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This past Sunday, I preached a sermon about parenting. Lots of points, some theological reflection, and some practical advice. It was a lot. I probably could / should have turned it into a three or four part series. My prayer is that the main point didn’t get lost: the word of grace. Especially for those with rebellious kids, parents whose children didn’t turn out the way they planned or prayed. I feel compelled to repeat that word of grace here, just in case it got lost in everything else I was trying to say.
You’re not just dealing with a prodigal child. God is dealing with a prodigal universe. Sin and rebellion against God is universal. It’s in the entire stream of the human race. Raising children is not the same as raising cattle or programming code into a computer. It’s not always cause and effect like that. It’s not always that black and white or a matter of direct input / output. People rebel against what they’ve been taught. Humans turn their backs on God and the people who love them. We can’t always know how or why things go foul.
Here’s what we DO know. Our God is the perfect Father and he knows how you feel. He, too, agonizes over his rebellious children who are not in a great place. He’s not distant from that. He suffers and dies on a cross for us. And with us. Our kids belong to the Lord, not to us. How much more…?
And we know THIS. God’s Holy Spirit can convict anyone of sin and bring anyone to a saving faith in Christ. Even after years and decades of running, the Spirit blows where he wills and we can’t track him or control him. We can only watch the leaves flutter as he goes by.
Parenting is like the cross: unconditional love, sacrificial service, and impossible pain. And unsurpassed glory. We bless our children by parenting by the cross. We don’t weigh them down with expectations we could never bear ourselves. We keep our promises as best we can. We forgive them and forgive ourselves. And we recognize that we all have a future and a hope, one that is wrapped up in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Our plans may evaporate, our dreams may get crushed. Maybe you’re not as consistent with the discipline or as committed to the priorities. You’re too harsh sometimes and too lenient the other times. But our God’s love and grace for his people never ever stops. His mercies never cease and his promises never fail.
Peace,
Allan
One year ago this week, Carrie-Anne and I met with our doctors at M.D. Anderson in Houston for the first time after her breast cancer diagnosis. Now, after 12 months, 16 chemotherapy treatments at the Allison Center here in Midland, eight trips to H-Town, and three surgeries, we’re done. It is finished. Over. Yesterday’s last reconstructive surgery went well and we couldn’t be more thankful. Thankful to God, thankful for our friends and family, thankful for healing and peace, thankful for the good people our Lord has placed in front of us every step of the way.
When we got to Houston Sunday afternoon, we did what we always do: drove immediately to Pappasito’s for dinner. Actually, we go to Pappasito’s if we’re anywhere near one and we’ve been to the one across from NRG Stadium eight times. The Texans had just completed their crazy win over the Cardinals and the place was packed with Texans fans in their Texans gear. It was fun to be in the middle of their celebration, talking about C.J. Stroud, congratulating them on their three-game winning streak. They were so giddy, nobody noticed C-A was wearing her Texas Rangers American League Championship t-shirt.
Well, one person noticed. The lady sitting at the table right behind us was wearing an Astros West Division Championship shirt that featured Alex Bregman’s quote about never knowing what would happen if Houston didn’t win the division. Obviously, these shirts were made and sold before the Rangers beat the Astros in the ALCS and seem a little silly to be wearing now in the aftermath of the Rangers World Series title. A friendly conversation was initiated between Carrie-Anne and this nice, but misguided woman, and a picture was taken to commemorate the exchange.
The surgery was yesterday morning and, again, it went perfectly. The doctors and nurses are over-the-top wonderful in every way and our experience was about as good as it could be. Carrie-Anne is super sore today — don’t make her laugh yet — and it’s going to take at least the rest of the week for her to walk straight up without pain. But this is one determined chick. Through this whole ordeal, not one part of It has gotten her down. She’s amazing, this woman. Her motto has become, “Whaddaya gonna do?” But she does it — all of it — with grace and grit, with incredible faith and strength. She’s beautiful in a million ways and more inspiring and magnificent every day.
Coincidentally, my sister Sharon and our brother-in-law Brent were at M.D. Anderson this morning for one of his lymphoma treatments, so we spent an hour or so with them today in the Mays building, four floors up from where C-A had her surgery 24 hours earlier. Brent has responded miraculously to his treatments — the doctors are telling him that the lymphoma is gone. And we praise God for that, too. Our Father is blessing us beyond anything we deserve and we are all so thankful.
It’s good to be home. It’s good that we get to sleep in a bit tomorrow. And it’s good that, by God’s grace, we’re on the other side of this thing.
Peace,
Allan
There are many, many more Astros fans than Rangers fans in Midland, Texas. And it feels like most of them are members of our church. Some of the louder and more obnoxious among them belong to the Travis McGraw clan. All of them.
So when Travis and his two boys wanted to bet a lunch at Cancun Grill on the results of the American League Championship Series, they found three eager takers in Stephen Lowery, Alan McGraw (Travis’ nephew), and me.
Yesterday was payday and it was delicious on every level. We wore our Rangers World Series gear and crowed for two solid hours over enchiladas and tacos and those awesome jalapenos grilled in soy sauce. The losers proved to be good sports about the whole thing — Travis even wore an old Rangers pullover he had saved from a Missions Resource Network fundraiser from nearly a decade ago. At one point, though, Travis did complain, “It’s like you guys have never won a World Series before.”
Today, I figured it was time to replace my Texas Rangers license plate frame. I don’t know exactly how old this one is, but it’s so sun-faded and worn out, it’s completely un-readable.
I’ve wanted to replace it for several years now, but, you know, I never think about it at the right time and it’s never been a huge priority. Now, the Rangers license plate holders are bright and glittery and they proclaim that Texas won the World Series. So, yeah. Done.
I think it increases the Blue Book value on my truck.
Peace,
Allan
Sex in our marriages is difficult. Trying to keep it in bounds, trying to keep it kindled — it’s not as easy as we all thought when we first got married.
Things change when you have kids. If you’re both working. If you both get over-committed. You can go full days without hardly seeing one another. Then you’re at work in the middle of the morning and you get a text from your wife: “I’m not wearing any underwear…because you forgot to put it in the dryer!”
Things change. And we’re all so stinkin’ busy. The TV and streaming and cell phones and kids and schedules and work and vacations all get in the way of a God-proclaiming, Christ-forming, sexual relationship in your marriage. We’ve got a lot working against us.
The biggest problem, though, is that we all bring our baggage into the bedroom. Our individual sexual scripts get shaped by a trillion different influences and experiences, many of which we have no control over. When we get married, we don’t just join together our bodies and body parts, we join all the baggage. Sometimes one or both of the spouses are dealing with guilt or shame because of sexual sin or some past trauma that’s not even their fault. That’s when the marriage bed can be like the cross. That’s where a couple finds love and understanding, grace and forgiveness and acceptance.
If your marriage has slipped into a place where the sex is not regular, it’s not frequent, maybe it’s not happening at all, don’t just shrug your shoulders and yawn about it. That’s a full-blown attack on your marriage by Satan himself! He doesn’t want you to experience what God wants you to experience. The devil is trying to separate and keep apart what God has joined together. And he’ll use every kind of distraction and circumstance and attitude to do it. Satan’s been doing this since the very beginning when he tried to drive Adam and Eve apart by fostering shame and guilt and mistrust. That’s his game. He exploits our sin and uses it against us in our marriages.
All of us have committed sexual sin, whether in heart or in deed. We’re all guilty on some level. And Satan wants to use that against you and your spouse. Maybe it was a long time ago, but you still feel trapped in shame and guilt and you feel distant from your spouse because of it. And distant from God.
No! Look at the cross! All of us are forgiven at the cross! All of us have sinned and all of us are still susceptible to sin, but our Lord Jesus has taken care of that at the cross.
Maybe if there were such a thing as pure people and impure people, we could divide the world into the two groups and marry accordingly. But that’s not the case. We all stand together under the same mercy and grace of the cross.
Jesus was a virgin. His bride, the Church, was decidedly not. He loved us anyway. He died for us. He forgave us and brought us into righteous relationship with our God. And one of the best ways to communicate that unconditional love and acceptance and belonging and grace to your husband or wife is to keep your sex life going together.
Peace,
Allan
I took a break from the posts on sex inside our marriages to write about our “4 Midland” plans. Now, just a couple more posts here related to our GCR sermon from November 5. If you’ve missed something in this thread, scroll down and follow the alliteration.
“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” ~Ephesians 5:21
Frequent and regular sex shapes both the husband and the wife more into the image of Jesus. You might say it’s a spiritual discipline. God shows us in our marriages that we do not belong to ourselves, but we pour ourselves out in service to others. The Christian life is concerned with genuine living sacrifice, not selfish transactions. Jesus says if you want to gain your life, you have to really lay it down. And you do that in a marriage. Like Christ and his Church, the one-flesh union is not forged through demands for one to meet the other’s needs, but through a sense of common purpose, common mission, together.
Scripture tells us to delight in sexual union with our spouses, not because sex is an appetite that must be filled, but because it reminds us to love and serve the other. It makes us the kind of people who stand by our promises and stand by each other. It teaches us that love is not a way to get what I need, but a way to pour myself our for somebody else.
We don’t love each other because we find each other sexually attractive; it’s the other way around. We grow in our sexual attraction because we share a growing love. When Scripture demands that the sexual rights of both spouses be maintained, it’s not talking about a legal thing, like a contract. It’s talking about the love and attention two people should give each other who’ve been brought together in Christ.
This is the way Christ loves the Church. So we mutually submit to one another out of reverence to him. Imitating him. Honoring him. Each partner in the marriage has to be most concerned not with getting sexual pleasure, but with giving it.
In the Woody Allen movie, “Annie Hall,” the title character’s therapist asks her how often she and her husband Alvie are having sex. She says, “Constantly! All the time! Like three times a week!” Later in the movie, the same therapist asks Alvie the same question. He says, “Almost never! Like three times a week!”
Okay. It takes two to tango. You have to figure that stuff out. And it takes all the mutual loving and submitting and sacrificing and serving the Bible describes to make it happen. It’s about constant kindness and consistent learning and communicating. It’s about daily attention and respect. It’s not about you. It’s paying attention to something bigger than both of you.
Peace,
Allan
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