When Parenting Isn't Perfect by Jim Daly

Author:Jim Daly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2017-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

Dancing with Expectations

These pressures run directly counter to who we’re supposed to be and the grace we’ve been given. Within the Christian community, we’re deathly afraid to project imperfection. Many of us Christians work very hard to hide our doubts and fears and insecurities. We learn a way of talking. We learn a way of behaving. We learn a way of hiding. And that extends to our families.

Funny that we don’t see many families hiding in the Bible. Scripture is so full of messy families that it can be hard to find a good one. We don’t find Brady families in the Bible. Some of them are downright dysfunctional. It’s not healthy for a mom to scheme with her favorite son to pull a fast one on Dad, like Rebekah and Jacob did. If you’re raising a family where your sons sell one of their own into slavery, you’ve got some serious problems.

Even the Bible’s most famous family wasn’t perfect. Most of us, even in our worst parenting moments, wouldn’t forget to take our kid home after a trip to the big city, would we? But that’s what Mary and Joseph did with Jesus in Jerusalem, right when he was the same age as Saul’s son Cody.

The Bible doesn’t shrink away from the world’s messes. The Bible deals with reality.

I go back again and again to the example set by David. He was far from perfect. He sinned—and sometimes in a big way. But he knew who he was. He knew his inadequacies. And despite all his flaws, the Bible tells us that God loved him. That he was a man after God’s own heart (see 1 Samuel 13:14).

What a mystery that line is, given David’s flaws and checkered past. Really? A man after God’s own heart? But here’s what I take from that. David lived a bold life. An honest life. A messy life. He didn’t live in fear. He didn’t live trying to vindicate the expectations of others. When he felt joyful, he shouted. When he was in anguish, he cried. When he felt anxious or depressed, he didn’t hide it: He wrote searing, raw psalms about it.

When the ark of the covenant came to Jerusalem, David danced before the Lord, which horrified his wife, Michal (see 2 Samuel 6:14–16). Doesn’t he know what people must think of him? I imagine her thinking. Has he no shame? Doesn’t he know that he’s the king? “How the king of Israel has distinguished himself today, going around half-naked in full view of the slave girls of his servants as any vulgar fellow would!” she sarcastically says in 2 Samuel 6:20.

David danced before the Lord, the Bible says—half-naked. He hid nothing, inside or out. And Michal? Her shame and her worry over other people’s expectations feel . . . very familiar. She might as well be the patron saint for Christian family dysfunction.

David danced. He modeled for us the joy we should feel in God, the joy we should show our families.

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