Thoughts on Erik's Birthday - He's 17!

He's upstairs conjugating Latin verbs...and I am thinking about how my life has changed over 17 years of parenting this gift of God that is my son, and how life will be changing again now that he is beginning to move into adulthood.

We gave him his dad's '99 Oldsmobile for his birthday - along with a gift certificate for "mechanic lessons" from Brent Stokes...and Folio Society's Tolkien collection. All in all, not a bad haul for a 17 year old.

One more year and society will dub him "adult." Am I ready for that? More importantly, is HE ready for that? There are so many things I want to "cram" in to the next few months...and yet, he is at that place in life where most of the valuable lessons have already been taught, he must now learn to apply them. I've tried to teach him the important things, such as "money is closely connected with sweat," "God may look on the heart, but man looks on the outward appearance so GET A HAIRCUT," "inner discipline will take you farther than natural talent," and "choose a woman that you would want your daughter to emulate...because she will," and so many other little life lessons.

Yet as important as knowledge is it will not serve him well if it doesn't translate into wisdom. That is what I have prayed for 17 years: "God, give this young man wisdom and discernment." Knowledge is useless if he doesn't know how to apply it to life...that is where wisdom comes in.

There's a passage in the Bible that I have come back to many times as a mom. Exodus 2:2-4 talks about Moses' mother who "...gave birth to a son and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him...but when she saw that she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with protection and placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the Nile, then...stood at a distance to see what would happen to him."

This has been what I have tried to do as a mom. Through these early years I have tried to protect him from the things that would seek to destroy him. But there comes a time when we can "hide" them from those things no longer. So we make preparation for their success outside of our care...we build a basket of the things that God has provided for us - love, education, discipline, prayer, training in righteousness - and then at the right time we place them into the river of life and watch from a distance to see how things turn out.

I am sure Moses' mother was much more aware of the dangers in the Nile River than little Moses was. There were scary animals and scary people who would have thought nothing of tearing this little baby to shreds. There was the matter of sustenance and protection from the elements. But she knew that there was God who loved her baby and so she stood back and let God take it from there.

There comes a time in our mothering when we can no longer hide our babies from the scary realities of life so we must place them in the protective coverings we have provided, let them go into the river, and stand back and let their dependence be on God instead of on us.

But I believe that Moses' mama was praying like never before...and so am I.