Much Afraid: How Fear Turns a Good Parent into a Slave [INFOGRAPHIC]

Parenting has this way of exposing a part of who you are in ways both beautiful and terrifying.

As in, Wow! Who knew I had this gift for creative teaching? Or, Who knew I could handle this amount of laundry and still emerge with enough panties to fight the day?

But also, as author Elizabeth Stone has written, Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

My new season of raising teenagers is exposing something profound about me, even if it’s something my closest friends might not guess: Parenting leaves me afraid.

What I Really, Really Want(ed)

Parenting my kids scares me because I want so much.  Reading blog posts I authored when they were young, I remember I have always longed for great things for them. (In them, I repeat the phrase “I want my kids to…” a lot.) But as my season of responsibility and control wanes and I hand them the reins, I see what I have always seen in me: Fear.

And it leads to some of my worst parenting decisions.

It happens when I hear my sons’ loud laughter at an inane or questionable YouTuber. When I realize I forgot to check up on their grades. When I wonder if he’s telling me the truth, or what he’s doing downstairs while I read in bed at night. When I allow him to spend a night at a friend’s, and realize there’s little I could do if his friend pulls up p*rn on a cellphone.

With teens that I am slowly releasing, it feels like I’m pushing them out of the nest…and watching gravity take them as the ground gets nearer very, very fast.

I know that if he is leaving for college in three years, I must begin to release. As I told my oldest this weekend, It’s the Holy Spirit in you that I trust. More than my son, I trust the God who’s already written his days.

(Or at least I try to.)

But fear whispers to all of us as parents, What will happen to my child? What will my child become? And what can I do to make sure those odds are in my favor?

May I be honest with you? I see fear cutting some of the best of us down at the knees. In fact, sometimes it hits hardest those among us who felt unprotected and vulnerable as kids. I see the promises they make: That will never happen to my kids.

The Place of Fear

No doubt God has given us fear so that when, say, our child is running into the street after that ball, we do not stop to examine our manicure. I should have gone with more of a matte. Fear helps us envision what could happen, and make a plan.

But I also think it rules the hearts of women.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s a particular struggle for women, as lust is often more for men. God speaks specifically to women concerning being under authority, saying we are Sarah’s children “if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening” (1 Peter 3:6). Is it inherent with our historic vulnerability? I don’t know.

Slavery vs. Sonship

I only know it’s a slave driver, this fear. I feel it lashing my back, threatening me with potential consequences. I am not pulled and compelled by love; I am pushed and provoked by the concern that snaps at my heels.

Lately, I have been piecing together what God says about fear. He always seems to follow up Do not be afraid with I am with you. But he does actually call it slavery:

I find it fascinating that his fear-antidote is to be a son. To have God as Father. (Tim Keller notes that we are all called sons because in ancient times, the sons inherited; the sons were privileged. And because of Jesus, even the daughters have the privileges of the sons.)

First John reminds me, too, of the fear-antidote: There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love (4:18).

And isn’t that what I found in my son’s cancer scare? Didn’t it reveal the holes of my belief in God’s goodness, like Swiss cheese? The irony is not lost on me that 1 Peter 2 refers to “pure spiritual milk” as tasting that the Lord is good. It is elemental, something we must feed on constantly.

Isn’t that the fundamental point where my faith starts to jitter and shake? Where I see God as detached and driving, rather than more loving than I could ever be, and pulling me close?

Snipping the Leash

I realize that like any slave throughout time, when I place my leash in the hands of fear, I am ruled and jerked around as its captive.  I work like a dog in what Gary Haugen has called “prayerless striving.”

The Pharisees were masters at the guise of control, rules, appearances, at placing burdens on others they themselves couldn’t lift (sounds a little like…slavery?). And within that control, they mowed right over the ability to love others.

Fear-parenting often leaves me reactionary, controlling, and vindictive. I reside in the knee-jerk area of my functioning. I’m not acting from trust in a loving, able, and infinite God, but a 30-something human with weak, empty hands.

I become unloving. I value the safety of rules and control more than wisely considering the heart in front of me. I’d rather run in and make a rule or issue a consequence (Give me thy cell phone!) rather than shepherd the heart of my child. As Marguerite Porete wrote in the 12th century, Faint hearts will not rise to tackle the demands of love. The faint-hearted take the lead in fear, not love, and do not allow God to work in them.

But when I begin from the place of beloved daughter, the leash is snipped. The slave is released. My chains, as the song goes, are gone.

I think about this with my teens; about the choices I cannot make for them. Ruth Barton writes gently,

One of the hard things that Judas’s story teaches us is that we cannot control others and their choices. Judas had been given the ministry and apostleship as much as any of the others, but his choice to “turn aside and go to his own place” was his to make.*

Of course, of course we should exercise control and consistent discipline over our kids (see 1 Timothy 3:4 and about half of Proverbs)! But our discipline and control can and should proceed not out of our white-knuckled terror, but our own place of trust in a good Father.

Here’s how I boil it down.

PRINT THIS HERE.

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*Barton, Ruth. Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership: Seeking God in the Crucible of Ministry. Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press.