A little over 12 years ago, I sat in a doctor’s office and was presented with the fact that the baby I was holding in my arms shouldn’t be here. I was told that 99% of babies with her particular health issues miscarried before they were born. In the weeks that followed, as a young mom of two kids under the age of two, I made a few decisions about the type of parent I wanted to be.
You see, I had been handed a miracle, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that all kids are miracles. There are so many things that have to come together just exactly right to create a healthy baby. The fact that that happens more often than it doesn’t is a miracle.
I found myself having to answer the question “What do I do with these two miracles?” So I made a few hard and fast decisions in those first weeks of my second daughter’s life. One was that I wanted to be an intentional parent. This blog is an outgrowth of that decision. The other big decision I made was that I never wanted to parent from a place of fear. I didn’t want my decisions about what my kids could and could not do to be based on fear because irrational, paralyzing fear is not from God. It is a tool that Satan uses to keep us from doing the hard things that God asks us to do.
In the past 12 years, I’ve had a few moments where I’ve had to remind myself of that decision not to parent from a place of fear — sending my girls off to their first sleepover or their first overnight camp, sending my 7-year-old out on the ice for the first time to play hockey with a bunch of boys, sending them off to their first day of middle school. But never has that decision been tested more than it was last Thursday when I put my 14-year-old daughter on a plane to Ecuador.
Two doctors had expressed reservations about her going on this trip. She’d been really sick not a week before. She was still on antibiotics. Every single fiber of my being was screaming that I should keep her home where I could keep an eye on her. But God was clearly saying “Send her.” In those moments of tear-filled fear and paralyzing doubt, the rubber met the road on that long-ago decision not to parent out of fear. This moment was where I had to decide if I really believed that fear was not a good enough reason to stop my daughter from going on this long-awaited trip.
So, last Thursday, I chose not to let fear rule my parenting, not to let fear get in the way of God’s plan. I put my daughter on a plane to Ecuador. And I am so glad I did. That picture at the top of this post is her playing soccer with some kids in Ecuador (she’s in the red shirt). She has made new friends. She has worked hard and connected with some kids in Ecuador. She’s had the opportunity to show the love of Jesus to people she would never have met if I had let fear make me say no to this trip. And even from the short text messages I’ve been getting, I can tell that she’s going to come home a changed person.
Parenting out of fear never ends well for us or our kids. When we parent out of fear, we often rob our kids of the opportunity to try new things, meet new people and grow spiritually. Fear should never be the only reason we tell our children they can’t have a new experience. Don’t get me wrong, there are valid reasons for telling our kids no. Our 12-year-old didn’t go on this trip because we don’t feel she’s old enough or mature enough to travel across the world on her own. The reasons for her not going, though, aren’t rooted in fear; they’re rooted in what’s appropriate for her age.
However, if you’re making decisions about what your kids can and can’t do and you find fear is the only reason you’re parenting the way you’re parenting, it might be time to reevaluate. It might be time to take a close look at whether you’re making decisions based on prayerful consideration of what’s best for your child or based on your own worries and fears.
Because when we let fear rule our parenting, we let Satan rob us and our kids of some of the great adventures God wants us both to have.