Skating on Banana Peels

From Westminster Seminary article by Bill Mounce. Click on the picture for part 1 of this 4-part series, "What We Do with the Bible." Then click on "Bill Mounce" in the righthand column to find the other parts. Worth the read!

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After waking up one morning, my daughter said, "I dreamed I was skating through their house on banana peels."
Hearing the word their, I asked, "Whose house?"
"Your house."
"Whose house?" I slowly asked again.
"Oh, our house," she corrected.

We hear this often. She refers to our family in the third person as if she is not a part of it. Tomorrow will mark two years since her and her brother's adoption was finalized. They have lived with us for more than two years now. What are we doing wrong? What are we missing that keeps her from feeling like she is part of the family?

Where Is the Trust?
Even after more than two years, there is not an internalized sense of belonging yet. There is is an apparent lack of trust in spite of the fact that for more than two years it has been clearly demonstrated that what our children need, and yes even sometimes want, has been consistently provided. 

What does it take to develop a sense of trust and belonging?

Was That Trust, or Just a Fuzzy Image of Big Foot?
Of course, in the midst of this, we have made a discovery about ourselves as parents. We are not trusting either. We are not trusting God to work in our kids' lives over the long term. We are not trusting God in the fact that we can only do our part and nothing more. The rest is up to God and the children themselves. We are not trusting God's word full of promises and basic principles for parenting and family. 

Like my children, trust has been elusive in my own heart too. People, including children, do not change overnight or even over two years. We change over a lifetime. Bill Mounce's articles referenced with the picture above makes the comment in part four:

But we have committed ourselves to him [God], to walk the path, and so we ask for God to help us understand and obey. And as we obey, the truth of the Bible is validated in our experience; and as it is validated, we start to trust.

Gaining Trust & Belonging

For me this is not just a theory of how God's word impacts my life, but experience. However, I often forget my experiences. Over time, with enough experiences, it finally sinks in. It takes a while for things to soak through my hard head and in God's sense of humor, He led us to adopt children with so many of my qualities already built in!

Properly understanding God's word and obeying it never fails us. James 4:7-8 is a help here. James uses the metaphor of farming to remind us that things are a process. The farmer works hard but is patient. He does his part. The earth does its part. The weather does its part. God does His part. The farmer is just the farmer, not the earth, the rain, and certainly not God. But most notably, the farmer is not alone in his work and neither are we as parents!

• We must do our part in trust and obedience to God's word. That is, we surrender to His agenda and direction.
  
• We must trust His judgment and knowledge about us and our children is superior to our own.
  
• Parents have two primary goals in their love and parenting: point our kids toward Christ and prepare them for adulthood. 
  
• How we spend our time and money should reflect such commitments.
  
• How we have fun, discipline, vacation, work, etc. all provides opportunities to model and teach trust.
  
• We cannot parent in fear of the negative things our children could possibly become.

As to this last point, I want to address it in another post coming soon. Even if I do all these things perfectly (which I won't at times), my kids could still turn out to be rebellious and wayward. I can see those tendencies already. But should I parent out of fear or trust?

So, to answer the original question, "What are we doing wrong?" We are not being patient and trusting. Thus, we are asking our children to be something we are not. When you skate on banana peels of fear and distrust, you fall.