this, behavior will take care of itself.

Obviously, I’m not talking about trying to reason with a hysterical toddler. But I am talking about parenting with the end in mind — thinking about an 18-year strategy for launching your child into the world.

Now, those of you who have followed the blog for a few years know that I’ve written and talked about this a lot. I even co-authored a whole book about it.

Still, it’s helpful to revisit these topics periodically, and this is one that’s been on the shelf for a while. So, let’s get back into it with a few questions.

What’s the best parenting advice you ever heard?

What’s the worst parenting advice you ever heard?

What do you think the goal of parenting should be?