How Clear is Your Vision? Parenting when Life gets Tough
We have had an incredibly busy/stressful/tired/not feeling great few weeks. Add to this kids who are learning how to get along with each other, and to love each other. Who are learning how to be respectful, who are learning how to have a good work ethic, and not always quite making it, and you have a recipe for a very tired and discouraged mom.
Have you ever had that happen to you? Well, it definitely happened to me last week. I got to the end of the week and I just thought,
”What in the world is going on? What am I even doing? Why is this happening? Why am I doing this?”
I thought back over lots of the things that we've talked about on the podcast, lots of the things like, “This is holy work. God loves mothers. He has created my family with a purpose. I am doing what he wants me to do.” And some of those things just didn't even feel big enough because I was so discouraged.
As I was sitting by myself for a few minutes, I felt the Lord tell me,
“What is the vision? How clear is your vision? What are you seeing in the future?”
It reminded me of a word the Lord gave me for somebody else. I was praying with a friend last week over her business, and the Lord showed me this picture of a beautiful arboretum, a beautiful forest with these grounded and rooted beautiful old oak trees and maple trees. It was beautifully landscaped and manicured with many different kinds of trees and many different kinds of flowers and shrubs. It was a beautiful garden where there was so much peace and so much life. And then all of a sudden the picture froze and rewound.
I saw my friend standing in an empty field with a handful of seeds and that represented her business and the people's lives that she's impacting in her business. But I felt like the Lord brought that back to my mind and showed me,
“This is the kind of vision you need to have for your family. You need to be able to look ahead with Me and see in 20 years, these grown adults that you have raised, who are serving the Lord, who are full of the Holy Spirit, who are walking in their destiny, who are hard workers.”
I need to be able to look past the bad attitudes today. The “how many times am I going to have to tell you to do this” today, and I need to look into the future.
I need to have a vision that is clear enough that it will sustain me and drive me on those hard days. It will drive me to keep on going, to not quit, and to not give up, because what I'm doing right now is planting those seeds. I am nurturing them. I am putting fertilizer in the ground. I am digging around the tiny saplings. I am bracing them up with sticks and wire and helping them to stand straight. I am trimming them. I am pruning them. I am working with them. I am tilling the soil. I am going through all the hard work right now because it actually is going to matter in the long run.
And when I get tired and discouraged and I feel like, “this kid is never going to learn how to just say, ‘okay’, and not have a big fit”, or "that child has kicked somebody too many times now”, or “how many more messes do I have to clean up from this person?” Or "how many more times do I have to tell them to pick up their mess?” When those things are hard (because we do have hard times in parenting, it is the truth), we have to have a vision that is bigger than what we see right now.
In Habbakuk 2:2-3 in the Message Bible it says this:
And then GOD answered: “Write this. Write what you see. Write it out in big block letters so that it can be read on the run. This vision-message is a witness pointing to what’s coming. It aches for the coming—it can hardly wait! And it doesn’t lie. If it seems slow in coming, wait. It’s on its way. It will come right on time.
Isn't that beautiful? I believe this is a message for all of us that we need to catch a vision—it’s God's vision for our families—and it's gotta be bigger than “I want my kids to listen to me”, or “I just want my house to look like it's not in the middle of a hurricane” or any whatever current thing that we're thinking about.
It's gotta be bigger than the current thing. It's got to go 20, 30, 50, a hundred years into the future where we can look ahead with the Lord and say, “That is what we are aiming for. That is what we want to see.” And then dream with God about it and write it down. I love how this verse says, “Write it in big, bold letters so that you can read it on the run”.
It can be a declaration:
“Lord, I know this is what You want for my family. I know this is what You have for us. I know this is the destiny You have for my children to grow, to be mighty men and women of God. So help me today to have a vision where I can see those mighty men and women of God in these toddlers and preschoolers ( or 10th graders and 18 year olds and 22 year olds). God, help me to see this vision that's bigger than right now, so that I can do what I need to do right now and have the perseverance to push through these hard times.”
Lord, we need your vision. We need your understanding of what is coming. We need your heart for the future of our families, of our marriages. God, what do you have for our marriages, for our relationship between husband and wife, in 20 years? What do You want that to look like in 50 years? God, what is our legacy going to be through our children in 50 years—in a hundred years? What is the legacy You have for us? We need to see it. God, we need Your vision.
Give us Your eyes, give us Your heart. Give us Your understanding, Lord. And as we go about our day, fill us with the understanding of that vision so that we can look at it and we can run. And we can persevere in the midst of tough times when everything seems like it's just too much and it's not going to matter.
Show us the vision, Jesus.
This post is a transcription of Episode 39: How Clear is Your Vision? Parenting when Life gets Tough. To listen to the podcast episode in its entirety, click here.