“Dear God, have mercy on us and please heal our kids of any damage that our failures may have caused.”
This was what my wife and I desperately prayed to God after realizing how broken we were as parents.
It was the summer of 2008. After nine years of marriage and twelve years in the trenches of ministry in immigrant churches, my wife and I began to notice areas of brokenness in our own hearts, and worse, how our brokenness was affecting our children. They would bicker, argue, antagonize one another, and their tongues were thorny with negativity. To our chagrin, our kids were using some of the same exact tone and phrases with one another that we used when they misbehaved. Their harsh words were an unforgiving mirror reflecting the failing condition of our own hearts. Here we were as leaders in our church, committed to serving God and his Bride, and yet we were damaging our own children.
Like a crack that slowly forms in a foundation, we weren’t consciously aware of the damage happening right under our noses. On the surface we were a happy bustling family, serving God, leading a church, and serving our neighborhood. Our kids were involved in community sports and activities, and we were making friends with other young parents. But underneath it all, we were beginning to drown as we juggled the daily demands of parenting four young children ages eight, six, three, and three-months, and navigating our own young marriage. On top of that, we were barely surviving on government aid that supplemented the quarter-time equivalent salary that I was receiving for my full-time ministry job in a Korean immigrant church. We were only in our early 30’s, but after zealously serving in immigrant Korean churches for twelve years, we were beginning to wear down mentally and physically. My wife and children were required to attend Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) meetings just to receive food stamps every month, and the financial stress was putting a strain on our marriage and on our children. My wife and I were unknowingly running ourselves into the ground. But we thought we were doing ok. So we carried on.
Friday evenings were reserved for something that we called “Family Fun Night” with our kids. We would spend every Friday evening either playing games, watching movies, singing songs together, and eating whatever the kids wanted. It was the one night of the week that my wife and I exclusively set aside for our family, protecting it from work, ministry, and other social dates and events. The kids looked forward to this evening of undivided attention.
On one particular Family Fun Night, my wife and I felt led to verbally affirm our children. We looked into their eyes one by one and said “There are many things we love about you, and one of the things we appreciate about you is…” As we spoke these words of blessing to our eight-year-old daughter, our eldest child, she wouldn’t make eye contact with us. To our surprise, her eyes were brimming with tears.
We asked her what was wrong and she replied, “This is uncomfortable for me.”
In that moment, I as a pastor and “Christian leader” felt something similar to what I imagine King David must have felt when he was confronted with his shameful sin. Our little daughter was so uncomfortable hearing words of affirmation from her own parents that she wouldn’t face us with her tears trailing down her cheeks. What a hypocrite I had become! The guilt and shame was overwhelming, but true. God convicted our hearts. The Holy Spirit was moving in us.
As we heard our daughter’s words, I had a montage of flashbacks of how we had been sinning against our children by assuming things about them, losing our temper, being short with them, and over-criticism. We also realized that by sinning against them, we were also sinning against her Heavenly Father, God who had given His child to us to cherish, to bless us, and to raise up in his ways. Our children depended on us as their mom and dad to love them and to reflect the patient goodness of God to them, but in that moment we realized we were failing profoundly as stewards, as parents, and as God’s representatives to our children. This realization devastated us.
Faced with our sin, and exposed before our young children, the only thing that we could do in that moment was to run to Jesus and fall at His feet. We were at God’s mercy, acknowledging that we had failed His trust in us. With our kids watching and listening, my wife and I kneeled there crying out to God, asking for HIs help to mercifully heal our children from our mistakes, desperately asking that they’d be spared from the impact of our mistakes, and protected from the generational sins that we swore we’d never repeat when we became parents. We asked God for undeserved forgiveness for hurting His children, knowing we had nothing to stand on but His grace and mercy. Ravaged with guilt and heaviness, we turned to the only hope we had, the gospel. In tears we asked Jesus Christ for mercy. We thanked him for purchasing our forgiveness with His precious blood. We were filled with humble gratitude for receiving something that we absolutely did not deserve: God’s forgiveness and hope for redemption, not only for us, but for the damage that we caused to our precious children.
Our oldest daughter said she didn’t feel like she deserved the affirmation of her parents; we knew this meant we had not affirmed her enough as a daughter of God. Instead we had unknowingly led her to think she was not worthy of love. We desperately wanted to relay to her little heart how truly loved she was by God and by us, and how sorry we were that our shortcomings had clouded her understanding of that truth.
After we prayed to God, we then turned to our kids and confessed our sin to them and we explained to them that we had sinned against them. And then we confessed to them that we had also sinned against their Father in Heaven who had given them to us as four precious gifts. We shared with them that this was not ok, and that Mommy and Daddy’s only hope in this mess that we had made was for us to be forgiven by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and then we asked the kids if they might in time forgive us too. Since that evening, confessing our sins against one another, and humbly asking for their forgiveness and pursuing reconciliation has become an integral part of our family’s culture. We try to preach the gospel regularly in our family to one another and more importantly, to ourselves. We try to approach one another with the humility of one sinner to another.
We thought we were doing “alright” as parents, but that night God gave us a merciful wake-up call to change our direction. Through the tears of a child whom we had promised we would love, raise, and protect, God took us off a path of generational sin and placed us on a path of multi-generational shalom just as He promised His people in Deuteronomy, Chapter 5. And He reminded us how deeply we need His gospel all the time.
That night God also allowed our children to see their parents desperately depending on Christ and His gospel as our only hope for rescue from guilt, for healing, and for the source of the greatest love for our family. Witnessing our heartfelt cries to Jesus, our kids got to see with their own eyes and ears that Jesus is a real person, not some faraway mysterious figure. The gospel was a saving truth, not a mere theological concept. And I believe our eldest caught a glimpse of the truth that she has a greater parent, our Heavenly Father, who sees her and honors her and will always be looking out for her, even if her earthly parents should sometimes stumble.
In those early years, my wife and I had unknowingly fallen into a trap, but God was merciful to us. Our greatest legacy isn’t raising kids who think their parents are perfect; it’s raising kids who know exactly where to go when they realize they aren’t. When our kids witnessed their parents in tears, falling at the feet of Jesus, we stopped being their “moral examples” and we became a fellow brother and sister running to be with Jesus; together.
Header Photo Credit: Gabriel Cox