Loaves and Fishes

Parenting is ridiculously hard. So much of what we try to teach our children feels like a contradiction. We want our children to be kind toward others, but we also feel the need to protect them from being taken advantage of or bullied.

It can feel like we are walking a tightrope sometimes, not sure if we are going to land on the right side when it comes to our parenting decisions.

As a mom, I can’t help but think about all the behind-the-scenes moments in my life. Times when I worked hard to help my children before sending them out alone in the world.

Something as simple as packing a nutritious lunch that would satisfy their hunger while still packing what my children actually wanted to eat always could make me second-guess myself.

And, at the end of the school day, I never truly knew what happened to that lunch. I hoped they ate it and enjoyed it, but I wasn’t with them so I never really knew. It’s one of the many small ways my children slowly moved away from me as they got older.

A parent’s job is to work themself out of a job. It happens slowly, and each decision we’ve made along the way works together with everything we’ve tried to teach our children. Hopefully the end result is a strong child who has learned to take care of themself while also totally loving others.

I can’t help but imagine the mother of the little boy in the Bible who gave away the lunch she packed him. I’m sure her first reaction was about how hard she worked to put together that small lunch of loaves and fishes. She maybe was even a little mad that he didn’t eat what she had planned for his meal. After all, she had worked hard and she had his best interest at heart.

And then she heard the rest of the story, how his selfless act not only fed a bunch of hungry strangers but, more importantly, allowed them to be fed by the Bread of Life. The fact that 5,000 people were fed because of the selflessness of her child must have been hard for that mother to understand.

She had clearly done some important work at home before she sent her son out alone that day. I picture him genuinely offering up his meager meal even though he had to have known it wasn’t enough. He did it out of that type of selfless love that moves the heart of every parent. At that moment, she must have felt like she had done at least something right as his mother.

Parenting is hard. And we sure make a lot of mistakes. At the end of the day, when our children have wiggled completely out from under our wings, we all hope to have raised a kind human being.

I’m sure that mom, all those many years ago, soon forgot about the work that went into making her son’s lunch that day. I guarantee she never forgot about her son’s role in the amazing miracle of feeding thousands of people.

We, as parents, probably won’t see the ripple effect of decisions we’ve made that helped our children grow into people who make good decisions. And that’s okay. We can rest in the knowledge that we did our best.

I believe one day, probably after our life here is done, we will have our eyes opened to how important our behind-the-scenes work was.

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