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CHILDREN'S MINISTRY
Kitchens Clean Up—Invest In Children Their Way
by Lynn P. Clayton
Being with your child is important, but being with her at her level of participation and understanding is every bit as important. I learned that lesson too late, and it cost me a hunting partner.
When we moved to Louisiana, I learned that deer hunting for multitudes is as important, as, well . . . I can’t think of anything else that is as important to those folks, except maybe Louisiana State University athletics or else fishing. You get the idea.
Finding or arranging a place to hunt is as difficult as . . . getting tickets to an LSU football game. But one day, in an obscure page of the daily newspaper, there appeared a notice that a wildlife area near our home would allow a limited number of hunters to try their skills at harvesting a deer. I applied for a “youth permit” for my ten-year-old son, and our names were drawn for one of the permits. Now we could join the conversation at all the social gatherings.
I was thrilled; Ron wasn’t particularly. I scouted the area and was set for the day of the hunt. I dragged Ron out of bed at 3 a.m. and headed to the wildlife area. He slept all the way there and only reluctantly followed me out of the car when we arrived for the hunt. Explaining why we were there before daylight was not easy.
We climbed the tree I had located and took our stand. So did the fire ants. Ron simply could not understand why I demanded stillness and silence from him when fire ants were having a feast on his legs. Telling him they were biting me too was no solace. The morning pretty well went that way.
About eight o’clock another father and his two sons, one about ten and one about seven, came trudging by our stand. The father was obviously disgusted. “I can’t believe these boys. They wouldn’t stay in the stand. They said they had rather be home watching cartoons than out here hunting. Can you believe that? I’m tired of arguing with them. We’re going home.” The two embarrassed brothers tucked their heads but kept walking.
Ron and I sat there in silence for a while, then he asked, “Dad, what time is it?”
“8:15.”
Long pause . . . “We could get home for the last of the cartoons if we left right now.”
Any time after that I mentioned going deer hunt, Ron jumped up and ran away as fast as his fire-ant-scarred legs would carry him. Never went with me again. Never. I was spending time with my son, doing something he said he had wanted to do, but I was doing it at my level of interest.
Children want their parents to be with them, but they don’t get all excited about being with their parents. They spend too much of their lives just being with their parents—usually waiting for them. They want their parents to be with them some of the time.
Once when I visited a really nice house, I was shocked when I walked into the usually sparkling kitchen. There beside a cooking island stood a seven-year-old girl and her mother, both absolutely covered with flour. Every inch of their aprons, every square inch of their faces, and even their hair was flour-saturated. If it hadn’t been July in Louisiana, one could have thought a freak snowstorm had swept through the place. The daughter was obviously happy, and the mother managed a smile.
“This is her time to make a cake. I’m helping her make the cake.”
“Maybe you should think about letting her help you.”
“Nope. On her day I help her.” The mother looked around at the mound of mess and said, “Kitchens clean up.”
Kitchens do clean up, but the bond of a daughter having her mother help her bake doesn’t go away. The older the daughter gets, the more appreciated those mother-daughter times become. My guess is that every time that daughter bakes a cake for her husband or someone else nowadays, she feels the gift of her mother’s presence.
Have you ever thought about the irony of parents going to all the trouble and involvement to bring children into the world and then hating to invest time with them? Why would we bring children into the world if we did not want to enjoy them? What right do we have to birth children if we are not going to nurture them?
Children do not ask to come into the world; they have absolutely no say about it—not when, where, nor to whom. We bring them in, usually kicking and screaming. We asked for them. Sometimes we are like my daughter, who used to bring home every imaginable kind of animal and then expect me to care for it. We bring children into the world because it seems like such a neat idea, but then we seem to expect them to raise themselves. We want to spend our time on more important things, or at least things more important to us.
One day a pastor was giving me a tour of his congregation’s new education building. It was a beauty, especially for the small church in a mission setting. We were walking through the children’s area, and over on a corkboard were posted pictures the children had drawn of their families. Finding the picture of the pastor’s child was a no-brainer; the pastor had twelve children. The little girl had drawn carefully and with surprising detail her mother and each of her brothers and sisters. Beside the mother stood a large question mark. The child simply did not have enough recollection of her father to draw anything beyond a question mark. We walked through the rest of the building, but the dad didn’t say a word. The building had lost a considerable amount of its luster.
How many children have question marks instead of fathers or mothers? You can say what you want about so-called quality time, but there is nothing you can give your children that is more important to them than time—and lots of it. Give your children a gift they will appreciate when they are older. Find an activity they enjoy, and then spend time doing it with them, at their level of enjoyment.
Last year I interviewed a group of ladies who gather weekly to quilt. I asked each lady, all of them retired and several living alone, how they learned to quilt. Everyone of them said they learned to quilt “watching my mother and doing whatever part of quilting I could do.” Each of the mothers had made time to patiently teach her daughter to quilt and let her participate at her level of interest—a small gift, maybe some would say a tiny gift.
Each of the quilters said she had laid aside quilting for many years but started again. The main reason these ladies quilt now—sixty, seventy, even eighty years later—is because when they quilt, they feel close to their mothers. One lady, in her late seventies, could not finish her explanation of how close she felt to her mother as she quilted. The emotions of those memories caused her to stop talking and dab her eyes with a tissue.
I doubt there was any way this dear lady’s mother could have known what a wonderful gift she was giving her daughter on those days she took that little bit of extra time to be with her daughter, at her level of interest. And I doubt if the mother could have known how long that gift would last or that it would take a few years to be fully appreciated. If the mother had known how important it was, she might have tried to make too big a deal over it!
If you want to read not a success story but a tragic story of parenting, read 2 Samuel 13-19:8. King David did a lot of things really well, but apparently spending time with his kids was not one of them. He and his son both paid the price. David’s words are truly the saddest of tongue or pen: “O my son Absalom! . . . Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son” (18:33). I imagine if David had it to do over again, he would have given Absalom the gift of time.
From 10 Gifts Your Children Will Grow to Appreciate, by Lynn P. Clayton
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