Spirit-led Parenting

DISCOVER HOW TO RAISE YOUR CHILDREN WITH PEACE, JOY, AND CONFIDENCE.

By SANDRA MCCOLLOM

I’m convinced that parenting is the toughest job on the planet, but also the most rewarding. Over the years I have discovered that there are basically two ways to parent: in our own strength or by God’s grace. I’ve tried both and found the difference between the two to be simply amazing!

I spent the first nine years of my twin girls’ lives pilling on the rules to produce good girls. Somehow, I felt safe with rules, but I went so overboard with them that they ended up first frustrating all of us!

Despite everything I was doing, I was a very insecure parent. I had a lot of fear that I wasn’t going to cover all the parenting bases and my kids would grow up and turn out bad. Instead of putting my trust in God and leaning on His grace to raise them the right way, I was putting my trust in my methods of parenting.

I didn’t trust truly understand grace until about two years ago, and before that, I rarely consulted the Holy Spirit about which direction He wanted me to follow. Why would I ignore amazing help from my amazing Helper? Well, I can honestly say I didn’t understand what I was doing because my mind was so clouded by legalism. I really was deceived.

I had serious misconceptions about God, convinced He was standing over me, watching and waiting to catch me anytime I made a mistake. These misconceptions carried over into my parenting, and far too often I treated my girls the same way I mistakenly thought God was treating me.

Thankfully, early in 2012, after experiencing s radical life transformation through a revelation of grace, God began to teach me how to parent by leading of the Holy Spirit. As each parenting situation would arise, He taught me how to shut down what my mind was screaming for me to do, which was based on my old list of rules, and how to slow down and wait on Him before moving forward.

Here’s one example of a wonderful result we experienced when I followed the Holy Spirit’s wisdom rather than my own rules: We homeschooled our girls. One day our daughter Starr was having a bad attitude about a math assignment she and Angel were working on. She felt like she was lagging. I wasn’t putting pressure on her, but she was putting it on herself. When she gets pressured, just like most of us, she tends to mistreat her sister or be sassy with me. I was SO ready to make her face a consequence, but thank God, because of the changes He had made in my life because of embracing His grace, I was learning a completely new way to parent. I was learning how to parent with the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. I waited a moment and felt He was speaking to my heart to “just talk to Starr.” Instead of accusing her, I simply said, “Angel is so good at math and I am terrible at it. I am so dumb.”

This experience was such an eye opener for me, and I will never forget it. Because I followed the leading of the Holy Spirit, we had a wonderful conversation and I was able to extinguish the lies the devil was telling Starr and replace them with encouragement. As John 14:26 says, the Holy Spirit is our Counselor Helper, Strengthener and standby, and “He will teach you all things. “He always knows so much better than we do!

It’s difficult for me to put into words the enormity of the change in our home since we have replaced living by the rules with living by the leading of the Spirit. Now, as I stay submitted to the Spirit in my parenting, something I’m led to say something, sometimes share a scripture, sometimes give a consequence, sometimes just talk it out, sometimes simply give a hug, and sometimes He has me do nothing at all except be quiet and let Him work.

And not only do I choose to parent by the Spirit, but now I also make it a priority to teach my girls how to follow the leading of the Spirit for themselves. I believe it will be a lifelong blessing to them.

God’s grace has taken our family light-years beyond anything a list of rules ever could. And I am having so much fun learning to have the mind of the Spirit about parenting rather than depending on my own mind.

Spirit-led parenting is an adventure and it takes the pressure off us as parents, because we no longer must try to figure out how to do the toughest job on the planet all by ourselves. We can simply listen…follow…and repeat!