Our Children’s Sins (and Our Own)

The other night, one of my kids was having a rough go during a stressful situation in their life. I went upstairs to see if I could help, and after knocking and cracking the door open, they frustratedly barked, “I’m done. I’m just done,” before closing the door on my face. After they were able to cool down a bit, we had a good conversation, but the thing that stuck with me were the words that tumbled out of their mouth while the door swung shut. “I’m done. I’m just done.” You see, those words are a jagged little mirror for myself. When my stress peaks, when I’ve hit my limit, when my frustration boils over and “peaceful parent” gets replaced with “sinful parent,” those are the words that I bark at my kids. I’m done. I’m just done. Having them repeated back to me, with the frustrated glare shining back at me from the eyes I’ve watched grow up, is a sharp and heavy dose of reality.

When our kids are young, there is an assumption, or maybe just a hope, that they will see the world for what it is, make all the right decisions, listen to your wise counsel, and generally just be a wonderful human. We tend to stretch our experiences and our lessons learned over their tiny little lives and are often taken aback when the decisions they make run up against that filtered reality. How could you do that? What made you think that was a good idea?

Those feelings of almost panic at our children’s missteps only grows as they get older. Perhaps it’s because the consequences only grow heavier as they branch out, or because you had assumed they had acquired enough life experience to avoid that particular mistake at this point in their life. Didn’t I teach you better than that? Didn’t I raise you better than that?

The hard truth is, our kids not only learn the lessons we teach them with controlled voices and intentional speeches, but they also learn the ones that boil off of us in our own times of poor choices and sinful reactions. They learn hair-trigger anger, and to avoid blame. They learn selfish instincts and taking the easy way out. They learn the tendencies we tend to cover when we leave the house, and they learn them so effectively that when they look at you from their own pool of misdeeds, you can often see a near perfect reflection of yourself. It’s jarring, and if taken off guard, can trigger a self-protecting response that puddle-hops over your own accountability in the choices they make and the responses they have.

We become like our first ancestors, standing in the garden pointing at each other. This one made their own decision! I had nothing to do with it! Except this is a garden of our own making, perhaps me standing in my bathroom arguing with my teen about leaving their dirty clothes on the floor while standing not ten inches away from my own pile of dirty clothes.

While our children’s transgressions can feel shocking, they should not feel surprising. In Psalm 51, after being caught in his own sin by the prophet Nathan, David laments “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Despite all of the good he did, all of the battles he won, despite the deep connection he had with God, David understood the deep rootedness of his sinful nature. “My sin is ever before me,” he said. And yet, Psalm 51 is one of hope. Despite being caught out in one of the worst times of his life, David called out with confidence to the only thing that could change his proclivity to sin. “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”

There is so much hope in this prayer, as well as the absence of any type of promise that David will try harder next time. In fact, David rightly and astoundingly comes to the conclusion that God “will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.” David understands that the only thing that can heal the fracture that his sins create in his relationship with God is God himself. And so in equal parts desperation and confidence, he appealed to God’s own character, crying out to a God who is overflowing with steadfast love and abundant mercy.

This same desperate confidence can be what tumbles through our lips when we are faced with not only our brokenness, but the brokenness of our children. Because as sure as it may be that they will mirror our own sins at some point in their lives, they are also loved by a God that uses those moments to reflect back to them (and to us, often in the same breath) the love that he had for them as he climbed Golgotha, carrying the literal weight of their sins on their behalf. In this, I am on equal footing with even my youngest child.

Perhaps, in this way, the goal of my role in their lives shifts away from raising perfect, sinless contributors to society to raising self-aware descendants of Adam who are so sure of their own forgiveness that they find in Christ that they are able to offer that freely to others, even me when I need it while I stumble through my parenting career. It’s in that place that we can walk together in the grace of God with confidence, because even when we bellow “I am done” from the end of our ropes, we can be assured that God is not, nor will he ever be done chasing after us.