First let me tell you the end of the story

 By the time our three children were all teenagers, they got along great. They liked doing things together, they immersed themselves in lengthy, late-night discussions – sometimes hilarious, sometimes sober – and they could even back off in the middle of an argument and mutually resolve a disagreement. In short, they were good friends.

The beginning of the story was less pleasant.

Our children were each born 2 ½ years apart. Our first-born son resented his baby sister’s competition for Mom and Dad’s attention, and she, in turn, felt squeezed out when a younger brother joined the family.

Sibling Rivalry and Middle Child Syndrome produced a wicked mix. The boys joined forces to compete against their sister, and she salved her hurt feelings by snatching every opportunity fate offered for revenge. They retaliated in turn.

The children’s relationship grew increasingly bitter until, by the time they were 13, 10, and 8, they were turning their lives into a guerrilla war. We were beginning to home school our two youngest children at the time, and they were making the experience miserable.

But then a miracle began, and the middle of the story unfolded.

The name of the miracle was forgiveness. And because forgiveness is a process rather than an overnight achievement, the middle of the story lasted about a year and a half.

In his wise little book Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve, Lewis B. Smedes says forgiveness starts with a critical decision: “Do I want to be healed or do I prefer to go on suffering from the unfair hurt lodged in my memory?”  

Once our children decided they wanted healing, Smedes’ book helped us by clarifying what forgiveness is and what it is not.

Forgiveness is not smothering conflict, nor is it covering over pain and pretending it doesn’t exist. Forgiveness does not mean making excuses for people who hurt us, nor does it mean tolerating continued abuse.

True forgiveness is impossible until we face up to our pain from the past. Only when we face the pain and feel it can we grieve what we lost and truly forgive someone for the harm we suffered.

Helping our children through the process of forgiveness meant that we listened to them recount their painful memories, acknowledged their hurts, and encouraged them to let go of their claims against each other, even though it was hard. We also encouraged them to figure out and practice new ways of acting around each other.

Our Christian faith helped us.

We taught our children to go to God for the resources necessary to do the work of forgiving. For forgiveness is essentially a spiritual issue – but then, so is hatred or revenge.

Reconciliation is the most satisfying way to complete forgiveness, although it is possible to heal without that final step. It takes one to forgive. It takes two to reconcile. If only one child had been willing to forgive, he would have healed while the others remained wounded and bitter.       

Fortunately, our children reconciled as they forgave. By the time the two oldest were in college, all three of them were so close that their friends were amazed to find out that they had ever been anything but good friends.

Parents cannot nag their children into forgiveness. They can only practice it themselves, then present it as a solution to their youngsters’ pain and guide them through the process.

© Becky Cerling Powers 1991

Reprint with attribution only www.beckypowers.com

Becky Cerling Powers is the author of Laura’s Children: the hidden story of a Chinese orphanage as well as Sticky Fingers, Sticky Minds: quick reads for helping kids thrive. She blogs at www.beckypowers.com “Truce for Sibling Wars” is part of a collection of stories describing and explaining the use of the spiritual weapons that the apostle Paul listed in Ephesians 6:10-20. This story describes “feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.” To find other stories in the series enter “reflections on spiritual warfare” into the Search Bar.

I grew up seeing myself as a model Christian.

I was the second child of six, and our parents took us to church every Sunday, and at every meal we read a Bible verse and said grace. Our social life revolved around the church, I was president of the youth group, and I helped start the one-and-only Christian Bible club in my high school. I genuinely loved Jesus, prayed and read my Bible daily, and was thoroughly familiar with the religious vocabulary of American evangelicalism.          

Our family had an intriguing relative whom we called Aunt Laura.

We called her “Aunt” because she was old enough to be our mother’s aunt, even though they were actually first cousins.

Aunt Laura had founded an orphanage near Beijing in 1929 and rescued over 200 impoverished Chinese orphans. When my mother was a child, her family did not attend church. Almost everything she knew about God came from the letters Aunt Laura sent home about her adventures raising children through famine and war. Pondering the stories about God’s answers to prayer in those letters played a critical role in my mother’s later decision as a teenager to become a Christian.

Then, in 1951, when I was only 4 years old, New China took over Aunt Laura’s orphanage and forced her to leave the country. Her Chinese husband, who was on a Communist Party wanted list, attempted to hide and escape to Hong Kong, but he was captured, imprisoned, and executed.

I grew up knowing this story.

 I saw Aunt Laura as a true martyr of the faith, but I also just enjoyed her visits. Even though her life was tragic, Aunt Laura had a merry sense of humor and seemed to move in an aura of pleasant calm.       

I continued my Christian activities in college, graduated, married, and before long I was delighting in the babyhood of our first child, all the while staying in occasional touch with Aunt Laura by mail. My husband began graduate studies at Princeton University and then spent six months on a paleontological and geological expedition in Kenya. I joined him there for three months in the fall with our toddler son and soon became pregnant again. 

Aunt Laura was 81 when our daughter was born in June 1974.

I was delighted with our new baby and her little brother, and then…exhausted. As the months passed, I kept getting sick over and over. Taking care of two small children overwhelmed me. I couldn’t seem to manage.

But then I thought of Aunt Laura. She had raised lots of children. Probably she could tell me the secret of serene parenting.

So, I sent her a letter describing my situation and asking for advice.

Then I waited eagerly for her reply. Surely, she would know just how to help me.

After a time, her letter came. I opened it…and was so disappointed! It was just a general printed newsletter that she had had copied and sent around to her list of correspondents. Except…then I noticed, near the bottom, a single sentence written in a shaky, elderly hand: “I find that I only receive God’s blessing when I depend completely on Him.”

I felt like she’d slapped me.

What could she mean?

Other Christians I knew saw me as a “mature Christian,” and I saw myself that way, too. I had been president of my InterVarsity chapter in college. I read my Bible and prayed daily. In the stony soil of the married graduate housing of Princeton University I had started a regular Bible study for graduate wives. Wasn’t all that depending on God?

“Depend on God. Depend on Jesus.”

I’d heard that phrase all my life. I thought that’s what I was doing. Yet, Aunt Laura seemed to imply that I was missing something basic.

I felt rebuked and hurt, and if anyone else had written me that, I would have decided they just didn’t know what they were talking about. But…since it was Aunt Laura telling me this, I prayed about it. I asked the Lord to show me what she meant.

Two things came together to give me a glimmer of what I was stumbling over.

First, I read John 15 and began to meditate on Jesus’ metaphor of abiding in (depending on) Him: a branch depending on the vine for its water, nourishment and growth. Relaxed…staying connected…then, naturally, as a matter of course – and only by complete dependence -- bearing fruit.

Second, I started reading Paul Ehrlich’s best seller, The Population Bomb. Ehrlich wrote that the world was over-populated, and our natural resources were rapidly dwindling. He predicted worldwide famines even in the United States by the late 1970s.

Yikes! This was already 1975!

What would I do if the economy crumbled? What would I do if there was another Great Depression with no work and no food?

I quickly decided that my solution would be to move our little family to Dennis’s parents’ farm in South Dakota. We could grow our own food and manage.

And then it dawned on me that my instincts had just given me away.

When I felt threatened, my automatic reflex was to protect Me and Mine by relying on my own schemes and resources. So, my real trust, my real dependence, was in myself. If I had been depending completely on Jesus, as Aunt Laura said, then my instinctive reaction would have been “Whew! Thank You, Jesus, that if we ever face a situation like that, You will help us!”

Over the next few days more insight came.

I began vividly recalling the sense of God’s presence I had experienced the year before on my trip to Kenya with our 23-month-old son. We had flown from Chicago to New York, where I learned that our London flight was over-booked, and we must wait for another flight. Then, by the time we arrived in London, we had missed our connecting flight to Kenya. So, I had to get a taxi and spend the night (day) in a hotel; then take another taxi to the London airport, find our gate and fly from London to Nairobi.

All that time I was traveling with a toddler. I couldn’t carry him, because I was already carrying two suitcases (no wheeled suitcases in those days). So, I had to herd him everywhere. Once he tripped and fell when I wasn’t looking, and a man ran over to alert me that I had almost lost him in the crowd.

Throughout that trip, I really had relied completely on Jesus. I had carried on a constant conversation with him, and I’d felt like I was somehow being carried through all the setbacks we experienced. That memory of dependence while traveling gave me a better understanding of what Aunt Laura was saying my everyday life could be.

I then asked God to teach me how to depend completely on Jesus.

After that, I went through some very hard times…although I probably would have gone through hard times even without making that request…. because if I had continued trying to depend mainly on myself, or Dennis, or whoever, I would have brought hard times on myself. So hard times aren’t really the point. They come, one way or another. The point is that learning to depend, to trust, to hope in Jesus through each day has been a long learning process for me. And it is still ongoing.

The key for me has been realizing that what God wants us to do is to let Him retrain our instincts, our automatic reflexes, the way the army teaches soldiers that when they hear a gunshot, to drop immediately to the floor.

We can’t change our reflexes all by ourselves.

God has to help us do it.

Yet, it’s not a passive process. Retraining takes an act of will on our part.

© Becky Cerling Powers – 2022

All Rights Reserved - Reprint with Attribution Only www.beckypowers.com

Becky Cerling Powers is the author of Laura’s Children: the hidden story of a Chinese orphanage and Sticky Fingers, Sticky Minds: quick reads for helping kids thrive. She blogs at www.beckypowers.com “Aunt Laura’s Advice” is part of a collection of stories explaining and describing the use of the spiritual weapons that St. Paul listed in Ephesians 6:10-20. This story describes using the belt of {revealed} truth, the helmet of salvation, the sword of the Spirit, and all occasion prayer. To read the other stories in the blog series, enter “reflections on spiritual warfare” into the Search Bar.

On Sundays…Regular walks provide an important way to get to know our kids and develop healthy family communication. Some kids love to talk. Others prefer action challenges (like, “Let me see you run to the pine tree, tag it, and come back!”) Usually, with maturity, the action types slow down and start talking. By establishing this pattern when our children are young, we start a ritual that makes it more likely for walks and talks to continue when our kids are teens.

On Mondays…We encourage children’s curiosity about the natural world when we respond warmly to their questions, slow down to take time to look at the bugs and other things that catch their attention and find books about their special interests.

On Tuesdays…Storytelling is a natural way to children’s hearts. Simple, non-embarrassing memories about their baby days, our own childhood memories, and family tales about grandparents and extended family make great stories from a child’s point of view. Hearing these kinds of stories helps fill children’s deep need for a sense of belonging.

Wednesdays…From their toddler days to their teen years, children are most apt to handle social situations correctly when they know ahead of time what to expect and what is expected of them.

On Thursdays…When the thought of cleaning a messy bedroom with our child upsets us, it’s time to back off and figure out why. Maybe we feel overwhelmed because we never learned good organizing and cleaning systems ourselves. Or maybe our expectations are unrealistic. Have I accepted the reality that this coaching task is part of my parental job description? Or that it can take years instead of weeks to train a child to be neat?

On Fridays…Cookies and candy too close to mealtime spoil children’s appetites for supper. Instead, we can give them nutritious, sugarless snacks like nachos, popcorn, yogurt and fresh fruit. This helps settle nerves and arguments when children’s blood sugar is low.

On Saturdays…Personal insight is not enough to resolve our bad feelings and attitudes. Deep anger and resentment don’t disappear just because people realize these emotions damage our family and ourselves. Festering hurts can be resolved only through forgiveness – which is impossible until we face up to pain from the past and grieve our losses. True forgiveness requires divine help over time.