Making People

I find it interesting that each human is so completely different from the other. Isn’t it amazing? When we set out with the idea of having children, we have in our minds a dream of what our children will be like. We work hard to pour into our children all the things we are hoping they will be. Sometimes its personal habits and other times it is character traits we hope they will have. We encourage things like clean rooms and getting homework done, kindness and caring. We do all this in the hopes that when they launch into the world they are the shiniest reflection of who we are, and then they are not.

The truth is you become who you are meant to be. I look back on my own life and always wonder how all the twists and turns I had did not make me a more angry and unhealthy person. Somehow each time I turned in a direction that was not the best choice, God showed up and walked me back to the place I needed to be. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had not felt God’s tap on my shoulder and turned towards him. I also marvel at my children who are each different from the other. They have similar traits but overall, their talents are their own. Their personalities show the quirks we share as a family but each child has fine tuned those quirks to suit the person they are.

When I see stories about people that have made choices that have hurt others I have a hard time making sense of it. How did these people get to the point in their lives where they decided to be the less shiny side of themselves? What is the turning point when evil is the choice that makes the most sense?  How does a parent bare the pain of those choices that their child has made and not ponder what they could have done differently? You can only hope that each person recognizes the value in another, but so often we see people and know that only God’s hand will work on them, that on their way through life no one poured into them.

We are all different, that was God’s design. When we have these gifts of children and we dream of what they will be and who they will be, we forget that what we want does not matter. We are not making people, we are raising them. Our job is to hold them and love them. We are to be a model to them and then let them go. Those clean rooms and caring and thoughtful lessons are just the beginning. Once we let go we have to make room for the work God has in mind. At times it will be hard to understand what His plan is, but in the end we hope that if nothing else we all are at the very least, less than shiny, worn and thread bare people that are the reflection of God’s love.