What My Kids Are Teaching Me (They Have No Idea)

Quick glimpse of a new library wall going up in our home as we renovate.

Our house is under construction right now.

Not the fun kind. The necessary kind. The kind you do when you’re a family of seven and the walls you live within have become. . .impractical in some ways! First world problems, right? Below are some pics I’ve put on Instagram that are gonna make you wanna turn your head sideways: studs where a wall used to be, dust on everything, a kitchen that’s moved to places a kitchen shouldn’t be.

You know what's interesting though. In the midst of all this, I observed something that I can't stop thinking about.

It's how unbothered all five of my little hobbits (kids) are.

I'm fighting with the small stuff of a thousand choices -- my real job, the construction, making sure everyone is right, my books -- and feeling like a time bomb ready to go off. Then I take once glance and here are my kids. Just messing around. Resting and playing in the chaos. Building a railroad system in the middle of my living room. Running and smiling through the sawdust as if they were like Tom Bombadil who just found Goldberry plucking lilies by the stream (Lord of the Rings reference).

They don't know that they are teaching me anything. That’s pretty much how it works in general.

The lesson of the mess.

This is what keeps coming back to me. My kids aren't careless because it's a small mess. The mess is not little. They are light hearted, because they have not got the mess confused with the point.

For them the house is still the house. Mom and Dad are still around. Dinner still happens even if it is at a folding table or out and about (which they have greatly enjoyed).

To them, the change and the disruption that has me going bonkers, as a Type A organized individual living with a mental spreadsheet, is a new place to build a fort.

And that’s the thing about children that we grown-ups keep forgetting. Or perhaps at times, I keep forgetting.

They still know how to stop.

A child can stand in the middle of chaos and just. . . be in it. Just look at it. Play in it. And they don't even know they're thankful for it.

It is amazing what happens when you stop and think isn't it? Or when you just stop, for a second, at all.

We live in a society that is paced by Instagram and TikTok. It's all scrollable. I feel the call of my responsibilities -- and they are valid and real, I'm not pretending otherwise -- but they compete for the thing my heart really craves, such as my relationship with Jesus and leading my family well. The noise doesn't win by being louder than the longing. It wins by never stopping long enough for the longing to be heard.

My kids don’t have that problem.

Sauna

And I’ll tell you where this really hit for me. It wasn’t at home.

I was recently sitting in the sauna with a brother in the Lord and he began to unpack what it means that we are all “on a different journey.” We talked about health first and being stewards of our body, and how no two roads are the same. But the more we traveled the conversation, the wider it got. Think of the parent caring for a disabled child. Imagine a person who can’t walk. Imagine the person born with an inheritance standing beside the person who is denied an earthly one altogether. People start at different positions in the race and it is completely outside their control.

Different journeys. And it would be easy to listen to that and fall into comparison, who has it harder, who has it easier, where do I fall on the line. But what surged in me was empathy. And beneath the empathy, this:

If only we would slow down—to observe, to think, to ask, to pray, to contemplate and give thanks—we have no idea what doors of gratitude God would open for us.

The sauna and the building site are telling the same story. Gratitude isn't having a less difficult journey than the next person. It is from hanging around enough on your own journey to see what is actually in it. My kids do that instinctively.

Where I had to halt

I’m going to be honest with you. One of the themes in my life where I have to stop regularly the most is not in my house. They are my books.

As an indie author, I feel the urge – the pressure, really – to get these stories into your kiddos’ hands. I should show you the Instagram messages I receive. Parents asking when the next one is coming. Kids who wonder what happen next to Bo and Mr. Quillery. The press is a blessing and I don’t take it for granted.

But I come to the reality of boundaries. I’m not a publisher. I don’t have a marketing department, I don’t have a warehouse, I don’t have a budget with a comma in it. Every step this series takes forward is a step I ask God to fund and guide. I mean that literally. So I have been bringing the books to Him the way I am learning to bring the construction in my house to Him:

I stop. Like I really stop, and look around and toward heaven.

I ask for His will to move the series forward and I try to wait for the answer rather than manufacture one.

This is what I've found out about myself in that waiting. If I don’t cut off the voices, they will drown it all out. The voice that says, speed up. The voice that says you’re behind you. That voice that says everybody else is doing better than you. They are noisy and they are everywhere.

When I stop though – when I really stop – I open to another voice. The voice of the Holy Spirit, ever-present, who knows me by name.

That voice has never told me to panic about a construction schedule or anything.

You have to pause to hear.

So here's what my kids taught me this week without knowing it and what a conversation in the sauna confirmed and what a stack of unpublished manuscripts continues to confirm every time I feel tempted to run instead of pray:

Live to hear the voice of the only one who truly matters. The one despite your journey hard or easy, calls you friend.

That’s it. But there is a condition, and not an insignificant one. You have to stop and hear.

Not stop for good. Your're still responsible. Tomorrow my kids go back to their lessons and I go back to the spreadsheet and the walls will eventually get finished. But somewhere in the day, at the stove, in the minivan, at the folding table where dinner is currently happening, there must be a moment when you stand still in the middle of your own mess and just look at it.

Nay, I say, even be grateful for it. Who knows, perhaps the mess exists only so that you would ask God what He would have you see in it.

My children do it without trying. Yours do too, I bet. Maybe that is why Jesus kept pointing to them and saying, "I tell you the truth, unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven." Matthew 18:3 NLT

Joyfully,

Andrew K. Johnston