In that consultation at the end, when he said, this is the diagnosis that we're working with. And, yes, we are seeing these behaviors. And so that's this diagnosis. One of the things I want you to see as parents who are parenting a child with this diagnosis is that we understand now where the behavior is coming from, but it does not make the behavior acceptable.
Well, hello again, and welcome back to the Trim the Wick podcast. I'm, Dan.
And I'm Becky.
And we are with you again this week. We are going to be finishing up our three part series on simply parenting.
That's right.
This might have been started, off as about parenting, but this got a little more in depth on just, walking the christian life, didn't it, babe?
Well, it did, but because our parenting has to flow out of something, right?
Yep. And, how you live your life is going to be an outflowing to how you train your kids and how you teach your kids.
Right. So if we're not walking in a godly way, it's going to be really hard to raise godly kids. And, you know, that whole thing we were talking about last week of can't teach what you don't know, and you can't expect your kids to be what you aren't.
Right. You have to focus on a little bit. Focus on yourself. Make sure that you're doing the things that are right. The old thing of, you know, do as I say, not as I do. Doesn't, go very far.
No, it doesn't. And it's not the way that God fathers us.
Right?
Right. He tells us over and over again, listen, I need you to come follow me. To the extent that he realized that just speaking into humanity from outside of the thing, speaking in and saying, here are my laws, here are my rules, I'm going to speak through my prophets. He was like, y'all just. You need me to come show you how to do it. And so he sent Jesus and said, okay, this is what it actually looks like now. Follow in the footsteps. And that's what we need to do for our kids and
go, okay. Follow us as we follow Christ.
Yeah. And so, if you've missed the first two episodes of this series, I want to encourage you to go back and listen to them. they're really good stuff, and we think they're going to encourage you and help simplify parenting for you. It gives, you a baseline to start and to start building some things and putting things in place to help you, train your children up in the way they should go.
So we're focusing on Matthew 22, where Jesus is explaining the commandments, and he's talking to the religious leaders and he says, you know, verse 36, to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, which we covered last week. And then he says in verse 39, the second one is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. Now, what would that mean? how do we view ourself?
Hmm? M that's a question to answer, isn't it?
Yeah.
Because we see ourselves in our totality. Right. We tend to be our own worst critics. We see the good in us. And we also see the junk in us too, don't we?
Right. Cause we live with ourselves.
Right. And even if we don't admit it to anybody else, we see the whole of who we are. So how do we love the whole of who we are?
So I think where he's leaning and what he's saying to us is that we're seeing and to love ourselves how God loves us and through God's eyes. And God loves us. And those times when we're beautiful. Where we've got it all together. And he also loves us when we were a mess.
Right. He didn't leave us in that mess.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That is the thing, is that he makes a way for us, through the Holy Spirit, to transform our minds, to renew our bodies, to renew our minds so that we're not left in that mess.
Right. And I do. I think sometimes we're quick to look at people and see them in their messes and we choose to not get involved.
Right.
You know, and we go, man, they're messy and they're troublesome, and I don't want to take the time for that. And yet, boy, when we're messy, we want somebody to take the time for us.
Right, exactly.
And we know that God took the time for us.
Yeah. Well, and also, it. We, like you were saying, we're our harshest critics. Sometimes we push ourselves down and beat ourselves up because we do have some issues where God's working out. And we see this now moving from dealing with us to parenting, because that's what we're talking about here, is that loving people as we love ourselves and how is this a good baseline for us to parent our children?
Right. So our kids are just about as messy as we are. Yeah.
Yeah.
And, they have their wonderful strengths in their personalities and their traits that are just built into them. And you go, you want to brag on all the time, but they do have their places where they need us to come alongside and help them in their weakness and help to train them up. And, this is where the way that God parents us in our weaknesses really has to be reflected into how we parent our kids in their weaknesses. Because he doesn't despise us for our weaknesses.
No.
He says that his strength is made perfect in them. And so we need to come alongside our kids and be the strength in their life when they're showing weak spots. So it's hard to keep our cool. When they're demonstrating weakness of character or demonstrating weakness of willpower. You know, I don't want to clean up my room. I don't have the strength for that. I just want to play games.
No, get up and do it.
You know, it's hard to maintain that patience and that kindness and that gentleness and that love towards them, but. But that's how we want ourselves to be loved, right? That's how we see our heavenly father loving us. And so if we're gonna love our kids the way we want ourselves to be loved and the way that we see ourselves loved by the father, then we need to be loving them in their mess.
Right? What it makes me think of. It makes me think of the illustration that we see in scripture, the story where the woman is caught in adultery. M and she is doing something wrong. She was clearly, whether it was a setup where you want to read and write through the scriptures or whatever, all these commentaries and people talking like, oh, she was set up and all this other stuff, regardless, she was doing something wrong and was caught right.
She was equally in the wrong as the guy was.
Exactly. And, she was as condemned as she should have been because she was caught right. And everyone around her, all the religious leaders, all the people that grabbed her and pulled her out to make the public spectacle of her, they were technically in the right. And Jesus, in the middle of all of that, shows grace, shows mercy, and shows love to her.
Right.
And steps up and defends her. Everyone else who is now convicted of their own personal sins in their life walks away. And Jesus turns to her and he says these things. He says, go and sin no more. Jesus loved her enough to defend her, to stand up for her, but then he also loved her enough to rebuke her right. To encourage her. And to let her go and walk in that right. And I think sometimes as parents, we lose
that. That's the thing that we lose is we get in that condemning mode or we get into that, that the kid has done something wrong. And we're just. We go into full punishment mode, right, when we need to stop, we need to love. We need to correct. Don't just love and say, oh, johnny, oh, Susie, I know that you're just a bad child or you're just going to live in this sin. So we're going to just wink and wink and just say, it's okay.
Right. It's just who you are.
Right. We need to correct it and challenge it.
Right.
But in all that we're loving and we're protecting and then we're building up and sending.
Right. It calls to mind. For those of you out there that are unaware, we have one of our kids, has been through all of the testing and does carry an autism spectrum diagnosis. One of the very early things in that process in our lives. When we were going through the diagnosis process, we visited, a neuropsychologist or neuropsychiatrist. Sorry, right. And went through this whole battery of testing. And in that consultation at the end, when he said, this is the diagnosis that we're working with.
And yes, we are seeing these behaviors. And so that's this diagnosis. Now, one of the things I want you to see as parents who are parenting a child with this diagnosis is that we understand now where the behavior is coming from.
Right.
But it does not make the behavior acceptable.
Exactly.
And, man, that has stuck with us. It's like you just put your finger on it. In that particular case, we understood where the behavior was coming from because there is a neurodivergence there. Right. There's a different wiring in the brain. And when we look at our kids, we can understand, just like Jesus understood with that woman caught in adultery. He knew where that behavior was coming from.
Yep. He knew exactly.
He knew every trauma of her past. He knew every manipulation of the rulers around her. He knew her desires for love or acceptance or whatever she was chasing. He knew where the behavior was coming from. And so in that, he said, hey, hey, hey, hey, I'm gonna defend you from all of this accusation and condemnation because I understand where it's coming from.
Right.
But I don't want you to live in where it's coming from.
Exactly.
It's applicable across our lives that these things boil down to a spiritual truth.
Yep.
That when we are loving our children and when we are teaching them to love people by loving them as people, we need to help them to see that. That. Listen, God looks at me and sees where I'm coming from and understands where my poor behavior is stemming from. But he doesn't want to leave me that way.
Exactly.
And so when I look at you, little kiddo of mine, I'm gonna look at you not seeking to smush your behavior into something that's convenient for me.
Right.
But I'm going to look at you and know you and love you well enough to understand where this is coming from. whether it's from a misunderstanding of what's expected of you or whether it's from a character trait that really needs to be developed and grown in you, or whether it's from a straight up rebellious streak that you've got.
Yeah.
I'm going to look at you and understand where it's coming from. and I'm gonna come alongside you and love you and help you grow past it.
Yeah.
And in doing that, it helps our kids learn to look at other people that way.
Well, and that's the thing, is that you want. We're training them up in the way they should go.
Right.
And what you want to do is you want to train in them the love. The love that you have for them, the love that the father has for us. And we're trying to train that into them. But love does not leave people in their sin, right? Love does not leave people, and they're destitute and does not. You know, it's not loving to watch a drowning man die and just stand there and pull out your camera and go, look, this guy's drowning. Hey, dude, we love you.
Right?
You know, that's not loving at all. What's loving is acknowledging, hey, there's somebody out there. I need to do something about this to help them. I truly believe that this idea of teaching your kids love through your actions with them and then making sure that they understand that that action is wrong and that they can do better.
Right.
And that God, just like, he transforms us, changes us so that we can do better. That is an action that we can actually do with our children to help them step up and do better.
Right. And I love that you put action to it there, because that then flows into. Right. When we've loved our kids. Well, and shown them that love does take action. It doesn't just take action in correcting wrong behavior. It takes action in building up and encouraging good behavior. M it takes action when it sees a need in somebody's life and moves to meet those needs. Right. Because if we're loving others the way we love ourselves, when we see a need in our lives, we take
action to meet that need. Oh, my stomach is rumbling. I think, I'll go get some food. And we need to love our kids in that way, right? So that they, in turn, learn to love others in that way. To not only be seeing them with eyes that understand where their poor behavior is coming from, but seeing them and seeing where their great traits are coming from, encouraging and speaking to those and building those up and giving them opportunity for outlet. And then also seeing our kids where
they have a need in their lives. And it's from their very, very basic physical needs.
Right.
to their emotional needs and to their spiritual needs. We need to be looking for those things in our kids and then taking action to meet them.
Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about the difference between that desire to show love for someone and an obligation to do something for somebody. Because a lot of times when we're dealing with children, we try to make it so basic and so quote unquote concrete because they're concrete thinkers, but we put it on a level that turns it into more of an obligation thing for them instead of teaching them the outpouring of a love for someone.
So what is the difference here? When we're trying to train a child, you know, we've got little Johnny and little Mary and Susie, and we're wanting to teach them the benefits of feeding someone, you know, providing food for someone in need. How do we train them to love people to where that, that becomes a natural outgrowth instead of, hey, it's Tuesday afternoon and we're going down to the shelter because we've got to feed people who
are starving. And you're coming with us. I don't care how you're feeling, but this is what we're going to do because this is what good people do. Yeah. So how do we, how do we train that idea of I'm loving people and I'm going to take care of people's needs and help them, versus. This is an obligation of something I have to do.
I think in large part it's by our own modeling. Right. Right. When I'm taking care of my kids needs. And y'all, sometimes we got to guard our hearts on this because sometimes we do come at it from a sense of obligation, and sometimes it's easy to feel put upon by your kids needs.
Yeah.
And to make very sure that they know that you are doing this against your will. I've got to cook dinner for you again. You know, do you understand how much I do for you? Do you even see how much I do? They will pick up very quickly that you are not doing things for them because you love them and want what's best for them, but you are doing it because you feel like it is your legal obligation. Because they're not 18 yet.
Right.
So we do. We need to guard our own hearts when we're doing things like that. And then when we have opportunities to love other people, if we're gonna go do that Tuesday afternoon to feed people at the shelter, then we need to do that joyfully and with an open heart and not as a sense of obligation. And we need to. Again, we're back to what we were talking about last week, of inviting our kids into those relationships and into those activities with us not forcing an obligation on them.
Right.
Because if we make it an obligation for them, it will become one.
Yeah. Well, and I think we also need to talking about that guard on our hearts. Again, this is where, for us, we aren't doing things out of obligation.
Right.
And that we're actually doing things out of the overflow in our hearts. Again, parenting has a lot to do with our. Where we are. It's not rules and regulations as much as it's how we're living our life. And it's an overflow of that.
Right. So if we're living in the bondage of obligation at any point, we need to make sure we're dealing with that in our lives first. Because where we serve, you know, where we love our neighbor even as we love ourselves, when we're finding ourselves in places of service, where we are loving our neighbors in any way, in any capacity, we need to be very careful that we're not saying yes to loving our neighbor because we feel like we should or we feel like if we don't, somebody will think a thing
about us. If that's the reason we're doing things, then we need to say no to those things until we're in a place where we can say yes with our whole hearts.
Right. Because taking care of people and loving on people is good.
It is.
And it is something we should be doing. And, I'll be honest with you. You'll be surprised on how much more you'll do when your attitude and heart is right.
Right.
Than when you're just working and stepping out an obligation. And again, that is something, if we translate to our children, it is going to make a huge difference in their view of doing certain things that, they're not going to be doing it out of obligation, but as an overflow of their joy and their heart.
Right. And like you're saying it will expand the amount that they're willing to do. Because if you're doing it out of obligation, m if you are loving people, or I'm gonna put great big old air quotes around that, if you are loving people, big air quotes out of obligation, then you're gonna do the bare minimum, right? You're gonna do, you're just punching a clock. You're gonna do what you feel is expected of you and nothing
more. But if you are truly loving people, the way God loves you and the way you love and care for yourself, then you're going to have your eyes open and you're going to be watching. When you're in the parking lot at the Walgreens and somebody's struggling getting their cart out to their vehicle, you're going to go over and go, hey, can I help you with that? Because you're going to see it, because you're going to be looking
for places to love people. You're just going to be seeing people differently around you. Instead of seeing people as nuisances and inconveniences who you've got to throw a bone to once in a while, just to, you know, keep things on the positive in the scales. You're gonna be really observing.
Yeah.
The people that move in and out of your day and you're gonna be seeing opportunities to love them. And if your kids are out running errands with you and they see you love somebody in a completely natural outflow way, they're going to pick up on that.
Yeah. Well, and here's the thing. Your children are going to mimic you every time they watch you like a hawk and they are going to do the same things you do. And I know this is, harsh on some folks, but that's what they do. When they dress up and put mommy's high heels on and little dress and glasses and grab her purse and stuff and walk around the house, that is the mimicking of who you are. So when we're showing our love to people the way God loves us, guess what? They mimic that too.
They learn to love.
And it also helps with siblings.
It does.
It's gonna help them in church, it's gonna help them on the baseball team, it's gonna help them at school. Because what they'll do is they're going to start mimicking you in those things of loving people and encouraging people. And the more that you encourage them, the more that you lift them up, correct them and send them on their way. You know, that's what's going to. That's what's going to pick them up and carry them as well.
Right. And it will be that natural outgrowth, just as if they were loving themselves, caring for their needs, seeing and observing their own needs.
Right.
And meeting them, they will begin to see other people that way.
Exactly.
Well, so it's pretty simple. Yeah.
Yeah. Simply parenting, right?
Simple. Simple, but not easy.
So, we're so glad that you guys have hung out with us this week again. And if you are enjoying this podcast, please let other people know, you know, like and subscribe to it and let people know what's going on here at Trim the wick. And we are, very grateful and thankful. You can also follow us on everything we do on our instagram page at trimthewic. Ah. Global. And you can stay up to date with what we're
doing there. Also, we are going to be talking next week on something very exciting, and we're going to have another episode talking about Kenya. And we are super excited to bring this to you next week where we are going to be talking about feeding the children and loving our neighbors. Yeah. And this was, an incredible time, an incredible thing that we are a part of. And we want to share that with you guys next week, so we really want you to be a part of that. So, again, thank you so much.
We'll, see you next week for practical application of today's.
All right, so we love you guys, and we'll see you next week. Okay, love you. Bye.