[nukkad] THERE ARE NO PERFECT FAMILIES

[Albert Joseph <>]

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THERE ARE NO PERFECT FAMILIES
No family is perfect. Some strange limbs grow on every family tree. You
never will perfect your family, but you can learn to have mercy on them.
*	Be responsible. Good parenting pays off. Don't neglect disciplining
(teaching) your children in a consistent manner and always model the
behavior you expect.
*	Know when to take responsibility. Every parent has positive and
negative influences on their children. But don't draw a cause-and-effect
line between every weakness, sin, or defect in your children and some
negative parenting pattern in your life.
*	Cut yourself some slack. Have mercy on yourself and your kids. You
are not the ultimate cause of every sin your children commit or of every
dumb decision they ever make.  Your children have a God-given, inalienable,
theological right to their own sins.

	Claim the freedom:
*	Freedom from the need to be perfect. Familial mercy liberates. It
frees you from being enslaved to the appearance of perfection. When you are
honest about your own imperfections, how can you show anything but mercy? If
every family has problems, then why are you working so hard to keep your
neighbors from finding out about yours?
*	Freedom from perfecting others. You no longer have to perfect anyone
else. Too many people spend their lives in useless embarrassment over their
ancestors or their kids. Release your family to be different, complicated,
and wrong. Set them free to fail, to learn by experience and to suffer
hardships.  If you are not ultimately to blame for your children's sins,
then you cannot claim some ultimate role as bestower of all their gifts when
they have accomplishments and successes.  That is God's job.
*	Freedom from finishing. You do not have to finish your kids.
		You do the best you can in the time you have, then let time,
girlfriends or boyfriends, wives or husbands, and drill sergeants and bosses
finish them off. Once your child is out of your home, the responsibility
falls on your child's shoulders, not yours.
*	Freedom to pray. Often you are unable to reach those in your family
who need you the most. You may never understand them.  You may never help
them, but you can, by the mercies of God, love them and forgive then, and in
the process forgive yourself. Max Lucado wrote, Never underestimate the
power that comes when a parent pleads with God on behalf of a child. Who
knows how many prayers are being answered right now because of the faithful
prayers of a parent 10 or 20 years ago? God listens to thoughtful parents.

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>From Streams of Mercy, © 1999 by Mark Rutland.  Published by Servant
Publications, Box 8617, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48107



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