First Day of School and Other Known Traumas

It snuck up on me suddenly and hit me broadside.  Twenty-five years ago this week, our oldest daughter started kindergarten.  Her growing up was an incredible delight.  Beth infused great energy and creativity into our family.  She was starting school, that much I knew was coming, but it was standing on that curb in front of the school that I realized what that meant.  She had gone to play school for a few years, a couple of mornings a week.  No problem.  But this?  Seven hours until I would see her again?  And then again tomorrow?  I felt like she was teetering on the edge of a black hole and would not surface again until she was eighteen.

With the other moms and dads, I stood in front of what appeared not as a school but the great unknown.  Excitement was oozing from Beth’s pores.   We took the historic picture and hugged.  As she ran inside, tears poured down my cheeks.  And then, Bill said some of the wisest and hardest words I have ever had to grapple with, words that I have never forgotten:  “The letting go starts right now.”

THAT is parenting in a nutshell.  Not letting go in the sense of allowing chaos to ensue and abandoning a child to his own devices.  But letting go to let them grow up and mature and develop character, the letting go that loves completely but lets them struggle enough to figure things out and gain confidence, the letting go that is an encouragement NOT a hovering helicopter, a letting go that teaches and shows and equips them with the “tools for their toolbox” that they will need so that twelve years later, their lives are packed for the great beyond after high school.   Everything they need is not at Target, but that which has been seamlessly woven into their lives for eighteen years.  The letting go allows them to OWN their lives – their character, actions, faith -- because you have slowly and graciously and intentionally tip-toed back and worked your way out of a job.  Because when I let go, I am leaving them in the hands of Jesus.  When I let go, they learn the reality of God.  When I let go, He becomes the hero – not me.  When I let go, they graduate with a magna cum laude degree in His faithfulness to them.  God is not something they have read about or know about, He is of whom they know and have staked their lives upon.  Because they have seen His hand, experienced it, depended on it already.

The letting go starts right now. 

 

…so that they should set their hope in God.

                                Psalm 78.7