Discovering God’s Work in your Children

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

HAROLD HARPER: Welcome back to For Faith & Family.

JOE WHITE: Harold it is a joy for me to work with you. I can’t wait to see what God has in store today.

HARPER: As a parent, I am reading, I am in the word, I really have the focus on making sure my kids are given what it means to live by God and live for God. We have our prayer time in the morning, and we are praying that God will use each of us as we go our separate ways for the kingdom, and we have these great prayer times on the way to school in the morning. Then we get around the table at night, around the dinner table, and we each share what God did either in us or through us during the day and it’s always interesting to hear their answers. But what suggestions can you give because you talk about this in the book and I thought it was an excellent section about helping your kids realize how God is at work in their lives, because that’s the part that I haven’t quite connected. You know, I kind of send them out with this expectation to see God at work in your life. God is going to use you today, or He’s going to do something in you today. When we get around the dinner table, it is hard to get those stories back, so what advice would you give to help kids realize God’s activity in their lives?

WHITE: I think 90 percent of the answer to that, Harold, is the fact that you are there and you care. I don’t want to over simplify that, because a lot of us around the country as parents, we struggle with our kids being able to verbalize how they are feeling and being able to verbalize what they are seeing God do in their lives. A lot of that is just language that kids don’t use a lot. It is easier for parents to talk about that, but for kids it’s just hard to talk about those things. But, 90 percent of it as parents is just that we are asking, it’s just that we are listening, it is that we are praying with our kids about things like that. But, in the other 10 percent, it is having our antennae up. You know, I’ve talked to parents about being a great big ear. It is no coincidence or accident that God gave us two ears and one mouth, and if I am spending a whole lot more time asking questions than I am giving advice, then I am likely to hear that one little comment that my child might make that might say, “Well, you know, today I was able to help Sally with her problem with her dad,” or whatever like that. Now, that might be small in my world, but in Sally’s world, that is huge. It is just so important to me to listen and to hear what is going on with Sally and then when I get that little bitty pang, you know, Sally and I were talking about her dad, go, “Wow, and how did that go?” All of a sudden, my world has got to stop when my child does begin to talk about something that is going on in her world, and just celebrate the small things, Harold, I think is the biggest thing there.

HARPER: I love the chapter you have, you dedicate a whole chapter to, “Teaching Your Teens to See Where God is at Work.” It’s a great section because I think even many adults have a hard time seeing how God is at work. I teach a Sunday School class and when you have a testimony time, tell me of the activity of God in your family, sometimes it’s just kind of silent. They expect to hear the praises story of the church, what we’ve done through the church or what the church has done for the kingdom or for God, but when you get down to individual families, you know, I just love the fact that you are encouraging parents to teach that in your young people, and you are giving them, really a view of what does it mean to be Christ’s ambassadors in the kingdom. What does that look like locally? And you even talk about a mission section in here. Talk to us a little bit about that.

WHITE: I remember when Jamie was thirteen and, to be honest with you, Harold, at age thirteen, I was having trouble connecting with her and all to her credit, in my clumsiness I was just trying to figure out how as a dad to maintain a vital connection and I took her on a little mission trip for a week where we went door to door in an English-speaking country, but a very destitute kind of environment and we went door to door with a team of twenty-five Americans and one hundred and fifty local folks, going door to door and just sharing Christ with the people on this island, and we had the time of our life. She and I can look back now, not only was that a time when she began to discover her love for people of lesser means, but also her daddy and she began to connect on a much broader basis where the issue was not between her and I, as we kind of struggled through the adolescent years there, but it became seeing what God is doing in the world. So I encourage parents whether it is the soup kitchen, or whether it is getting involved in a homeless situation in your community, or whether it is getting involved in an urban, perhaps, a culture if you happen to be in a suburban culture or even if you are in an urban culture, finding a family who perhaps doesn’t have a mom or dad, healthy environment, but with you and your kid doing something together for people who are less fortunate. I see parents who are doing that a lot and those are the parents, honestly, who are having the most abilities to communicate with their kids on what is God doing in your world.

HARPER: Amen. Now, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about something you mentioned a little while ago, and that’s the schedule. What do you think? There are two chains of thought, and I already know what you think because you answered it earlier, but I want you to comment on it a little bit, about kids’ schedules. I have heard both sides. I have heard one side says, you know, we need to slow our kids down, we need to let them experience life, and then the other says, parents need to be more intentional and look for activities that will help their kids—enroll them in classes, encourage them to go to camps, involve them in teams, and so the schedule fills up and so they won’t be a couch potato. What’s your take on kids’ schedules today because it is a little different than when we were growing up?

WHITE: Well, it is different, and when I say that, it gets exhaustive. America, if you could just say, okay, what are we like, we like our tea really hot right now and we like our tea really cold right now. We either want it icy cold or just barely hot enough where it doesn’t burn your tongue. We are a country of extremes. We don’t like anything lukewarm. Unfortunately, in the area of discipline and in the area of activity, the pendulum generally swings way to the left or way to the right. I work with families that are so busy that everybody is just worn out. I was working with a family of swimmers, just last week, and they are up at 5:45 and they are swimming for two hours and then they are in school, and then they are swimming, and then they are home, and they are studying, eight o’clock to ten o’clock at night because their school is a high achievement school and we are doing college prep work, etc. Then they drag themselves into bed at 11:30 so they can get up at 5:45 in the morning and get in the pool again. That’s the story for a lot of families and it is sad because they don’t have time to talk and sit and listen and to pray together and to just talk about how are you doing? On the other hand, you know, unfortunately, mom and dad are often so busy that the children are sitting in front of the television for three or four hours a day and the kids don’t have their own dreams, they don’t have their own activities, and sports, etc. The key word, like everything else, Harold, is balance. My child should have, and it was a rule in our home, they were going to be involved in something besides school every season, and they could choose it. It could be sports, it could be the band, it could be some serious involvement in an art club, but there was going to be one activity or they were going to have a job and they were going to be working and we would be happy to deliver them and take an interest in that job. But, not five. But there sure was going to be one because I didn’t want them to die in front of a television set from couch disease and that seemed to work well in our home. We sure didn’t push them to start or to be all-state or anything like that but we sure did want them to do well in school and well did not necessarily mean straight A’s. It just meant to be exercising the abilities that God gave them. Find the balance, don’t kill yourself. There is a chapter in one of our early books called, “Close the Zoo,” and it talked about this zoo, about this true study where the animals at the zoo seven days a week were getting worn out, they were getting grouchy, they were not entertaining the customers who came by, the tourists, etc., and so they decided to close the zoo one day a week, what a novel idea. All of a sudden the activity began to pick up and the monkeys were having more fun with each other and with the people who walked by, etc. and they made this wonderful discovery that God discovered a long time ago, that a little bit of rest during a workweek makes a person a whole lot happier. Close the zoo, if your home is too wild or too crazy, you’ve got to start shutting down some of the activity.

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