Parenting With Parables

My 2nd-grader lost her cash-filled wallet about a year ago. Today she found it. Overjoyed, she bounded up the stairs to tell me the good news. We celebrated with a little happy dance and off she went, down the stairs again. She was already moving on with her day. I wasn‘t done with the moment.

“It’s like the parable about the woman who lost her coin!” I hollered down the stairs after her. “Remember that one? She searched and searched and turned her house upside down until she found it. Just like you!”

Crickets.

“That’s how we look for the Kingdom of God, you know!”  I added, hoping my words would lodge somewhere in her subconscious and plant seeds for a vibrant Scriptural imagination.

I waited a minute to see if I’d get any response.

“Okay, Mom!” she hollered back, which every parent knows is polite kid code for, “Whatever, Mom!”  

Sigh.  It was worth a try.  

Parenting with parables isn’t always easy.   I wonder if Jesus ever got the same reaction from his audience.  I wonder if they shook his hand after he preached and, with a perfunctory nod, said “Nice sermon” before heading home, which every pastor knows is a polite parishioner’s version of “Okay, Mom!”  

And yet, Jesus kept preaching in parables.  He kept using them as vehicles to train people to find the glory of God in the dreary ordinariness of life — in lost coins and garden weeds and batches of dough.  Really, what more do I want to teach my children?  

That’s why I’ll keep parenting with parables. Because maybe, one day, when life happens to them, my children’s minds will automatically wander to Biblical analogs and they’ll know how to spot God’s goodness around every twist and turn, in every loaf of bread, in every flower bed, in every wallet that once was lost and now is found.

#parenting #parables #Scripturalimagination #parentingonpurpose