Responding to Oklahoma

This has been a horrible week for people in Tornado alley. They now suffer storms in the aftermath of an EF-5 tornado as the rescue operation desperately continues. Those of us who have never had buildings ripped off around us and watched our belongings and memories turn into toothpicks within minutes cannot understand the sudden shock and magnitude of loss. The ones who "only" lost their homes are the fortunate ones. There are many families who must also face the loss of a child or other loved one on top of the horror.

I finally had to turn the channel because it was just too much for me to hear as a compassionate onlooker. I can do that, but the people in Oklahoma can't close their eyes or change the channel to make the images go away. This is their life now and for a very long time to come. Long after the media has moved onto the next story, the clean up and rebuilding will continue. As we have learned from other natural disasters, there will be lots of waiting. Waiting for government assistance, for insurance, for shipments, for news and for reconstruction. Waiting for time to take them farther and farther away from yesterday.

With children hearing about this and not living locally, sometimes we wonder what we can do. Well we can do plenty!

• First and ongoing: Pray! Nothing replaces the power of hearts connected to God. Pull out a map of the area and show your kids. Sit together and specifically ask God to touch and heal lives.
• Find some positive stories in the midst of the disaster (like the elderly lady who found her dog alive in the rubble today) and thank God for hope.
• Visit your local Red Cross and donate blood. After 9/11 a number of our friends did that and we lived in California. 
• Sign up to be a volunteer. No matter where you serve, you are making a difference. Many cities have non-profit food packing facilities or food shelters. Help is always needed.
• When Katrina hit, I organized a diaper and water bottle drive at our church in Minnesota. These donations were merged with other organizations sending trailers south. What is your church doing?
• Check online to see the relief work already in place there and contact venues to see what is needed. In just a couple minutes I learned that Journey Church in Moore is a staging area for disaster relief and the Convoy of Hope that feeds the hungry is hard at work getting supplies to the victims.
• Sit down and color with your kids. Have them draw their feelings and reassure them. Or, have them color pictures and write notes and deliver them to a local hospice or senior citizen home. There is nothing like an art or craft outlet for our emotions.

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head that hopefully nudge our need to do something positive to counteract tragedy. They of course follow parental acknowledgement and reassurance. We don't want to focus on the devastation - we want to see the bigger picture and do what we can to help rebuild and support those in their time of need. Just don't forget to keep praying, when the spotlight is removed the need will still be there.

Let's Pray

I see and hear lots of prayer requests in many forms. There isn't a day that someone on Facebook isn't asking people to pray for a co-worker, baby or body part. A few days later I sometimes even see a jubilant "thank you" to all those who were praying because the prayer worked.

Okay, that's not why they were thankful, it was because they experienced a positive outcome. They got a "yes" to the question they had asked the Creator of the universe. Therefore, they were rejoicing in their answer to prayer.

I think it is a mistake to teach children that a "yes" from God = answered prayer because that leads to the thinking that a "no" must mean unanswered prayer.

How often do we all entrust the deepest desires of our hearts to God and wait with baited breath for him to say yes? Note that I did not say wait for him to answer, because if we are all honest don't we want him to always say yes? My family has been waiting over five years for God to make clear our paths. The fog has lifted here and there but none of us can say at this point that God has answered our biggest and longest-prayed prayer.

What we need to teach children is that prayer is not about the answer we get or when we get the answer. Prayer is about releasing our need into God and stepped back in trust. I will say this again because I really need to hear this today: prayer is about entrusting God no matter what with all of our needs. Letting him know that we agree that we don't know what he knows and that we trust him. Our desired "yes" may look good in our eyes, but God's "no" or "wait" may have broader impact than we can see from our human vantage point.

God always answers prayer. He either says "yes", "no" or "wait". I think we should dance as delightedly for each answer because they are all the same -- from our loving God who is active in our lives whether we think so or not. Each answer is an answer, yippie! That is what I try to teach children.

We surely don't want kids to think God is some kind of magical Santa-being, reduced to passing out lollipops and sugar plums. We don't want to teach our kids that we ask, ask, ask and that's prayer. Kids need to know that asking is but a fragment of a complete prayer. Sometimes it's understandable or necessary to shoot out a "help" prayer, but part of our prayer life should include four components:

A - Adore God for who he is and what he does for the world

C - Confess our mess-ups: the things we have done that we shouldn't have done; and the things we have not done that we should have done (sin)

T - Thank God specifically for what he is doing in your life and world (make a list!)

A - Ask God for help - for people, for yourself, behavior, needs, etc.

When teaching young kids, keep it short and simple. I like to make it realistic by talking about all the places and times we can pray in order for children to understand that we can and should be praying at any time. While brushing teeth, in the middle of a test, on your bike, when you pick up scissors. There isn't a time in our everyday lives that we don't need to talk and listen to God.

Speaking of listening, one of my favorite things to teach is to make a list of all the wonderful things (attributes) about God and sit still. Sit and think of just those things. Talk about a perspective adjustment!

If we can teach our kids that prayer goes both ways, we will have some strong followers of Christ ebbing into adulthood. Then they can pass on their trust to the next generation, and the next to the next and the next.

That's my prayer for my family.

Anger Management

Just the other day, while driving and making a legal right turn onto a 2-lane road, a woman made a U-turn from the opposite direction, cutting across the two lanes in order to be in front of me. This all happened rather quickly and I remember her angry face yelling at me from within the confines of her vehicle. Not only did she yell and glare, just as soon as she cut across the lanes, she swerved into a bank entrance. Bam! I'm glad I was awake or else.

I blinked and thought "Woa, she's one angry person" and continued on the way to my hair appointment.

Ever since this happened, I've been thinking about anger and the damage it can do when adults act out in front of kids. But what about when kids are mad? How can we help them work through it in a healthy way?

When my girl was 8, I married my current (and last) husband. He did things foreign to her like read with her, ask about homework, insist on seat belts and respecting the family by doing chores. Her birth father had been completely detached. She had never experienced what a father's hands-on care was like. After a few months, she was acting out in uncharacteristic ways.

So one Sunday, the three of us had a pow-wow. We sat around the dining room table, blew up a balloon and had her draw her birth-father's face on it. Then we lovingly asked her if she was mad at him. Yes. Since he had died, she could no longer speak to him, so we told her she could speak to the balloon as if it was him. Choking back tears, she yelled and stammered at the man who had so let her down. How could he have cared so little? We were all wiping away tears. After she felt she got it all out, we had a great discussion and release time. We closed with prayer and she got to pop the balloon.

Don't ask me where I got that idea, I know. It had to be from God. This next idea came from a dear assistant when our 5-year old son was so angry that his favorite friend was moving away he was acting out all over the place.

My assistant - a devoted grandmama - gave me the perfect idea for our active boy! She told me to take him to the lake and encourage him to pick up rocks and as he tossed them into the lake, yell out what part of his anger that represented.

So, off we went to the lake. Before we started, I told him we knew how upset he was and that by throwing rocks, he could give his hurt and anger to God. Each time he picked one up, he told me what it was for and then hurled it into the lake. We stayed there throwing rocks until he had nothing more to say and just wanted to throw rocks, period.

With both of these situations, we sat and prayed. We thanked God for caring about thoughts and feelings, and for taking away what hurts.

Kids are concrete thinkers, and this was a great way for them to deal with their emotions in a literal way. Both times, I cried with them, held them and when we were done, told them how brave they were and how much God loved them. Both times, that anger was truly gone.

Sometimes a counselor is necessary, sometimes we just need to enter their world and offer assistance.

My Child Has A Friend I Don't Like

We all have people we run into or know that we don’t like, and hopefully it is for a good reason (vs. jealousy). As adults, we hopefully know how do deal with our level of interaction with someone who falls into this category. But what do we do when we don’t like a friend of our child’s?

There was this one little girl that could irritate me til my skin crawled when my daughter was four. They were friends for the longest 18 months of my life. Fortunately, my daughter had no idea about my dislike of this over-indulged, manipulative child. That’s because I taught her that “we include and invite everyone to our home, and we must share everything.”

Two thoughts about what I learned about that generalization.

One: the other girl nearly broke my girl’s brand-new bike because of my “sharing insistence” and her lack of ability to ride. (We changed our policy to exclude special toys that a careless child may have little regard for.) Two: God forced me to pray for this irksome, irritating, whiney kid. Her parents had groomed her to be like that and she took it from there. God showed me that if I spent as much time praying for this “piece of work” as I did thinking and ranting about her, my time would be much better spent. (Once I started praying for her, I ended up having a fond heart for this girl and looked at her through much different eyes.)

I doubt my daughter remembers that former neighbor, but when I learned to limit her access to things and to tell my daughter there were some things that we did not play with in groups, plus began praying, everything changed.

What about when our kids are drawn to a troubled kid and your kid is being placed in the same category by association?

This too has happened to both my kids. Both were around second grade at the time. My parent sonar went right up once I saw that the newly discovered “friends” would not look me in the eye and had body language about a decade more mature. In both cases, these school-generated friendships lasted almost an entire school year. Both friendships dragged my children down and got them in trouble. I was frustrated to think these were their choices and sought to learn what was so attractive about these blooming problems.

It wasn’t so much the charm these kids had, because frankly, they lacked that. But what they did do was seek out my children, and my kids gratefully accepted the attention and followed the lead. Both of my kids were susceptible at the time and in need of peer affirmation. Reminds me of adults making poor choices in people because of who pays the most attention.

We managed by keeping the play dates at our house, where we closely supervised. We bit our lips. We prayed. We firmly enforced our house rules. And, we quietly and consistently encouraged friendships with positive kids as well.

Our dialog included age-appropriate discussions about what makes a good close friend vs. being friendly and kind to others. We affirmed positive character strengths we observed in our kids, and helped them see there are people we help, people who walk alongside us, and people who inspire us. It is good to have all 3 categories in our lives. We read lots of Bible stories and tried to remain as unemotional as possible. Each of the above actions took place in very small doses, and never behind a lectern.

As time passed and our kids developed more self-confidence, they drifted away from the negative influencers. I think because we never said “no”, but were calm and welcoming, not only did they learn to choose differently, their hearts opened to be loving to a wide range of people. Plus…they had learned to find their own worth in hobbies and skill development.

How Do You Get One of Those?

That's the question I asked a much older father in the church I was attending when my daughter was four. I had seen how he and his wife interacted and volunteered, and more impressively - how their two college aged kids engaged and behaved at church functions.

The older kids impressed me by their humor and grace, ability to communicate with people of all ages and their quiet faith. They volunteered when they could, where they could and I considered them solid young adults. I wanted one like that in about 18 years, so I asked their dad.

He gave me a big smile and one of those comforting, knowing twinkles that contained the wisdom of the ages without any pride and said that was the goal he and their mother had. "We just claimed Scripture about leaders over our kids." I wasn't sure what that meant, but I sure wanted to try that!

They had used two sections out of the New Testament (1 Timothy 3:1 - 7 and Titus 1:6 - 9) addressed to church elders or overseers and personalized them with their son and daughter's names in place of nouns. These verses were prayed every day for each child since the kids were small. The verses mention character traits such as honesty, purity and self-control. Whether or not my girl (and son yet to be born) became some kind of leader any where, I surely agreed with the traits in the verses. So I've been praying them ('claiming them') for my kids ever since.

This father's comment has inspired me to comb the Bible for other verses to pray for my family, friends and others over the years. I love to encourage young families to seek out verses and pray them over and over. What a great idea to pray God's Word back to him.